Art and Architecture in Mexico

Abstract

This book is a timely contribution to the literature in English about Latin American art. It is the first extensive English-language survey of Mexican art since Joshua Taylor's translation of Justino Fernández's book Arte mexicano, de sus orígenes a nuestros días (1958), published as A Guide to Mexican Art (1969). The later compendium Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries (1990), released in connection with the Metropolitan Museum of Art's exhibition of the same title, covered select Mexican works from antiquity to the first half of the twentieth century and is now out of print.In contrast to these precedents, James Oles's book concentrates on the art of colonial and independent Mexico to the exclusion of ancient Mexican art. This decision fits within recent developments in the history of art that stress the specificity of each region and period of Latin American art. Oles extends this approach to illustrate the diversity of Mexican art within Mexico by covering artistic production not only in Mexico City but also in regional areas. Simultaneously, the book acknowledges the field's attention to globalization by analyzing Mexican art in relation to a multiplicity of international styles and tendencies.Art and Architecture in Mexico is well researched and effectively summarizes and elaborates on the relevant scholarship in the history of Mexican art. The author presents the material chronologically, illuminating his formal analysis of the artworks with references to pertinent social and political issues. This book is exceptionally strong in its coverage of modern art, especially for the period from 1960 through 2000, including sustained discussions of abstract, conceptual, and performance art as well as artists' collectives, which to this date are understudied. The breadth of the artistic material, the solid documentary foundation, and Oles's clear and engaging writing style make this volume an excellent resource for introducing undergraduates to the history of Mexican art.Because Oles recognizes that Mexican art developed within global networks, he proposes to turn from the “pervasive” theoretical framework of mestizaje that scholars have used to describe the integration of indigenous with Spanish artistic traditions to the more inclusive concept of hybridity (pp. 10–11). In his opinion, hybridity functions as a capacious term that includes not only Aztec and Spanish but also other European artists as well as slaves, merchants, artisans, travelers, and émigrés from various parts of the world (p. 11). While this reasoning is clear, in the rest of the book Oles seldom mentions hybridity explicitly, except in relation to the art of the sixteenth century. In this section, he asserts that cultural hybridity mirrors racial hybridity (p. 21). In the remainder of the book, the reader is left to infer hybridity from his explications of the artworks, which do not reference the original theoretical frame. For example, in a section on casta paintings, the discussion focuses on the phenomenon of racial mixing, with acknowledgment of some of the works' European pictorial sources but with no direct reference to hybridity. The relationship of both mestizaje and hybridity to race is complicated as Oles later identifies neocolonial architecture from the early twentieth century as a perfect expression of mestizaje (p. 236).In his famous essay “Indianism, Mestizaje, and Indigenismo as Classical, Medieval, and Modern Traditions in Latin America” (1966), George Kubler forcefully critiqued the application of the concept of mestizaje to art on the grounds that it was a “racialized expression.” To Kubler, race and art were incommensurable categories. In his book The Mestizo Mind (1999), historian Serge Gruzinski explains mestizaje as Spanish and indigenous mixtures but limits its use to the sixteenth century. Considering these understandings of mestizaje, Oles is justified in thinking the term too restrictive to describe Mexican art, but surprisingly, he expresses no reservations concerning hybridity.The concept of hybridity has been subject to volumes of critique since the mid-1980s, mostly in response to writings by Homi K. Bhabha later reprinted in the collection The Location of Culture (1994). In the celebrated essay “Hybridity and Its Discontents: Considering Visual Culture in Colonial Spanish America” (2003), the art historians Carolyn Dean and Dana Leibsohn eloquently argued against the utility of hybridity as a descriptive term for colonial Latin American art because, like race, it failed to illuminate anything but surface phenomena, leaving invisible and essential aspects of artistic practices, such as labor, unexamined. Oles mentions this article in a bibliographical essay (p. 412) but fails to engage with it in the text. Addressing at least some of the previous critiques of both mestizaje and hybridity would have strengthened this book's theoretical frame. These omissions do not diminish the book's considerable didactic value. Rather, they raise the question of whether a theoretical gesture without expansion adds anything to a substantial survey text.