The Colonial Self: Homosexuality and Mestizaje in the Art of Nahum B. Zenil

Abstract

Nahum Bernabé Zenil's Tiro de dardos (Dart Game, 1994) (fig.1) is a frontal, three-quarter-length, nude self-portrait. The artist's body fuses with the background—a dartboard painted in the red, green, and white of the Mexican flag—and his bright red heart, extruded from the body, marks the center, the target. The pose evokes both the crucified Christ and Leonardo da Vinci's representation of man as the natural expression of geometric perfection. The allusion to a target and a flag, as well as the play between two-dimensional object and three-dimensional image, recall Jasper Johns's fragmentation of identity in his paintings of the 1950s. In the case of Zenil, however, the picture articulates the self. Hitting the target—being a man, being Mexican—is neither predetermined nor natural, as it involves chance, skill, and risk. To miss is to lose, but for Zenil, a mestizo gay male, to hit the target—to be himself in contemporary Mexico—is to suffer. In image after image he plays the game but according to different rules. In the process, he collapses Mexico's intertwined colonial legacy of race and modern ideologies of nation into male bodies experienced and desired, thus challenging notions of race, sex, and gender that consign him to society's edges.