Thoughts on Things - Art

Alfonso Reyes at the Museo Nacional de Arte
Mexican intellectual Alfonso Reyes Ochoa tremendously impacted Latin American culture of the 20th century. His short story “La Cena” is credited as forefather of the surrealism and magical realism that, through Borges, García Marquez, Cortázar, and points beyond, came to dominate 20th C. Latin American literature.

Philosopher, diplomat, and intellectual, Reyes believed strongly that the new Latin American culture ought be centered in the arts. As a member of the group Ateneo de la Juventud (Anthem of Youth), he sought to forge a coherent Mexican identity by reconciling the colonial mezcla of divergent cultural traditions, from the European philosophers of the Enlightenment to indigenous religious and historical heritages.

Currently showing at the Museo Nacional de Arte, Alfonso Reyes y Los Territorios del Arte (Alfonso Reyes and the Territories of Art), takes an interesting approach to visual art. The show combines Reyes’ writings on art with the works he spoke of.

Both older, European paintings Reyes discoursed on (Rembrandt, El Greco, Goya, Picasso, etc), and younger, Mexican-revolutionary artists who were influenced by the conceptual tenets of Reyes’ thinking (Diego Rivera, Daniel Vázquez Díaz, Antonio Rodríguez Luna etc.) are on display. By drawing direct connections between the written word and visual arts, the show emphasizes the importance of cultural dialogue between artists and thinkers of all stripes.


Conceptual curator Arturo Lopez has implemented a philosophy of his own: bring the connection between writer & artist, audience & art full circle. Through interactive displays, visitors are invited to offer input and ideas. Thus the art that influenced the writer who influenced the artists influences new writers still, emphasizing the continuity and interconnectedness of ideas, influence, and creation.


Alfonso Reyes y Los Territorios del Arte shows at the Museo Nacional de Arte in Mexico City through 14th February, 2010.


Editorial Note: This piece was written to be published while the show was still going, though never appeared online on account the publication going out of business.

Thoughts on Things - Art

Thoughts on Things - Art

Gerardo Cantú and The Last Supper
There’s some sort of intro waiting to be written here about how we define great art. What it means to be great v. what it means to good, and how we separate the two. This intro would contain very certain, borderline rhetorical statements about things that come down to chance, circumstance, dedication, popular taste, opportunity, and vision. Define it how you may; by our vague intuition, Gerardo Cantú’s interpretation of the The Last Supper, currently (editor’s note: as of February 2010) on display in the Biblioteca de Mexico: Jose Vasconcelos, in Baladeras, is great art.

A good deal of the piece’s brilliance lies in its ability to confound. Anyone who’s seen their fare share of Last Supper renderings is pretty much set on what to expect: Jesus, Judas, Mary, a smattering of apostles, some sort of divine sunlight spilling luxuriously through a window. Maybe a dove, maybe some Latin script at the top, maybe a coin purse on Judas’ person somewhere.

Cantú’s Last Supper is a beast of a very different nature. Garish and flat, the piece is stylistically evocative of both El Greco and Julian Schnabel in its emotive contortions and heightened Expressionist colors. There are also shades of Edward Gorey’s macabre creations.

The table at which the collected biblical figures sit looks more like a folding screen or piece of drywall, situated top-to-bottom, rather than the traditional side-to-side set up. Jesus, generally the welcoming, serene center of attention, is an outcast. He hangs from the top of the table, dejected, head in his hands, a picture of absolute isolation. Around him, the apostles guzzle wine and shove food in their mouths, oblivious of their lord’s psychic pain.

That Christ is doubtful and surrounded by his closest allies, all of whom are ignoring him, is a genius reimagining. While there are those who would call the work something akin to heresy (and there are always those crawling out of the woodwork to do just that. I imagine the primary occupation of these people being sitting around scouring the earth for things they might deem heretical), it is a sublime twist that greatly humanizes Christ.

Much like Caravaggio’s earthly renderings of the biblical, Cantú has stripped Jesus of his superhuman serenity and shown him much as he probably was: a man who, in a world of the self-serving, gave himself over to belief in the innate goodness of his fellow men and women.

Knowing that he was doomed to crucifixion, Christ took a long hard look in the metaphorical mirror, in this case other people, and wondered whether or not it was all worth it. Thus the apostles in Cantú’s work represent the vices and apathy of mankind.

Cantú’s painting can be read in another, similarly intriguing light. Let’s look at it this way: Christ is Mexico. We know that Mexico is a predominantly Catholic country. We know that the arrival of Christendom on the shores of Mexico irrevocably altered the course of the nation’s history, is responsible for the mestizo peoples and cultures of the country. We know that Christian imagery figures greatly into the Mexican artist’s search for cultural identity and reconciliation.

If Christ is Mexico, he is lost. He is a man of a violent fate, surrounded by his disciples, but they pay him no mind, consumed instead by their own lusts. It’s no great stretch to assume his apostles are the Spanish, Díaz, the failed aspirations of the revolutionaries, and all of the self-serving, matricidal bureaucrats and politicos who have haunted the histories of Mexico since the Spanish invasion.

Alone and destitute, Mexico walks to its certain death, and though it will rise again (this taking not only Christ’s resurrection as the future fate of Jesus-as-Mexico, but also the basic spiritual belief that death is not an end, but a transformation), though as what and in which conditions, no one knows.

Regardless of the artist’s intended reading or the preferred interpretation of any given viewer, Cantú’s vision of the Last Supper is an evocative, intelligent, probing painting, one which poses more questions than it presumes to answer; as such, it is great art.

Check out Cantu’s Last Supper in the foyer of the Biblioteca Mexico: Jose Vasconcelos.

Images of Cantú's Last Supper have yet to appear online, though a good deal of the artist's work can be found in this booklet. The booklet includes a very good overview of the artist's work a career, though be forewarned that it's in Spanish.

Image Credit: Cantú with one of his paintings, Araceli García

Thoughts on Things - Art

Thoughts on Things - Bullshit

A recent tour of Chapultepec Castle revealed some serious bullshit re: Mexican history and pre-Hispanic culture.

One of the first things our group learned on the exhaustive tour was that, well, despite what everyone might think, actually Spain didn’t conquer Mexico because at the time there was no Spain per se, and certainly not a unified notion of Mexico as a nation, so really all that you had was people fighting people.

While some might take this an effort to work some genuine historical analysis into an otherwise very literal relation of “Mexico’s” post-“Spanish” domination history, in the context of the rest of the tour, it reeked of the feces of a certain bovine animal. Bullshit alarm #1 goes off.

Let’s think about this. There was no Spain, as it were, as the country it is today. Granted, that’s the way it was. And of course there was no Mexico as the unified country known today as Mexico. But there were Spanish peoples, who came to what is now Mexico and perpetrated severe atrocities on people who are the ancestors of who are now Mexicans, thus they too are the Mexican people, if not in name then in blood and culture.

And so by saying that there was no Spain and there was no Mexico puts the idea in the mind of the visitor that it was just groups of people vying for supremacy, and that the European colonial power isn’t precisely to blame. It’s possible that this is done for PC reasons, to avoid offending Spanish visitors and invoking the ire of Mexicans (ire being directed toward the Spanish).

Reasons regardless, this attempt to deflect attention from things like rape and slaughter and slavery, and toward this relatively pointless minutiae about the development of kingdoms and modern-nation states gives a very suspiciously skewed perspective of what was actually going on at the time.

The tour continues, some rather pleasant images and historical nuances are departed upon us, and we come to a display of human skulls with giant holes driven through them. Thus begins the inevitable section in which we deal with violence, warfare, human sacrifice, whatever else you may have had back in the day that puts the weak stomach ill at ease.

Our tour guide tells that pre-Spanish Mexico was far from the wanton bloodshed of a certain Mel Gibson film. In fact (we’re told), human sacrifice didn’t happen that often and was done for a reason. We’re told, think of it like this:

It’s Christmas time and some aliens come down to earth and you invite them in for tea and you’re having this nice snack with these extraterrestrials, discussing a certain episode of M*A*S*H that had been beamed into space, when they see the dead tree in your house. Hold the phone.

The alien leaps to his/her/combination thereof feet. “Dear god! Why have you got a dead tree in your house?! This is a phenomenally grotesque display of arboreal sacrifice!”

And then it’s your job as the host to be like “Well, actually, it’s this annual ritual that we have, where we cut down trees and bring them into our houses and decorate them. It’s actually quite nice.”

“Oh. I see. Well then, forgive my impertinence.”

And thus was explained the human sacrifice of indigenous Mexican cultures: Dismembering and beheading captives, stripping their skulls of flesh, and impaling them in garish rows on fences as a totalitarian scare tactic is essentially the same thing as cutting down a tree and putting some lights on it and having a little gift giving ceremony.

Or, rather, comparing human sacrifice to Christmas trees is a way to imply a certain innocuous quality in the sacrifices, so that pre-Hispanic cultures are not seen as barbaric. Being relatively intelligent, we of course see that what’s going on here is that the castle and its emissaries are attempting to create a cohesive vision of Mexican culture and history for the visiting foreign legions of tourists so that said tourists will go home thinking Wow, Mexico has such a fascinating and rich cultural history and not Man that’s fucked up that they cut people’s heads off and impaled them on sticks.

And yet to assume that guests to this magnificent country are unintelligent enough to be unable to accept a country that is not as multifaceted and contradictory as Mexico is quite frankly insulting. Certainly, there’s no harm in seeing the human sacrifice from the sacrificer’s point of view, and it’s an interesting tidbit about the countries not actually existing per se, but to try to alleviate responsibility for what could be seen as barbaric in an attempt to placate tourists is a dangerous revisionist tactic.

We can only hope that this will be rectified in the future.

Thoughts on Things - Bullshit

The Bullshit About Drug War Coverage
The intensifying drug wars ravaging Mexico have been the center of a U.S. media squall for well over a year. The one-sided and condescending tone of the majority of this coverage errs to the nationalistic and propagates a dangerous myth about violence in developing nations.

The basics are true: ruthless drug lords and cartels are kidnapping, mutilating, and publicly displaying the corpses of police officers, military personnel, and their rivals. Drugs are being stuffed into desperate, poverty stricken, bribed, coerced peoples and sent across the border. A drug caravan recently crashed the US border and started a shoot out in Baja California. These things are indisputable. In the lack of insightful interpretation lies the problem.

Let’s take a look: where are these drugs going? North. Where north? Into the United States. The US is the prime drug market in the Americas, and the world (we need only look to the poppy fields supplying our [endnote 1] heroin from Afghanistan as proof for this). The proliferation of cartels and drug lords speaks of the huge demand for illegal drugs in the US. American crackdowns on the border make it harder for drugs to come in, making it harder for the dealers to get their fists in multi-billion dollar drug pot, making said drug dealers very angry, resulting in murders, desperation, and, in some Mexican states, near lawlessness. The market exists because there is demand. Businesses proliferate because of this demand. Suddenly there are too many businesses for the market to support, and the bubble bursts.

It would seem, then, that all of this drug violence is due to the United States’ insatiable appetite for drugs. And where do drug dependents and addicts come from? From desperation, escapism, hedonism, abuse, sexual trauma, poverty, depression, narcissism etc. In short, not from anywhere good. The tremendous drug problem in the United States is indicative of severe societal shortcomings, not only in our inability to deal with drug addiction and possession in an intelligent and compassionate way (ie sending addicts to prison not rehab, imposing mandatory minimum sentences), but also in our inability to provide our society with a framework wherein happiness (by which we mean a modest happiness, not this vainglorious-15-minutes-gimme-the-loot American Dream) seems an attainable and worthwhile goal.

Now, of course, there are a few problems even in this argument. For starters, there will always be those who just want to get fucked up, not because of some problem or trauma or other extenuating circumstance, but simply because that’s who they are and that’s what they want to do. Additionally, to suggest some kind of utopian society wherein happiness for all is achievable is a naive and ridiculous thing. Contrapuntally, though, there must be some median, in which there are those who do drugs, as there will always be the hedonistic and depressed and whatever else, but in which the majority finds other means of occupation; basically, a nation without such a catastrophic appetite for drugs there that there is what has been deemed by most a war in another country to feed that need.

That the American media seems content to ignore the fact that a deeply problematic, uniquely American epidemic is responsible for most of this violence points to a troubling nationalistic racism and condescension, wherein other countries are represented not by their achievements but by their shortcomings. And of course the majority of these shortcomings are resultant of intervention by one or more colonial powers. Case in point, Newsweek’s October 2007 cover article on Pakistan, in which it named the Asian nation the most dangerous in the world. Now, is Pakistan widely feared and loathed by, say, China? Or neighbors like Afghanistan, Iran, or Nepal? Not in the least. Do Malaysia or Japan fear Karachi-launched missile attacks? No. Who is Pakistan really dangerous to? India, the US, Israel, parts of Europe, and of course the UK.



Typical US Media depictions of Mexico; Newsweek's not eve a little bit racist Pakistan story

Let’s break this down: Pakistan is dangerous to India because it was all an intricate system of kingdoms, tribes, and societies which had nothing to do with each other until Britain showed up, forced the whole thing into one nation, starting fucking shit up with Kashmir, and then, voila, 1947, it all falls apart. Due to the rise of radical Islam, and very deep colonial wounds, Pakistan is dangerous to the UK. Radical Islam is notoriously spiteful of the US and it’s cultural exports, and so Pakistan is dangerous to us. Israel is the US’s little pet military project in the Middle East to keep Arab and Persian peoples at bay so oil can be extracted, so of course Pakistan has it in for Israel. But enmity toward the US, UK, and Israel has accrued in the Muslim world at large, and in places as far flung as Somalia, China, Indonesia, and Venezuela (Chavez is a matter for another day, of course). So if a missile takes off from one of these places – say Pakistan, for argument’s sake – and lands itself in Israel or London or Munich or New York, who’s really to blame? The fucked or the fuckers? (endnote 2)

To return to Mexico, the US media seems perfectly content to perpetuate the belief that it is a crime-ridden, blood-thirsty, lawless, depraved nation of murders and psychopaths. While it would be ridiculous to pretend that Juarez, Tijuana, or Mexico City are utopian, crimeless cities, the US short list of Newark, Camden (endnote 3), Detroit, Gary, and even DC don’t exactly make Mexico’s den’s of iniquity look like “City of God”. In fact, more or less, they’re pretty much comparable. In his book First Stop in the New World, author David Lida cites crime statistics showing that for the average citizen, there's virtually no difference between living in Mexico City and Detroit. So what’s really happening here? Mexicans at large are portrayed as coming from a violent, depraved, backward place. This in turn creates problems for the millions of Mexicans living in the United States (endnote 4), who encounter resistance at near every turn because they are perceived as bringing some horrible tide of decadence and decay into the United States, when in fact said tide is only coming because there is demand in the US for it.

Though there are myriad pundits in the US who take a moralistic approach to their condemnation of Mexico’s drug business, let’s take a look at where it comes from. Latin America was very notoriously fucked by the Spaniards, French, English, and Americans. Job markets were virtually non-existent at a time when the global economy had set up shop and forced indigenous peoples to cough up regular payments to continue living their lives in their own fucking countries. Major western businesses shy away from a market called drugs. Indigenous and mestizo peoples tap this market, rake in billions, colonial powers realized they fucked up big time, and put the hammer down hard on the drug dealers, deeming them illegal and imposing severe and of course hypocritical prison terms on those who are trafficking. So while the majority of what’s been happening throughout the drug war is morally indefensible, it seems that in part the patterns of behavior and violence are due to external, colonial influences. Of course only an ignoramus would completely blame the brutality on external influence as we know the Mayans had a taste for a little bit of the old ultraviolence and the Aztecs really enjoyed fucking people up, what with their human sacrifices to vengeful gods. But, the fact remains that external forces were certainly involved in this whole debacle.

Though Mexico undeniably suffers its fair share of violence and societal woes, the American media’s portrayal of the drug war, and country at large, in focusing on the brutality and depravity of the situation and ignoring the American roots of the problem, presents a very one-sided, racist, and ultimately harmful vision of our southern neighbors.



Endnotes:

1.The author, being a US citizen, feels the need to make this clear and proceed accordingly, so this isn’t seen as yet another haughty-taughty European attack on the United States.

2. Now, of course, being what we hope is a relatively compassionate person, I believe no innocent person deserves to die, and that the generations of English and Israeli people living their daily lives have nothing to do with what transpired in times past, are simply victims of circumstance. But this doesn’t alleviate the problems that former colonies are dealing with, and their inability to find footing in a world economically dominated by their former colonizers. And while we must condemn any and all rash actions of violence and hate, can you really blame them for being peeved?

3. Very sincere apologies to the state of New Jersey here, as I am from there and often find myself defending it against ignoramuses, but the fact remains that these two cities are very violent, dangerous places.

4. And briefly on the illegal thing, Arizona, Texas, New Mexico, and California were all illegally taken from Mexico by the US, so who really is in a position to say Mexicans can’t live within the United States’ territories? Well, hypocritical assholes, mostly. And of course this lovely new legislation in Arizona that is-and there's no other word for this-racist, isn't helping matters any. But the of course the opposite argument is Well, if we hadn't been so rutheless to begin with, we wouldn't have what we have.

Random Photos of Southern Mexico

Random Photos of Southern Mexico

Photos - Tula

Tula (officially Tula de Allende, thanks to the Spanish) is a small town in the mountains bordering the states of Hidalgo and Mexico in central Mexico, is the site of the Toltec capital. Though eventually taken over by the Aztecs, the Toltec peoples have a highly developed society. The ruins at Tula, their most sacred site, are about 1000 years old. (P.S. - The town of Tula is actually really nice and "happening", I just happen to be more interested in derelict things, which is why in the first three photos below it kinda looks like a shit hole.)

Photos - Tula

Photos: The Art Bus

The art bus was donated to Mexico by the government of Japan. It was then painted by two Mexican artists, Danira Miralda and Alicia Martinez Alvarez. The pair maintains a living studio within the bus, and invite the general public in to make art with them. Thus culture directly impacts society, and occupies a non-illusory pace, transcending the material.

The art bus is in the leafy, quiet Roma Norte neighborhood, on a street lined with excellent restaurants, tea shops, cafes, and mezcal bars. It abutts a park.

Photos: The Art Bus

Photos: El Oro

El Oro is an old mining town in the mountains about half an hour from Atlacomulco. The population is significantly less than Atla, though it has a nice historical centro.

Photos: El Oro