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Before delving too deeply into the specific artworks in ”Resistance: Cultural and Political Narratives in Mexican Art,” a thrillingly engaging exhibition at the New Bedford Art Museum, I feel obliged to give a (very) brief tutorial to those that think that art should not be political at all.
Art is not just charming landscapes or elegant portraiture or academic studies of colors and spatial relationships.
Art does not only illustrate or reflect the beauty of the world; it too responds to the horrible injustices often wrought by political extremism. For some visual artists and musicians and poets, the answer might be to produce work that is joyous, offering hope, beauty and solace in the darkest of times. Others feel a particular obligation to confront atrocity and the everyday banality of evil by not holding back: by directly calling it out, on canvas or paper, with photography and video, with sculpture or song. “Mississippi Goddam” or “Streets of Minneapolis,” anyone?
This is nothing new. In 1814, Francisco Goya painted “The Third of May 1808,” illustrating the Spanish resistance to Napoleon’s armies during the occupation of that year. In 1830, Eugène Delacroix painted “Liberty Leading the People,” in which the Goddess of Liberty wields a bayoneted musket and guides a group of revolutionaries over a barricade. In 1840, British abolitionist J.M.W. Turner painted “The Slave Ship” to commemorate the 1781 murder of 132 enslaved Africans who were thrown overboard in order to claim loss for insurance purposes when the ship ran low on drinking water.
In 1937, Picasso painted “Guernica,” with its wailing woman holding a dead child and a screaming wounded horse, after Franco’s Nationalist Army bombed the Basque town. Modernism became a weapon of the Cold War, supported by the State Department and the CIA, as a symbolic counterpoint to Soviet socialist realism. In 1972, Andy Warhol created a screenprint portrait of a garishly hued Richard Nixon, under which it is scribbled “Vote McGovern.” And Banksy is still out there doing what Banksy does.
As one enters the New Bedford Art Museum, one of the first works of art seen in “Resistance” is “Cucaracha Trump, Series: Cucaracha Fascistas” or “Trump Cockroach” from the series “Fascist Cockroaches.” The linocut was printed by the socially engaged printmaking collective known as Subterráneos led by artist Mario Guzmán in Oaxaca, Mexico. Envisioned as a black-and-white cartoon insect, he holds manacles with one leg, a bomb in another, and he sports a tie clasp emblazoned with a swastika. It is adhered to a bright orange wall and it seemed to be a favorite spot for museum visitors to stand by for a photograph.
Guzmán displays the far more traditional “Portrait of Lucio Cabañas,” the onetime general secretary of the Federation of Socialist Peasant Students of Mexico, who later became the guerrilla leader who founded the sociopolitical movement Party of the Poor and led the Peasants’ Brigade Against Injustice. With roughly 300 members, they lived in the Guerrero Mountains and financed the group with bank robberies and kidnappings. Legend contends that he had five women bodyguards and he carried bags of money that he distributed to the poor. He died in December 1974, a hero to many, although it is unclear whether his death was in combat with the Mexican army, or by execution or by suicide in order to avoid arrest. Nonetheless, he remains a folk hero.
Suspended from the ceiling are a number of large (115” X 48”) linocuts on fabric, all by members of the Subterráneos collective. The sheer scale of the work, with their mysterious and majestic figures hovering in the space, are enough to make one consider exploring — and perhaps embracing — ancient mythologies. Created by Eric Pozos Vásquez, “The Wixarika” features a parent in an elaborate hat of leaves and tassels holding a young child wearing a smaller version of the same. The Wixarika, also known as the Huichol, are an ancient people who worship four principal deities, the trinity of Corn, Blue Deer and Peyote, and the Eagle, all descended from their Sun God, Tao Jreeku.
The same artist also displays “Terrorismo de Estado,” a brown ink print in which a bullet-riddled man lies dead on the ground. A woman is holding an enormous bouquet of flowers, while another squats to light candles, and a shirtless man howls at an unresponsive god. The English translation of the title is state terrorism. Couldn’t happen here … right?
Emilio González of the Subterráneos collective displays “Although fascism dresses as the people, fascism remains.” It features a skull-headed figure in a riot helmet, body armor and weaponry, about to hurl a pineapple, which may allude to the old slang for a hand grenade. The image is disturbing but not as much as that oddly Orwellian title.
Multidisciplinary artist Adela Goldbard collaborated with several other artists on her “Night Vision” series. She worked with Bianca Doquiz and Xochitl Ruiz Núñez on “Coyote,” which is designed to appear as if the viewer is looking through the scope of the rifle at the critter, his doom imminent. Goldbard teamed up with Alejandra Sánchez Salgado and Fátima Armengol on “La linea ll” in which the scope is focused on three or four people attempting to scale a wall. They are clearly unaware of the jeopardy that they are in. Both are textile works made in a needlefelting workshop in San Agustin, Oaxaca.
OK, strap yourself in for this one. Goldbard’s “They probably, off the road, over that bluff, miles back, must be even wilder and stranger…” is a photograph that is but an element in a much larger project that she collaborated on with Marcela Ortega in 2010. It was called “On the Road” which she describes as a “reinterpretation project of spaces and objects based on the 1951 book by Jack Kerouac, recounting the trip the Beats did to Mexico City on the Pan-American Highway.”
Goldbard and Ortega collected discarded objects from dumps along Route 85 and transformed them into sculptures, illuminating them with the headlights of their pick-up truck to stage the photographs documenting the project. Goldbard questioned the borders between fiction and reality, noting that “a text that fictionalizes an actual experience is taken as a guide for a new actual experience and its subsequent fictionalization.” Mind blown.
Renata Cassiano Alvarez has noted that she did not choose ceramics merely as material but as a way of thinking. She calls clay “the memory of earth made plastic … it records touch, pressure, hesitation. It contains history without needing to articulate it.” She displays work from her ongoing series “Siempre Voy a Volver (I Will Always Return)” in which the forms suggest vessels and bodies without resorting to literalness.
Her “Exquisite Sense of Dilemma” is both alien and familiar, a strange marriage of the industrial and the domestic. It appears, at once, as spongy as an angel food cake and as heavy as an anvil. It is neither here nor there but it is comfortable all the same. From a certain angle, “Avalanche” seems to contain a cowlicked cartoon character with two eyes, a bulbous nose and a Jay Leno chin. And it does seem to teeter on the verge of collapse, even if only comically so.
The colorful and charming animal figures created by Taller Jacobo and Maria Ángeles are a much-needed respite from some of the disheartening realities of the political challenges that make up the bulk of the work in the exhibition. That work is powerful, vital and significant. I’ve seen the exhibition five or six times. I get it. But it is heavy.
But those ducks? They changed my mood.
“Wildlife Crossing” by the husband-and-wife Ángeles team consists of six brightly painted wooden ducklings being escorted by a parent duck on either end over a large oval table painted to look like an asphalt road with yellow stripes. Only the most hardened cynic could be disgruntled. Imagine a psychedelic version of the Boston Public Garden’s “Make Room for Ducklings.”
The Ángeles team gets even more fanciful with works such as “Fusion #2 (Rabbit,Turtle, Snake)” and “Fusion #6 (Armadillo, Eagle, Iguana).” Both reimagine the hybrid animals as colorful mythological creatures.
It is possible that the artists may have been aware of the Mexican paper artist Pedro Linares (1906-1992). In 1936, he suffered from high fevers and experienced a lucid dream in which he encountered fantastic dream figures that included a winged donkey, a lion with a dog’s head, and a rooster with the horns of a bull. He referred to them as the “Alebrije” and they were his subject matter for much of his life.
Not quite Alebrije but magical in their own way are two little dogs on pedestals. One is peeing, one is pooping. Both are gold.
The exhibition is stunning. The curation is impeccable.
The show was unpredictable. And it was necessary.
Culture and politics …together again. As it always was, as it shall always be.
“Resistance: Cultural and Political Narratives in Mexican Art” is on display at the New Bedford Art Museum, 608 Pleasant St., New Bedford, until May 31.
Don Wilkinson has been writing art reviews, artist profiles and cultural commentary on the South Coast for over a decade. He has been published in local newspapers and regional art magazines. He is a graduate of the Swain School of Design and the CVPA at UMass Dartmouth. Email him at dwilkinson@newbedfordlight.org.
