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| Art as Lived
Experience: Neo-Avant-Garde Expressions of Mexicanidad Fabiola Martinez Rodriguez, St. Louis University, Madrid |
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| In 1891 the Academy of San Carlos held an exhibition to show the works produced within and outside its institutional walls. One of the paintings exhibited for this occasion was José Jara’s Foundation of Tenochtitlan winner of the biennial history painting competition in 1889. As access to the Academy’s collections was restricted, these exhibitions were always welcomed by Mexican art critics and intellectuals who wrote lengthy reviews explaining what they thought should constitute the form and content of a national school during the Porfiriato (1876-1910).[1] In his review of the 1891 exhibition Eduardo Gibbons, for example, complained about Jara’s composition saying that his indígenas appeared to be “zulus rather than the descendents of that pure, indigenous race, athletic in form, as proud and valiant as the sons of Sparta. But here, in this picture, the model is that of the conquered race, the subjugated Indian.”[2] From Gibbons's point of view it is clear that a scene with the historical significance of The Foundation deserved a grandeur and magnificence which Jara’s composition lacked. And that such an image would have to be grounded in the legacy of neoclassicism, and romanticism rather than the more realist principles that seem to inform Jara’s interpretation.[3] As the art criticism from the Porfiriato testifies, the artists from this period were still very much constrained by conventions of classical beauty and the canons established by European Academies.[4] But as European modernism and avant-garde movements began to gain ground in Latin America, at the beginning of the twentieth century, Mexican artists began to move away from the conventions of academic art and traditions. This shift coincided with the Mexican Revolution, the consolidation of mestizaje and a more fruitful reconciliation with our indigenous heritage. Whilst changes in the perception of race were being filtered through the work of Franz Boas and cultural anthropology[5], the challenges posed by modernism were facilitating the appropriation of indigenous and popular traditions into the artistic practices of post-Porfirian artists. This break from academic conventions, and the avenues opened by artists experimenting with the use of new media and technologies will have a profound impact in the development of modern and contemporary art in Mexico. Based on the recent exhibition ‘La era de la Discrepancia. The Age of Discrepancies’ held in the Museo Universitario de Ciencias y Arte (Mexico City), and led by the curatorship of Cuauhtémoc Medina and Oliver Debroise, this paper investigates the particularities of the neo-avant-garde in Mexico between 1968 and 1997. This was a period of consolidation through which Mexican art was both liberated from official nationalism, and from the dominance of Euroamerican art facilitating the creation of artistic expressions that should no longer be considered derivative or imitative. These groups and movements, I will argue, embody the ethos of Mexico during a period of relative isolation from European and American influence, presenting the complex social, cultural, and political reality of Mexico more successfully than their post-revolutionary predecessors. Following the spirit of ‘Inverted Utopias’[6], ‘La Era de la Discrepancia’ seeks to integrate Latin America’s avant-garde into the historiography of modernism and to revaluate the significance of these movements in the context of a particular Latin American experience.[7] Taking as its starting point the ‘Movimiento Estudiantil’ of 1968 ‘La Era de la Discrepancia’ therefore rightly rescues from oblivion almost three decades of neo-avant-garde production in Mexico. As the curators of the exhibition point out this body of work has been expelled from the canon of national art in Mexico, and has attracted little attention from the international art world.[8] Detached from institutional patronage and support, this production therefore presents a unique opportunity to investigate the transformation of a neo-avant-garde aesthetic into a form of expression that may be considered distinctively Mexican. Whilst the work of post-revolutionary avant-garde artists continued to celebrate the primeval utopia of indigenismo, the attention of later generations turned towards the reality of an unstable and politically repressive Mexico. Anti-establishment by nature, groups, movements and artists of the neo-avant-garde followed the footsteps of David Alfaro Siqueiros experimenting with new media and technologies in order to express their disenchantment with a Mexican modernity that had failed to fulfil the dreams of the Revolution. Broadly speaking, the material covered by ‘La Era de la Discrepancia’ can be separated between the production of the 1970s, defined by the militant work of experimental artists, and that of the 80s and 90s when issues of identity and gender entered the agendas of artists working outside institutional frameworks.[9] The initial discrepancy highlighted by the exhibition occurred in 1968 when the first Salon Independiente was held. This exhibition was summoned by a group of artists in opposition to the Exposición Solar which was being organised to coincide with the Olympic games held in Mexico city that year. Whilst their stance was a reaction against the nationalist undertones of official patronage, the violence and repression that the capital experienced as a result of the ‘Movimiento Estudiantil’ in October that year engendered a new generation of artists committed to denounce the political and social injustices of a failed democratic project. The exhibition then continues to survey the production of artists marked by these events, and whose work presented a challenge to the status of art and artists, the role of institutions (in particular museums and official patronage), and the canonical weight of the ‘Escuela Mexicana de Pintura’. In the 1980s, the attention of radical artists turned once more to the streets of Mexico city after the 1985 earthquake had destroyed large parts of the capital changing forever the urban landscape of the city. The destruction and devastation felt in the capital was accompanied by the increasing visibility of urban subcultures appearing as result of poverty and an unprecedented urban growth. As a result of this, popular culture begins to occupy a more significant role in the imagery (or imaginario) of mexicaness –a space once filled by the utopian appeal of its folkloric traditions. Parallel to this, in the 80s and 90s artists began to question gender and identity stereotypes opening a space for the exploration of sexuality, and postmodern expressions of mexicanidad.[10] As the exhibition comes to a close, we see how in the 1990s the apparent economic growth experienced during the administration of Salinas de Gortari came crashing down in 1995 after the Zapatista rising in Chiapas, the previous year, had made apparent the ongoing exploitation of indígenas, and the nation’s unresolved communion with its indigenous heritage. The art of the 1990s therefore continues to be influenced by political and social agendas, but the curators emphasise the significance of independent exhibiting and working spaces, and the role of curators in helping to shape the direction contemporary art practices would follow.[11] Whilst the material covered by the exhibition cannot but offer an overview of artistic production at the time, leaving out some perhaps important omissions[12], the presence of foreign artists working in Mexico (eg. Francis Alÿs and Melanie Smith), and the contribution of Mexican artists working abroad (eg. Felipe Ehrenberg and Martha Hellion) is rightly acknowledged and highlighted by the curators. Hence the isolation of Mexican art at this time is only relative compared to the artistic milieu of Mexico during the first half of the twentieth century. Although not all of the production included in the exhibition may be regarded as neo-avant-garde, especially that of the 1990s, the avant-garde here is defined by the experimentation and use of new media and technologies, which does not necessarily exclude the artist’s interest in the aesthetic qualities of his/her work. As Dietrich Scheunemann has argued, Peter Burger’s theorisation of the historical avant-garde as a reaction against the aestheticism of modernism, and the artists’ desire to bridge the gap between his art and the praxis of life can no longer be sustained as a unifying paradigm:
As Scheunemann successfully argues avant-gard and neo-avant-garde artists were also interested in exploring the aesthetic potential of new technologies, and it is their responses to the potentiality of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, and new technologies what defines the artistic nature of the avant-garde. Based on this, claims that neo-avant-garde movements in the 60s and 70s represented an inauthentic and anachronistic version of the historical avant-garde would also need to be questioned, and their contribution to the development of revolutionary art practices and techniques acknowledged. It may be argued that it is their experimentation with the aesthetic qualities of new technologies and media what has facilitated the incorporation of neo-avant-garde practices into the canon of contemporary art. In his book Mexican Modernity. The Avant-garde and the Technological Revolution Rubén Gallo has made apparent the historical avant-garde’s experimentation with the aesthetic potential of new technologies in Mexico. Looking at the work of Mexican Estridentistas, for example, Gallo describes one of Kyn-Taniya’s poem as ‘radiogenic’ explaining that its content reflects the ‘imprint of the new technology which inspired it’[14] (in this case the radio). Gallo’s thought provoking insights into the history of the avant-garde in Mexico bring to the fore the potentiality of technology to change our perception of the world, and as a consequence question the ontology of representation, and the function of art in the modern world. Many of the explorations began by the historical avant-garde in Mexico can be seen to inform the work of neo-avant-garde artists working in the 1970s and 80s, except that for many artists technology was no longer perceived as the key to unlock a utopian modernity. Armed with cameras a young generation of filmmakers, for example, exploited the potentiality of supper 8 as a new media that allowed them to produce inexpensive and independent films that were “free of censorship, and generally critical of the cultural establishment.”[15] The radical and highly psychotropic aesthetic of Alejandro Jodorowsky (perhaps best described as neo-surrealist) made its mark through films and magazines; and artists exploited the power of sensationalist media to highlight the absurdity of urban paranoias and anxieties.[16] The 1970s also saw the proliferation of collective work made by groups of artists joined by aesthetic and political agendas. Whilst taking an active part in the radical movements of the 1970s, the communal nature of their work also challenged notions of originality and individuality in art. Since most of their work was produced and exhibited in the streets of Mexico city, these groups managed to create a public art that was more successfully integrated into the praxis of life than that of their post-revolutionary predecessors. Using language as its paradigm, for example, Grupo Março explored the potential of collective work, ‘the relationship between words and image, and the polyvalence of artistic meaning’. As described in the catalogue of the exhibition in Poema topografico “isolated words or poetic phrases were placed on benches, sidewalks, light poles, and storm drains, an urban intervention designed to generate fresh meanings.”[17] And in Poema Urbano “the group passed out words to pedestrians on the streets of downtown Mexico City, in order to have them create a poem.”[18] Throughout the 80s and 90s, the antiestablishment ideas of radical artists were often voiced though the publication of journals and magazines such as La Regla Rota and Poliester. Pintura y no pintura. In spite of their short existence, these publications were extremely important in the dissemination of ideas that were helping to bridge the gap between neo-avant-garde and contemporary art practices. It most be noted that this transition was accompanied by the increasing visibility of foreign artists working in Mexico at the end of the 1980s, and that at this point the material covered by the exhibition becomes more cosmopolitan and ‘globalised’. ‘La Era de la discrepancia’ should therefore be understood as part of a revisionist undertaking working to dispel the view of Latin American art as ‘peripheral’ or ‘derivative’. This revision is needed in order to acknowledge the significance of the avant-garde in the context of Latin America, and as part of the development and historiography of modern art. As the curators of ‘Inverted Utopias’ point out in the catalogue of the exhibition, Latin American artists and theoreticians realised that the significance of modernism resided in its ability to challenge Old World conventions “introducing an autonomous set of cultural and artistic values [which have allowed] the legitimation of Latin American art and culture on its own terms” (my emphasis).[19] This process of legitimation eventually liberated art from conventions of representation giving Latin American artists an unknown freedom to represent. What and how things were represented was therefore no longer a matter of conventions, but of personal and aesthetic choices made by artists as they sought more suitable forms to represent the particularities of Mexico. To conclude, we may argue that as new technologies and media were integrated into the practices of modern art Mexican art was gradually ‘decolonised’. The work began by the artist of the post-Revolution, therefore, was fully realised through the production of Mexican artists in the 70s and 80s opening the gates for contemporary artists, such as Gabriel Orozco, whose work is now part of a transnational and cosmopolitan art world. Neo-avant-garde art in Mexico may not have fulfilled the utopian dreams sought by the artists of the Mexican Renaissance but it did fulfil a utopian ideal: that of freeing José Jara’s indígenas from the claws of academic conventions. Although a society where Jara’s indígenas may be able to exist as decolonised subjects remains a dream, Mexican artist may now more freely choose from a variety of artistic practices and media to represent the changing reality of Mexico.
Endnotes [1] For a study of history paintings in the Porfiriato see for
example La fabricación del Estado1864-1910, (exhib.cat.),
Mexico City, MUNAL, 2003; and my doctoral dissertation “Civilizing
the Prehispanic: neo-prehispanic imagery and constructions of nationhood
in Porfirian Mexico (1876-1910)’, University of the Arts,
London, 2005 |
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