The debate over the nature of foreign influences in Latin American society is a long and complex one, moving along a scale that sees the destruction of a purportedly authentic autochthonous culture on the one hand, to enthusiastic defenses of the modernizing influence of their incorporation on the other, with intermediate points that consider the inevitability of hybridity to the virtues of anthropophagic expropriation (see the theoretical work of García Canclini). These debates have been mediated by various versions of cultural nationalism from both ends of the political spectrum, and they have been inflected by the social, political, and economic consequences of endorsing or rejecting a modernity based on the assimilation of the so-called new as it arrives, apparently, always from somewhere else.
The most positive face one can put on foreign influences (and leaving undertheorized and taken for granted what can be understand by the concept of foreign influences) is that they contribute to the project of modernity, enhancing standards of living, and, if nothing more, make the routine of daily life more interesting by injecting an expanded variety into the usually trivial icons that are the products we live by (see important work for Argentina by Sarlo). The most negative is that such trivial icons disrupt an already richly meaningful existence, although the problem of such appeals to integral cultural purism is how such transcendent meaning is assessed in its prelapsarian state: we have ways of measuring -or, at least, seeming to sense or intuit- when foreign influences have a deleterious effect (e.g., the notorious case involving the scandal of replacing mother's milk with packaged baby formula), but prelapsarianism often remains the unanalyzed signified: what is the "real" culture that has been displaced, corrupted, or replaced by foreign influences?
Latin American societies vary enormously as regards their calculus of foreign influence or even what is to be identified as such and what the sources of that influence are and what agenda -beyond capital gain- may underlie them. The general cry of "American imperialism" may, in fact, be provoked by products that come from any number of national sources and cultures, if they aare not simply cases of an underdifferentiated multinationalism. Responses, too, vary, from the traditional outrage of sharply defined nationalistic positions, to attitudes of resignation or indifference from the bulk of the citizenry for whom getting on with one's life may be far more pressing in multiple and complex ways than giving anything more than passing attention to whether the morning's marmalade is now a foreign import and no longer a nationally made product.
To be sure, the matter of foreign influences is more than a question of the brand of marmalade that is the best bargain at the local grocery store: indeed, one might say, today marmalade and tomorrow one's very own body. Thus, I do not wish to imply that the matter of foreign influence is a trivial matter: no one could possibly downplay the impact on Puerto Rican society of the American invasion (on July 25, 1898) and century-long occupation, even if there are reasonable differences of opinion as to whether Puerto Rico would be better off if its history had been other than it has been, whether as a continued colony of Spain, as an independent state, or as some other destiny.
The cultural -as opposed to political- responses to foreign influence have ranged over numerous options. There are those works that provide a fairly transparent image of the models involved (the staggering production in Spanish, as well as translations into Spanish of works written in other languages -most notably English- of texts in the self-help genre that are now routinely bestsellers). There are those works that engage in a denunciation of foreign influences, often by parodying them: the Chilean Enrique Lihn's Batman in Chile (1973) was part of numerous works in the period lamenting U.S. involvement in Chile. Of particular interest are Ariel Dorfman's theoretical and critical writings from the same period: Para leer al Pato Donald (1973; with Armando Mattelart); Superman y sus amigos del alma (1974; with Manuel Jofré); The Empire's Old Clothes (1983). Finally, there are those works which represent the artful accommodation of cultural models that are usually recognized as having a foreign provenance, such as detective fiction, especially the hard-boiled type (although one recalls the parodies of the British intellectual detective genre by the Argentine Honorario Bustos Domecq -the combined pseudonym of Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares- in the Isidoro Parodi series), musical theater and film (e.g., Chico Buarque de Hollanda's play A ópera do Maladro (1979) and its film version (1985; directed by Ruy Guerra). Certainly, many television formats are adopted from U.S. models.
One particularly important form of the critical interpretation of foreign influences is through the modality of kitsch. Kitsch is defined by Peter Brooker as:
A cultural object or icon of conspicuously `poor' or no taste (an ornament, a song, picture, verse or cheap paperback) or the self-conscious and provocative preference for such an object in defiance of the conventions of `good taste' or of `high art'. . . . Kitsch values objects that are `so bad they are good' and can be close in this respect to the meaning of camp. It therefore challenges received distinctions between art and mass merchandise, though it is likely to bestow value on one-time popular objects rather than presently mass-produced items, or upon selected, eccentric examples of the latter... It prizes the eccentric and the aesthetic, therefore, in a world of low-grade disposable junk.
Kitsch is an effect, and it often arises from the "misuse" of an existing cultural object as it is transformed into one of a different genre and order, such as bed sheets with the design of the American flag or refrigerator magnets that reproduce examples of high art (Brooker gives the example of the widely recycled image of the Mona Lisa; one can add the image of the Mexican Frida Kahlo and her most paintings). Kitsch often is associated with specific sites of cultural production, as refrigerator magnets, t-shirts, sundry novelty items like tourist mementos. Kitsch may be simply an inevitable dimension of commercial reproduction, which recycles ad infinitum known and recognizable images, and there is a specific inventory of those that are most familiar to the general consumer, such as the stars and stripes or the Mona Lisa.
Kitsch, however, has another dimension, and that is as an instrument of cultural critique, as a modality that can serve to problematize the aesthetic (as Brooker recognizes) and, in increasingly dense ways, to problematize and deconstruct a system of artistic representation. In this way, kitsch may serve productively as a form of metacommentary, in the sense in which Fredric Jameson has used this term: if artistic production is a form of ideological commentary, to what degree does a particular type of production critique an artistic production and the limits, contradictions, discontinuities, and disingenuousness of its ideological commentary? An art that questions and mocks itself is engaged in metacommentary, and kitsch, with its possibilities of descralization, parody, and radical disengagement with the pieties of the aesthetic may be an effective instrument of metacommentary. Several important studies have explored the kitsch in Latin American culture (Olalquiaga; Santos), focusing on precisely its potential effectiveness to engage in ideological critique.
The photographs of Marcos López's Pop latino are exercises in creating images of kitsch, or, perhaps more specifically, in capturing the kitsch of daily life by restaging it as a photograph. It might be stretching a point to insist that the images, as a whole, allude to the influence of foreign icons of capitalism, culture, and sociopolitical meaning. Yet there is a unifying quality of the fifty-four images, in terms of their representation of commercial products, of cultural icons that are commercialized and the expropriation not only of foreign products but of a certain type of American advertising technology and popular cultral mentality.
The latter is particularly evident in the Warholian hyperrealism of the images, with the sort of foregrounding of the icons in question, the photographic precision of models and products, and the garish colors -often unhued and untinted primary and secondary combinations- that are characteristic of popularly oriented advertising, such as billboards, mass distribution magazines, television images, tourist materials, and labels on products themselves. These are far removed from the quasi- or pseudo-artistic and highly elaborated advertising campaigns of publications directed at presumedly sophisticated and self-styled elite audiences. Moreover, in the former case, the products being marketed are relatively inexpensive, and in the latter case large-ticket items are more likely to be the case, justifying the expensive models and the complex details of design and photographic execution.
López's images are pop latino less because there is a specific style of pop art that can be unequivocally identified as Latino. Rather, what is more specifically at issue is the insertion of pop art, a style of American and Western European origins, into contexts that are immediately recognized as Latino, whether because of details of language, bits of cultural information, the products themselves, or an intertextuality with images that are recognized as being associated primarily with Latin American -and here, really, mostly Argentine- society or societies.
Let us begin an examination of specific examples of López's kitsch phiotography/photography of the kitsch with the image from the collection featured on the cover of Pop latino (the index identifies the photograph with the title "Carnaval crillo", 1996), as it illustrates well several of the points I have been making made here. In the foreground of a large panel (these are 7 x 11.5 inch photographs), a woman is dressed in a maid's uniform. Although there are several basic colors for such uniforms, in this case it is a palish blue, with faux lace trimming such as one might find on the uniform of the maid or service personnel of an upscale hotel, clinic, sanitorium or the like: establishments where there is the need for individuals who perform menial tasks such as cleaning to move in public spaces, to be marked, on the one hand, as occupying a service category, while, on the other, to have some detail of their uniform that signals the status of the establishment. This is, in itself, a significant detail of kitsch, since the lace detail serves less as an article of clothing design continuous with the dress to which it is attached and more as an add-on sign, like a detachable name plate or the like, that says something about the workplace of the individual who is obliged to display it.
Confirming her status as a cleaning woman, the model is wearing latex gloves, of the sort used to protect one's hands from harsh chemicals and contamination by unknown/unhealthy substances encountered in the cleaning process. These are not just any rubber gloves, but the top-of-the-line gloves, the ones that are very pliable and mold themselves easily to the hand; the palms are ribbed to enhance their grip even when wet or holding wet objects, and the cuffs are fluted to ensure a snug fit to the wrist and forearm. Such gloves also come in various basic colors, but, in conformance with López's essential utilization of garish colors, these are an intense orange, all the better to clash appallingly with the institutional blue of the uniform the model is wearing.
The main point of the image is the mask that the model/maid holds in front of her face: it is a costume mask imitating the form of the face and crown of the U.S. Statue of Liberty. That this is an American icon is emphasized by the fact that the design stamped on the mask is a fragment of the American flag, with a portion of the white stars on a blue field dominating the right-hand side, with the alternating red and white stripes dominating the left-and side and the portion that fits over the nose and upper lip. The blue picks up the color of the uniform, while the red picks up the lipstick the maid is wearing, and the white the lace detail of her uniform. The maid's left hand holds the mask in front of her face (her mouth, lower cheeks, and chin are left exposed), while her right-hand is pressed against her chest in the typical pose associated with the recitation of the American Pledge of Allegiance.
If we focus just on the meaning the model is enacting, it is difficult not to see a correlation between the gloves she is wearing and the face mask: the former are a typical American product, either imported or reproduced in Argentina for the local market, while the face mask is indicative of a large number of American cultural icons -in this case, an institutional icon that has become kitsch through its repeated recycling as the myriad objects that cite the U.S. Statue of Liberty -that are evident in the Argentine marketplace.
Most recently, the American celebration/commercial opportunity of Halloween has joined other festivities that are taken from the American calendar or, if they are already on the Latin American calendar (such as Christmas), are given a focus and an emphasis that resonates with the American business exploitation of those holidays. In the case of this image, the particular/peculiar brand of American patriotism is evoked: such masks are part of the paraphernalia of the U.S. Fourth of July and its derivations. While there is no denying the manifestations of Argentine patriotism or that of other Latin American republics, the sort of endlessly inventive kitschification through cheap commercial reproduction is simply not in evidence. Indeed, I would venture to say that an Argentine who might go in for such kitsch is more likely to buy a set of bed sheets with the image of the American flag than to clamor for a set with that of the Argentine flag, whether the daily one or the presidential one.
One of the features of López's photographs is that, like a good Baroque painting, the imagery spins almost out of semiotic control. Thus, the image of the model is not enough to underscore the clash of cultural systems represented by the expropriation by Argentina of American motifs: if they are kitsch in the first instance of their existence (as diminished simulacra of institutional or semi-institutional icons), they are even more eloquently kitsch when inserted into the foreign cultural setting, because of the limited resonances of their meaning(s) and/or because of the recontextualizations of such meaning(s). Indeed, one might well ask what meaning accrues to the recontextualized Statue of Liberty mask when it is worn by a fully uniformed Argentine cleaning lady. Is it sufficient that what it probably means is the macro-sememe "United States"?
This would seem to be the case, as we extend our examination of the photograph from the foregrounded human model to the background. The model's backdrop is one of the major Argentine cultural icons, the Avenida 9 de Julio, the reputedly broadest avenue in the word, which cuts a swath from north to south across the city, with close to a dozen-lanes in each direction. To the right of this backdrop and just before the vanishing point of the camera's angle, is the cultural icon that is the anchor, approximately midway in its trajectory, of the 9 de Julio, the obelisk, which commemorates the site of the first raising of the Argentine flag. The obelisk itself is a symbol of the city of Buenos Aires, and its inherent kitschiness (a classic symbol of the sun, it is recycled as a flag memorial, although it is important to note that there is a significant intertextuality in the way in which the Argentine presidential flag contains a sunburst. The official symbology is complemented by popular vulgar references to its phallic meaning and the way in which it is the "great dildo of the nation."
Yet, if the obelisk fades off into the distance, at the other end of the photograph, between the frame of the latter and the foregrounded image of the maid, is a seven-story billboard advertisement for American Airlines. That advertisement is dominated by a symbol and by a text. The symbol is that of the U.S. Statue of Liberty, which thus stands in an inverted semiotic relationship to the Argentine obelisk--the abiding tension between attention to what is Argentine and what is foreign, specifically American -and in a redundant relationship to the impromptu enactment of the Statue of Liberty by the cleaning lady, with her mask and the "patriotic" positioning of her right hand. The Statue of Liberty, to be sure, possesses, as do most public monuments, a plethora of kitschy dimensions, beginning with the by now trite allegories of the figures and symbols they utilize. (I confess a particular attraction to State of Liberty cigarette lighters, an image that I believe the humorist Quino has used in more than one of his cartoon drawngs.) These juxtapositions, therefore, are exercises in redundancy and reduplication of a limited number of semantic primes. The text of the American Airlines billboard reads "A New York sin escalas"; along the top is the name of the airlines -in its traditional red, white, and blue colors, of course. What is noteworthy about this text is the use of "New York" rather than the proper Spanish equivalent of the name of the city: Nueva York. This is an element of linguistic kitsch: the strategic use of a word or phrase of a foreign language rather than what we might call its native equivalent. In so doing, one winks toward the receptor who knows, if not the language in question, strategic lexical items, whose use, rather than their everyday and ordinary Spanish equivalent, conjures up special knowledge of the object or phenomenon, a special relationship, a select meaning.
The process is kitsch because it involves the diminished reduplication of the original in a less valued or less significant context. This is so, because the presumption is that saying "New York" is more elegant or classier than saying "Nueva York," that Spanish, as a language perceived by those who make such linguistic substitutions (at least, in a non-ironic way), is less significant than English, and that Spanish acquires value by such substitutions. The fact that they are token substitutions -a few linguistic signs haphazardly or strategically introduced into the language event- is what underscores their status as kitsch: such substitutions cannot be said to fulfill any apophantic function and are poetic in only the clumsiest of ways; indeed, they are more probably strictly phatic, signalling the self-attributed status of the speaker rather than contributing to transactional meaning. Therefore, by incorporating a message using "New York" into his photographs, López is underscoring the process of insertion of cultural icons drawn from a foreign culture into Argentine society. Moreover, it is an accession to "New York" and all that city means, with its immense iconicity for the United States, in a fashion that is "sin escalas": direct and, presumedly, unmediated.
I would like now to consider two paired images. The two images are not included in Pop latino side-by-side; moreover, there are two ways of postulating the logical relationship between them. One is that of a waiter holding a formal pose as he offers a bottle of Coca-Cola to the camera in the fashion of a magazine or billboard advertisement ("Mozo", 1996); the other image functions as though it were a parody of the Coca-Cola ad: premodern/nonstylish details surrounding a similar offer of a bottle of Cerveza Santa Fe ("Ciudad de Santa Fe", 1996). The logical order is relative here. From one point of view, the beer, a national product, could be construed to be something like more authentic, since it is a national product and probably antedates the introduction of Coca-Cola into the Argentine marketplace. Whether this is actually so is irrelevant, since the context of the presentation of the beer is sufficiently premodern (I will explain what I mean by this in a moment) to contrast significantly -and, therefore, to imply a progressive chronology- with the paradigmatic modern drink, which is how Coca-Cola has been traditionally marketed.
Yet, from another point of view, what I am calling the premodern is placed first, as though it were an autochthonous recovery of a national drink, while the Coke image is placed several pages farther along, as though it were secondary to Cerveza Santa Fe and not a displacement of it. To be sure, such products, national and foreign (assuming always that such a rigorous dichotomy is possible and, consequently, meaningful) coexist, occupying different markets and signifying different cultural aspirations as they can be deduced or extrapolated from the preference of clients. Still, these two products do not simply occupy neutrally similar different socially symbolic spaces, because the presentation of one and another is substantially different from the point of view of the semiotics of their respective images and of the respective contexts in which they are inserted.
I have used the term "premodern" to refer to the image of Cerveza Santa Fe (it should be noted that the province of Santa Fe, where this beer is produced and for which it is named, is one of Argentina's most traditional; its capital city is also named Santa Fe). This is not so much because the marketing image of the beer is of long standing and predating more contemporary marketing strategies. There is that about the image, in the form of a backdrop of the logo of the beer painted in a large format on a brick wall; the paint is worn in several places. Moreover, the logo is distorted at one point by the fact that the wall has a shuttered window, and part of the logo is painted over the shutter, meaning that when the window is open, the unity of the logo is disrupted. As it is, it is dispersed to a certain extent because of the change of color, texture, and depth of the image as a result of the material difference between the brick wall and the frame of the window and the shutter itself. The slats of the shutter are particularly at issue in disrupting the surface depth of the logo. By the same token, it should be noted that Coca-Cola goes back to virtually a premodern America, and one can still find in the American countryside vestiges of similar outdoor images of the Coca-Cola logo on the sides of barns, service stations, and rural stores. Indeed, these images, whether still preserved as such or captured in photographic images are a significant part of the U.S. nostalgia industry, to the extent that Coke is such an American icon and has been associated so much with the development of twentieth-century America, including its role as a major sign of American imperialism throughout the world.
What is premodern about the Cerveza Santa Fe image as captured in the backdrop is reinforced in the foregrounded model, who holds a bottle of the beer, as though offering it to the camera in a canonical advertising format, which includes holding the bottom of the bottle with the finger tips of the right hand, while only two fingers of the other hand hold the neck of the bottle, thereby providing maximum image exposure of the bottle and its logo to the viewer. The model is, however, what is most notable in this image. The figure is that of an elderly rustic. Although his head is cut off, we can see his longish and unruly hair and his aged skin; moreover, he is looking off outside the frame of the photograph, as though detached from the proceedings, and the upper edge of the photography bisects his head, such that we cannot see his eyes. As a consequence, another expressive feature of the face, the mouth, is what dominates: his lips are pursed and turned down at the corners, as though this were all a distasteful undertaking. At best, it is not the enticing facial language normally associated with the selling of commercial products.
But what is most striking is his dress. He is wearing some rust colored and ill-fitting pants that are poorly fastened at the waist; the pants have no belt. Although his white shirt is clean and pressed, it is fully unbuttoned and pulled back, with the sleeves partially turned up, so that what is prominent behind the bottle of beer he is holding is his hairless chest. The bottle hides his navel, but objects outside the frame that provide three different degrees of lighting for his chest highlight what would be for the language of conventional advertising the unappetizing display of his flesh. One must remember that the display of flesh in modern advertising depends on an appeal to a presumed canonical inventory of erotic fetishes, and it is a question of heightening the working of those fetishes while scrupulously avoiding the inclusion of anything that might be construed as antinomous to them: there is only a certain range of male chests that are considered "sexy" in advertising texts, and this model's is not one of them.
López's other image enjoys a significant intertextuality with that of Cerveza Santa Fe. One is immediately struck by the fact that the backdrop of the Coca-Cola image is decidedly non-urbane. It, too, is a brick wall, and, moreover, it is a fairly battered brick wall. We see the wall continue around a corner to a second wall, so that a corner is formed. The floor is made of dirt, and dirt has piled up in the corner formed by the two walls. We can just see a sliver of sky above one of the walls, and the top edge of the wall contributes to the overall effect that the photograph was taken either in an abandoned construction site or in one of those homes that lower middle-class individuals in the poorer actions of Argentina build for themselves and their families, with parts of the construction becoming weathered and worn without the house ever quite being completed (typically construction stretches out over years, with work only being done on weekends and holidays).
Thus, the backdrop becomes the first, most obvious sign of what I will allow myself to call, in conceptual shorthand, a Third-World setting. This is, to be sure, the locus of the consumption of Coca-Cola as it has spread throughout the world, a world that is not that of a the capitalist leader(s). The fact that there is a sociopolitical motif to be evoked here, that of whether Argentina is "First World," the rallying cry of the ultimately failed neoliberal experiment of the Menem 1990s, is also a level of meaning in the photograph: Coca-Cola may be an icon of the so-called First World, but its consumption in Argentina and Latin America does not, except under the conditions of the most delirious wishful thinking, signal these geographic realms as First World.
The presentation of Coca-Cola in this image is, nevertheless, one that is associated with gracious dining in Argentina. A properly attired waiter (neat pants, impeccable white shirt and tie, fully buttoned vest) proffers a large serving tray, perfectly balanced on the tips of the fingers of his left hand, with his right hand and forearm discreetly tucked behind his back. The tray contains a partially emptied large bottle of Coke, alongside a partially served glass of the beverage. Yet the image is not a perfectly First-World one. The fact that the server is standing in the corner of a partially constructed building is echoed in the way in which his pants are worn: some stitches are missing from crotch area and the fastener on the waistband seems to have some problem, although we can only partially see it. In a classically dressed server, his pants would, moreover, be black rather than tan -these are almost the same tan as the pants worn by the model in the Cerveza Santa Fe image. The model's face in the Coca-Cola image is also cut off at the eyes; however, from what we can see of the look on his face, it is that of customary obeisance of the professional server. Finally, it is worth noting that the features of the second model are indigenous: while the reputedly finer restaurants of Argentina strive to hire waiters who look more Western European, it is not uncommon for waiters in a high percentage of restaurants and bars in Buenos Aires to be "cabecitas negras" -individuals from the indigenous north of the country that were part of the massive urban immigration that began in the 1940s.
Thus this second image is not simply a supposedly First-World image juxtaposed with a Third-World one. In a very real sense, the first image is more homogenous in capturing a certain segment of the social reality of Argentina: the marketing and consumption of well known national products, in contexts that have nothing to do with the (pseudo)modern ones that are promoted in glossy advertising and to which particular segments of the urban population are prone to aspire to. By contrast, the second image is decidedly mixed in its cultural anchors. On the one hand, it focuses on the promotion of the icon of American culture, Coca-Cola; on the other hand, it places the promotion of that product in a context that is as equally premodern as that of Cerveza Santa Fe. Moreover -and this is a real clincher as regards what I would call the degradation of the great American cultural icon in its journey downward into everyday Argentine consumption -when one looks closely, the Coca-Cola bottle is well worn, the consequence of the unending -and, therefore, wearing- recycling of the bottle that is indicative of the economics of consumerism in Argentina. The point is that the image captures the marketing of foreign cultural products, but it also underscores their inevitable degradation as a consequence of the particular pinch-penny way in which they are assimilated into the local economy.
López's images are accompanied by a series of prose texts that basically consist of haiku-like evocations of the Argentine/Latin American material landscape, such as: "Pop Latino: Un shopping center de cartón pintado que tambalea azotado por los vientos patagónicos" (no pag). This characterization casts in a different semiotic code the overall sense of López's photographs: the degraded (or debased or vitiated) foreign sociocultural icon, inevitably and irretrievably subjected to the distorting processes of local sociocultural realities. It is the decontextualization of the former and their recontextualization in the latter that is so productive of the quality of kitsch that López is interested in capturing. One particularly hilariously eloquent photograph ("Todos por dos pesos", 1995) involves a model dressed in garish colors, topped off with a pea-green Jim Carrey mask from the latter's 1994 film The Mask. Around his neck the model is wearing a collar of Argentine chorizos, but he is gesturing toward a billboard hanging from the front of a very traditional Argentine residential facade, advertising a dollar store. Not only is the dollar store a foreign imitation, but this dollar store (actually everything for 1.99) advertises "importación" -that is, all products are foreign imports. One assumes that for those prices, they are mostly cheaply made items from Southeast Asia.
There are several photographs that contain Che Guevara and armed guerrilla images. Some seem to be a commentary on the importation into a country like Argentina of tropical revolutionary movements--that is, the Argentine Che Guevara reprocessed through the very alien culture of Cuba. Against the backdrop of the Argentine Planetarium (one conventional symbol of the Argentine European self-identity, surely), an Argentine dressed in military fatigues is being threatened with a plastic gun by someone wearing a crocodile mask ("Atrapado por las fuerzas del mal", 1993). The head of a standard-issue guerrilla fighter, in the form of a mask in mostly nonnatural colors, looks gleefully on out of the lower right-hand corner. In another image ("La Habana", 1997), a beefy Argentine (one presumes), his head also cut off at the eye level, as in the case of the models selling beer and Coke in the images analyzed above (this is clearly a technique López uses to disrupt the assumed conventions of the photography of individuals, whereby the head is the most interesting part of the human being), is shown wearing a tight-fitting tank top. The pattern of the top, without actually being the American flag, is that of the stars and stripes in red, white, and blue. The image is flanked by two versions of the same image of Che Guevara, one larger than the other. Che, with the expected icons of his persona, especially his black beret with the single star dead-center front, stares off into the distance, his brow furrowed in the committed determination of revolutionary fervor in a parody of Alberto Korda's famous photo of Che. By contrast, the dress of the model is that of the beach-side tourist.
Yet let me back away from the implied Americanization of the model's tank top and provide an alternative interpretation, even though one might want to hold onto the Americanness of the tank top as a masculine item of clothing. Alternatively, the model may be read, if not as a postrevolutionary Cuban, as an Argentine tourist in Cuba (his beefiness inclines me toward the likelihood that he is Argentine, since recent Cuban dietary restrictions are not conducive to such male body mass). The fact that the context is probably Cuba is borne out by the detail of the buildings to be seen beyond the Che images: they look very much like those of old Havana. The tank top may, then, well be based not on the American flag, but on the Cuban flag, which uses the same colors. In this reading of the photography, the quality of kitsch arises from the postrevolutionary transformation that leads from Che's revolutionary stance to the tourism of the model. Moreover, the single star of Che's beret, which is the single star of the Cuban flag, is reproduced in the essentially boundless design of the article of clothing into/onto which it is commercialized (that is, boundless in the sense that the number of stars is determined solely by the geometricality of the design and the size of the article of apparel).
I have emphasized López's universe of images with particular attention to the quality of kitsch of those photographs that involve the presence and juxtaposition of sociocultural icons that intrude, if not on a putatively "authentic" Argentine reality, at least one in which these icons are only precariously -contradictorily, disruptionally- accommodated. Certainly, from a postmodern point of view, all sociocultural icons are ultimately precarious and problematical as they go about their semiotic work, and even the most naturalized of icons can end up dislodged by paradigm shifts in the structures that give them meaning. Concomitantly, even what appears to be the most outrageously "inappropriate" cultural sign may subsequently undergo a seamless integration into the system of cultural meaning. One of my favorite examples is the way in which the at one point totally alien British derby, a half-century after it is introduced into Bolivia, is as much an integral part of the indigenous costume, especially for women, as is the poncho of the Altiplano.
The particular effect of López's images is based on strategic juxtapositions, such as occurs in the image ("Feliz Navidad", 1997) of the tinsled American Christmas tree (artificial, of course), which in a very first instance is out of place as a winter symbol in the summer heat of Argentina's late December, is placed alongside a portrait of Eva Perón. In another image an array of sexual ticklers or dildos (there is not likely to be a local industry for these objects) is placed against a seascape, as though, with their "naturalistic" flesh tones they were sea creatures arising from the foam ("Guardianes del río", 1996; see also "Antena", 1996, in which a solitary dildo raises up against the desert sky, in consort with the armed cactuses -sahuaros in my U.S. Southwest desert setting). These are, in the main, photographs that are simply a pleasure to examine, and it is clear that the models and the photographer spent many hours of fun together producing them. The level of sustained humor that they reveal is, indeed, quite impressive. Yet, it would be a mistake to see these carefully staged images only as humorous collages. There is important work going on in Pop latino in terms of ideological interpretation, and the simple fact is that I have attempted to show how analytical scrutiny is able to demonstrate the careful and calculated artistry of López's images. They contrast significantly with the found images of Gabriel Valansi's nocturnal photographs (see Foster), but both photographic languages are successful, each in its won way, in commenting profoundly on contemporary Argentine cultural values.