Mexican Art Research Articles

Woman in art: a breath of beauty in the men’s world

Woman in art: a breath of beauty in the men’s world

Oscar Wilde in Mexico: Keeping the Scandal Alive

Oscar Wilde came to be known in Mexico during his lifetime not as a talented writer but rather as an outrageous figure who was disgraced and imprisoned for his “depraved habits”. Soon after the initial scandal of his 1895 trials, a handful of Mexican intellectuals launched modest endeavours to reshape Wilde’s image by turning attention to his literary works, some of which they translated and made available in Spanish to Mexican readers for the first time. Despite this new appreciation of his talents, Mexicans continued invoking the scandalous image of Wilde to stir up attention and startle audiences. Among the first generation of Mexican artists who identified readily with Wilde’s sexual dissidence, there was a marked preference for the writings – literary works that were notably more sexually explicit and themselves more scandalous than those of Wilde – of the more universally respected André Gide, although Wilde’s wit did serve them as a model for shocking their readers. Even Carlos Monsiváis, Mexico’s greatest cultural critic of the last half century, whose own writings sought to subdue the symbolic importance of the Wilde trials in Mexico’s queer cultural history, could not resist invoking Wilde’s name as a provocation against the homophobia of certain interlocutors.

‘Inherited Images’: the Decolonialist agenda of Katherine Anne Porter and Anita Benner

Katherine Anne Porter and Anita Brenner engaged transcultural journeys in order to realize their visions of validating the work of Indigenous Mexican artists. They both believed that the Indigenismo movement, made popular by the muralists in 1920s post-revolutionary Mexico, celebrated the Natives without negotiating their harsh lived reality. Porter and Brenner employed what may be termed a decolonialist agenda when they chose to work with and showcase Indigenous art in their own creative endeavors. This decolonialist agenda situated the Indigenous voice in the forefront and helped further advance a working-class aesthetic and modern Mexican identity uniquely tied to indigeneity that was often neglected by other revolutionary efforts.

Tomes/consume this! Engaging patron expertise through artists’ books

This article presents one way that librarians, archivists, and educators can create new knowledge by connecting communities with rare material culture. The authors share how they engaged critically reflective practices while gathering descriptions of rare Mexican artists' books at community-engaged outreach events. The books took on new meanings once they were removed from the context of the archives, and were centered within diverse communities. Participants interacted with the books in places where culinary bites and libations overlapped with the themes presented within the books. Polysensory, transcultural, tactile, embodied, visual, and gustatory literacies were observed as well as bilingual narratives of food, drink, memories, and personal recipes. The authors learned that bringing unique archival objects to communities made them more accessible both in and out of the archives. This project speaks to larger issues facing academic libraries and archives, such as engaging diverse audiences in inclusive programming, and building outreach into existing services, spaces, and collections.

Frida Kahlo’s Photographic Posing: A Theoretical Approach to Visual Autobiographies

Artists’ autobiographies have been considered primary sources of information in Art History, while photographic portraits are generally intended as mimetic representations. However, both of these registers can also act as rhetorical strategies for the artist to construct a certain image of him or herself, and some artists have used photography to directly defy certain theoretical pillars of traditional autobiography. Such is the case of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. As this article demonstrates, in certain photographs Kahlo’s pose questions and undermines foundational notions of visual autobiographies. Through these photographic poses, she reveals the limits and obstacles of autobiographical practices to provide knowledge regarding an extra-diegetic point of reference. What is more, she ostentatiously displays her surgically operated body and distances herself from the standard image of normative bodies. In this way, Frida Kahlo builds and evokes her own photographic imaginary while transgressing some common features of traditional autobiographies.

Intervenciones Artísticas: Estado de Excepción en México

The movement of Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas, Mexico began in 1994, succeeding in generating a change in Mexican society by valuing indigenous liberation practices. However, a state of emergency is instituted in Zapatista territories according to laws that grant amnesty and regulate the legal vacuum. Certain Mexican artists such as Erick Beltrán, Gabriel Kuri, Abraham Cruzvillegas and Pablo Kubli, contribute critical reflections with works sustained in the context of pure violence of the State. The theoretical framework is constrained by the theories of Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, Giorgio Agamben and Achille Mbembe, who contribute to the understanding of the state of exception that the State implements by modifying sovereignty and Human Rights. The method used in the article corresponds to the reception of literary texts. The artistic pieces that are integrated by Pablo Kubli represent the interdisciplinary contribution of the social sciences and the practice of art, with images, schemes and interventions that are argumentative reflections of the environment of globalized violence, and of social resistance to the paradigm of modification of autonomy in intervened regions. In addition, a comparative approach with states of emergency of globalized countries is proposed according to the events of September 11, 2001 in New York and March 11, 2004 in Madrid, among others. Starting from the Mexican experience and from global countries, the term of sovereignty is modified by the violence of the State over territories cut off by the permanence of the state of exception and restrictions on constitutional guarantees.

Circulating casts of the Coatlicue : Mariana Castillo Deball’s unearthing of the Aztec earth goddess’s history of reproduction and display

This essay delves into casts of the Aztec earth goddess, the Coatlicue, through the lens of a sculpture, No solid form can contain you (2010), by the contemporary Mexican artist Mariana Castillo Deball. In this sculpture, Castillo Deball created a fibreglass cast of the Coatlicue and placed it on the floor. These artistic decisions highlighted two important and yet understudied aspects of the Aztec monument – its frequent disinterment and reburial, and subsequent reproduction and circulation. This article traces these connected paths of the Coatlicue, from the cycles of unearthing to its circulation through publications and plaster cast copies. To theorize the importance of these copies, this article draws on a recent article by Bruno Latour and Adam Lowe. Major political shifts within the Mexican Republic had important consequences for the status of Aztec monuments such as the Coatlicue, as presidents Benito Juárez and Porfirio Díaz recuperated them as evidence of a powerful ancient civilization. Once feared as a ‘monstrous’ icon, the Coatlicue was transformed into a symbol of national identity and occupied a place of pride in the museum. In No solid form can contain you, Castillo Deball questions the political and museological apparatuses that have dictated the status of the Coatlicue. The essay argues that her work operates within a framework set out by Erica Segre whereby Mexican artists integrated images of the pre-Columbian past to ‘interrogate identity’. To create the work, Castillo Deball used the same strategies of replication and circulation, though by presenting the work with seams left unfinished and lying on the floor, she gestured towards the constructed nature of replicas and their history of display.

Of Monsters and Malinches: Signifying Violence in Edgar Clément's Operación Bolívar and Tony Sandoval's El cadáver en el sofá

In this article, I show how Mexican artists Edgar Clement and Tony Sando-val work through representations of mutable, gendered bodies to explore the manifestations of neoliberalism and the kinds of violence that are encouraged or facilitated within that socioeconomic framework. More specifically, I argue that both artists make use of a wide range of monsters and monstrous characters to revelatory effect as they employ a series of specifically Mexican monsters to relate multifaceted stories of violence on a personal and systemic level. This is particularly true regarding their construction and positioning of la Malinche or malinchista characters as the monstrous/revelatory centers of each text. Lastly, I argue that the use of an open medium such as comics/graphic narrative provides both artists with an ideal platform to relate issues of drug-related violence and trauma for two reasons: first, it interrogates what Oswaldo Zavala has called the critical limits of narconarrative, as both texts refuse to present drug or other violence as disconnected from the nation and the state. Secondly, this interroga-tive power is due in part to the way in which the Mexican reading public has historically been trained to consume and interact with graphic narrative.

The New Frontier for Labor in Trade Agreements

In the spring of 2015, I took my students of international trade law to visit the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Geneva. It was a two-day trip, organized around lectures and discussions with staff from different divisions of the organization, the Advisory Centre of WTO Law and the permanent missions of two countries. None of my students had been there before, and even though I had taught international trade law for several years, it was also my first time visiting the headquarters of the organization. We were excited and curious. The building looked big and majestic. The back side opened to a spacious park overlooking Lake Geneva. It made for a pleasant tour on a cool, sunny morning. The WTO was celebrating its 20th anniversary, and there were banners hanging from the walls in the internal atrium marking the occasion, as well as announcements of events to come. In our second session, we were led to a room with wooden panels and a colorful mural that spanned the four walls. It depicted industrial workers — strong men making a car, miners, shipbuilders, men using heavy equipment, but also women, seamstresses, teachers and a few children. In the center a bare-chested man between two goddess-like women was holding a torch. The mural struck me as an ode to work, to achievement and to emancipation. A tale of the human race transforming the world through physical and intellectual labor. The painting, by Dean Cornwell, reminded me of the frescos of Mexican artist Diego Rivera in its depiction of industrial workers, although this one had no reference to exploitation or the confrontation between capital and labor. It was an incredibly optimistic image of work and human progress. I was surprised to see a mural of workers in the WTO. The painting seemed not only vintage but also out of place. What was it doing here?

Frida Kahlo as Feminist Geographer*

Pankl, Lis. 2015. “The Critical Geographies of Frida Kahlo.” PhD diss., Kansas State University.My dissertation examines the critical geographies of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo (1907–1954). I approa...

Neoliberalism in Mexican Cultural Theory

This essay reviews two theoretical books on neoliberalism written by Mexican cultural critics: Capitalismo gore (Gore Capitalism), by Sayak Valencia, published originally in Spanish in 2010 and translated into English in 2018, and La tiranía del sentido común ( The Tyranny of Common Sense) by Irmgard Emmelhainz, published in Spanish in 2016 and yet to be translated into English. These works are pioneering in their discussion of the correlation between neoliberalism, subjectivity, and culture in Mexico, and they have become widely influential in broader discussions of art, visual culture, literature, and cultural production. They add to the work of economic and political historians, such as Fernando Escalante Gonzalbo and María Eugenia Romero Sotelo, by connecting landmark moments in neoliberalization (from the financialization of the global economy in the 1970s to the War on Drugs in the 2000s) to changing paradigms in art. Author Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado contextualizes both books within larger discussions of Mexican cultural neoliberalism and describes the theoretical frame works through which both authors read Mexican politics, art, and popular culture. In Valencia's case, Sánchez Prado discusses her idea of “gore capitalism”: a framework for understanding how neoliberalism relies on dynamics of the shadow economy and on the subjectification of gore (what Valencia calls endriago subjectivity) to function at the social and artistic levels. In the case of Emmelhainz, Sánchez Prado engages with the author's idea of semiocapitalism, a term borrowed from theorist Franco “Bifo” Berardi, which Emmelhainz deploys to account for the interrelation between culture and capital in the era of neoliberalism. As such, Sánchez Prado argues, Emmelhainz and Valencia provide ways of reading artistic and visual production, including museum curatorship and narcocultura, in ways that show their organic relationship to neoliberal economic and political reforms. Find the complete article at artmargins.com .

Toward a Cartography of Mexican Art in the Post-Nafta Era: Three Critical Perspectives1

This review examines three recently published studies that pertain to Mexican art during the onset, development and crisis of neoliberalism as a stage of capitalism and as a social rationality: Delirious Consumption. Aesthetics and Consumer Capitalism in Mexico and Brazil (University of Texas Press, 2017) by Sergio Delgado Moya, The Incurable-Image. Curating Post-Mexican Film and Media Arts (Edinburgh University Press, 2016) by Tarek Elhaik, and REMEX. Toward an Art History of the NAFTA Era (University of Texas Press, 2017) by Amy Sara Carroll. Each volume proposes a critical device that offers the reader an understanding of the tensions that shaped art produced in Mexico in the context of global capitalism. A comparative analysis of the three volumes produces a broad understanding of the development of Mexican art, both from different historical perspectives and from various methodological approaches that are examined in this review.

El ojo microscópico: la relevancia de lo nimio y lo mínimo en el arte narrativo, pictórico y guiñol posrevolucionario

Este artículo muestra ciertos nexos, eslabones perdidos, que conectan al arte mexicano de principios del siglo pasado con la llamada Generación del Medio Siglo. Se estudian probables vínculos desde el fenómeno de la relevancia de lo mínimo, la representación de lo aparentemente baladí y lo trivial. Si hubo, por un lado, descripciones desde lo panorámico, el diálogo como forma dominante, las vastas escenas de gesta revolucionaria y política: la gran novela de la Revolución Mexicana y las representaciones del conflicto armado y los murales, por otro aparecieron imágenes de lo pequeño, lo nimio, lo microscópico: cuentos sobre la grandeza de lo cotidiano, pinturas sobre los espacios más mínimos, un arte de escenas habituales en que la violencia o la generación de una patria no son los temas.

Visualizing mole poblano as heritage process in Mexico City’s Café de Tacuba

ABSTRACTThis paper provides the first study of an untitled, large-scale painting, which the author refers to as The Creation of Mole (1946), by Mexican artist Carlos González. Commissioned for Café de Tacuba, one of Mexico City’s oldest and most well-known restaurants, this painting was part of an aggressive rebranding campaign for the café, which sought to legitimize claims of Mexican culinary authenticity through evocations of Pueblan colonial heritage, including the fictive legend of the invention of Mexico’s national dish, mole poblano. The paper demonstrates how and to what ends The Creation of Mole, which has been precluded from scholarly inquiry due to its commercial status, engages in meaning making at the nexus of national identity and aspirational modernity. It is argued that the labor rendered invisible in The Creation of Mole nonetheless amplifies an important kind of civic “making” present in, and perpetuated by, the painting. The confluence of mole poblano’s popularized mythic invention coupled with the colonial historicity of Café de Tacuba encodes mole poblano, and Café de Tacuba’s menu writ large, as foodstuffs of a collective Mexican mestizaje—an invisible but powerful phenomenon that could be consumed, absorbed, and digested.

‘The State is Me.’ My Role as a Conservator: Do Conservators Have Power Within the Cultural Structure?

ABSTRACT Preventive conservation plans must include the collaboration of all the different departments within an institution to be able to diagnose the situation, provide proper maintenance, and allocate a budget. Preventive conservation entails understanding the collection’s needs, organizational culture, institutional priorities, and risk factors. Beyond the intervention of objects, the conservator is the creator of guidelines and the implementer of solutions. In this paper, need-based approaches are provided showcasing how tailor-built preventive conservation plans became merged into the backbone of everyday activities. In the Louis C. Morton Auction House in Mexico City, diagnosis tools were adapted, redefining conservation terms within a business-oriented model to guarantee success. In the National Museum of Art in Mexico, the sustainable preservation plan categorized actions within their realization capability. Tasks were allocated to different departments and suppliers; outsourcing, not the responsibility, but the commitment of continuity with service providers via contracts. At the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, the complex conservation projects have focused on high standard continuity. Motivating people to participate in the steady innovation, an encyclopaedic museum must have not only to conserve its collections, but also to serve as an international example.

Curating Context: The Art Institute of Chicago’s 1945 Leopoldo Méndez Exhibition

Abstract This article considers the exhibition of the work of leftist Mexican printmaker Leopoldo Méndez at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1945. Showing Méndez’s work in a manner that illuminated the artist’s communist loyalties could have been controversial in the postwar milieu, but the exhibition did not generate negative publicity. The professionals of the Art Institute, most notably Katherine Kuh and Carl Schniewind, perpetuated the invented populist legacy of printmaker José Guadalupe Posada to provide a folkloric and regional context for the work of Méndez. They thereby provided a reading that encouraged audiences to overlook the contemporary leftist political importance of Méndez’s work, and made the prints palatable to an audience that might otherwise have reacted strongly to the work of a communist Mexican artist at a time when the Good Neighbor Policy had come to an end and the Cold War had begun. This case study, the dynamics of which were repeated at parallel exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, exemplifies the crucial challenge of the curatorial representations that have not problematized the context of the artistic narratives that they present.

Heritage practices, indigenismo, and coloniality: studying-up into racism in contemporary Mexico

ABSTRACTBased on two years of ethnographic fieldwork traveling with three ‘artesanos’ (mask-makers) from rural Michoacan and ‘studying up’ as they circulated through fairs and folk art competitions across Mexico, this paper describes how indigenous artists in rural Michoacan are routinely incentivized and sometimes cudgeled within majoritarian institutions of art in Mexico to enact self-racializing stereotypes and stigmatized indigenous identities and to produce and showcase the so called traditional works and performances that conform to static and primitivist stereotypes. At play here is the interlinked legacy and persistence of paternalism, indigenismo, nationalism, and primitivism. These logics continue to play out in reconstituted terms beyond or after the legal, political, and official embrace of pluriculturalism and the multiethnic community in Mexico. The embedded ethnographic vignette and the analysis that follows suggests how a strategy of ‘studying-up’ into coloniality furthers the delinking program. In line with the strategy of delinking, the ethnographic and conceptual work in this article proceeds by decentring or provincializing a set of dichotomous or binary oppositions that are commonly expressed and articulated within the Mexican heritage field, which would oppose indigenous tradition and culture against urban and mestizo modernity, civilization, and culture. The analysis diverges from a common or dominant approach to delinking in one crucial way – it does not engage in ‘borderthinking’ by looking towards the margins; it does not counterpose subaltern indigenous knowledge with privileged occidental knowledge. Instead, presenting an analysis that ‘studies up’, the paper applies the tools of decolonial theory and method and critical theory to analyse and interrogate elite Mexican patrimonial institutions and culture, which in fact epitomize coloniality and engender indigenous vulnerability. The article concludes by discussing the value and the potential pitfalls of this approach, in order to further the decolonizing project from within the space of cultural studies.

Introduction to Carlos Mérida's “The True Meaning of the Work of Saturnino Herrán”

Abstract The introductory essay places “The True Meaning of the Work of Saturnino Herrán: The False Critics” (1920), a piece of early criticism written by the Guatemalan artist Carlos Mérida during the first year he lived in Mexico City, within the contexts of the cosmopolitan milieu of post-Revolutionary Mexico and the artist's own trajectory. It suggests that the text both demonstrates intellectuals’ interest in questions of form and national art and Mérida's desire to provide a critical framework for his own paintings of indigenous Guatemalan and Mexican women. In “The True Meaning of the Work of Saturnino Herrán: The False Critics,” Mérida lashed out at Mexican critics for praising Herrán as the best and most Mexican painter of the time, arguing, instead that the realism and sentimentalism of Herrán's paintings dishonored national themes by presenting them as picturesque stereotypes. Published in the widely-read magazine El Universal Ilustrado, the text attacks Herrán's paintings and the critics who praise them while also arguing that the predominance of the artist is symptomatic of the predominant problem of the literary nature of Mexican artists’ engagement with autochthonous art and culture.

The True Meaning of the Work of Saturnino Herrán: The False Critics

Abstract The introductory essay places “The True Meaning of the Work of Saturnino Herrán: The False Critics” (1920), a piece of early criticism written by the Guatemalan artist Carlos Mérida during the first year he lived in Mexico City, within the contexts of the cosmopolitan milieu of post-Revolutionary Mexico and the artist's own trajectory. It suggests that the text both demonstrates intellectuals’ interest in questions of form and national art and Mérida's desire to provide a critical framework for his own paintings of indigenous Guatemalan and Mexican women. In “The True Meaning of the Work of Saturnino Herrán: The False Critics,” Mérida lashed out at Mexican critics for praising Herrán as the best and most Mexican painter of the time, arguing, instead that the realism and sentimentalism of Herrán's paintings dishonored national themes by presenting them as picturesque stereotypes. Published in the widely-read magazine El Universal Ilustrado, the text attacks Herrán's paintings and the critics who praise them while also arguing that the predominance of the artist is symptomatic of the predominant problem of the literary nature of Mexican artists’ engagement with autochthonous art and culture.

Bearing Witness to Child Abuse and Trauma in Pilar Acevedo’s Multimedia Fragmentos Exhibition

This is the first academic study of the artist Pilar Acevedo (born in Mexico and raised in Chicago), and more specifically of her Fragmentos exhibition at the National Museum of Mexican Art, Chicago (2013–2014). It proposes that Acevedo’s art tackles the challenge of bearing witness to the physical and psychological effects of child abuse in ways that help us to move beyond existing concerns within trauma theory and examines why art which uses shocking images is not effective either as art or as a call to action. This article identifies the strategies Acevedo employs to encourage the viewer to participate actively in the construction of meaning whilst avoiding turning trauma into a spectacle that makes us turn away or feeds our voyeuristic fascination with pain. The techniques foregrounded include: firstly, the use of fragmented dolls as signifiers that draw on, but also depart from, the work of Hans Bellmer and Cindy Sherman and the traditions of surrealism and abject art; secondly, a multimedia and intermedia approach that opens up new ways of seeing and experiencing art whereby the viewer is invited to piece together the fragmented narratives in a way that reflects the disruption of memory by trauma, and the work of psychoanalysis.