Abstract
Rolando Briseño’s paintings, photographic constructions, and public art installations disallow distinction between cultural critique and the mysteries of nature. He juxtaposes desire as a generator of individual and cultural motivations with frameworks that generate quantum activity, plant and animal reproduction, and cosmic energy. Briseño incorporates imagery of foodstuffs and pigment from actual culinary spices in order to present the rituals of commercially produced food and the shared meal relative to the consequences of centuries of global trade. The pleasures of meals extend from enjoying the fruits of the natural landscape to discussion of the cultural politics of Chicano identity. With reference to scientific knowledge and ancient and modern history, Briseño’s series Celestial Tablescapes (2007) examines interactions in present circumstances, explores their complex historical origins, and suggests their unknown future potential. This essay considers the work of Marcel Merleau-Ponty and Michel Foucault relative to Briseño’s cultural work.
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Notes
- 1.
Duane H. Davis and Tony O’Connor, “Intentionality, Indirect Ontology and Historical Ontology: Reading Merleau-Ponty and Foucault Together,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 39.1 (January 2008), pp. 57–75.
- 2.
Ibid., p. 60.
- 3.
Jessica Belasco, “Meal is a Century in the Making,” San Antonio Express-News (February 14, 2010), p. 1 J.
- 4.
Norma E. Cantú, ed., Moctezuma’s Table: Rolando Briseño’s Mexican and Chicano Tablescapes (College Station, Tex.: Texas A&M University Press, 2010).
- 5.
Jack Weatherford, Indian Givers: How the Indians of the Americas Transformed the World (New York: Crown, 1988), pp. 71 and 114, quoted in Rubén C. Córdova, “Indigenous Heritage, Culinary Diaspora, and Globalization in Rolando Briseño’s Moctezuma’s Table,” in Cantú, pp. 69–91.
- 6.
Córdova references Alfred W. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1972), Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), and Arturo Warman, Corn and Capitalism: How a Botanical Bastard Grew to Global Dominance, trans. Nancy Westrate (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).
- 7.
Sandra Cisneros, “El Pleito,” in Cantú, pp. 125–127.
- 8.
Amalia Mesa-Bains, “Of Moles and Maíz: Rehistorization of Mexican and Chicano Culture,” in Cantú, pp. 56–59.
- 9.
The Smithsonian interview may be accessed at http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-rolando-briseo-12193.
- 10.
Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands: The Frontera: The New Mestiza, 3rd. edition, (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1999), p. 77.
- 11.
- 12.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The Intertwining—The Chiasm,” in Claude Lefort, ed., The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1968), p. 146.
- 13.
Ibid., p. 138.
- 14.
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, volume 1, trans. Robert Hurley (N.Y.: Vintage, 1978), p. 157.
- 15.
Galen A. Johnson, ed., The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1993), p. 51.
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Sherer, S.A. (2015). From the Infinitesimal to the Infinite: Rolando Briseño’s Celestial Tablescapes . In: Tymieniecka, AT. (eds) From Sky and Earth to Metaphysics. Analecta Husserliana, vol 115. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9063-5_11
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