Читать книгу A Companion to Modern and Contemporary Latin American and Latina/o Art - Группа авторов - Страница 61

“… your dreams are too transparent, you need a tough philosophy.”

–Octavio Paz, A Poet c. 1959

Between 1949 and 1951, when he was close to 35 years of age, Octavio Paz wrote four essays that set the foundation for his life's work, establishing his viewpoints and later obsessions. First, he published El laberinto de la soledad (The Labyrinth of Solitude), the psychohistorical and symbolic‐political construction that hypnotized modern Mexicans by transcribing their traumas, masks, and cultural ghosts into a catalog of beings inhabiting the mythic substratum of the country (1950). It was followed by Paz's experimentation with automatic writing, ¿Aguila o sol? (Eagle or Sun?), which produced a hallucinatory glimpse into the psychosocial underworlds of visionary poetry, “a sort of mixture of Surrealism and concern for the pre‐Columbian world” (1944–1955, pp. 12D and 13D). With this work, Paz moved beyond the orbit of the Spanish lyrical tradition to immerse himself in an avant‐garde that fluctuated between the exoticism of antiquity and the historical crisis of the postwar, describing Iztapapalotl, the obsidian butterfly, mourning the end of sacrifices and directing his words toward a present where “each night is an eyelid that the thorns have not ceased to pierce” (1997, p. 183–184).

This inflection is critical: poetry set aside its otherworldliness to register a political transmutation. Paz wrote: “When history sleeps, it speaks in dreams,” pointing to “the benevolent cardboard stone face of the Chief, the fetish Conductor of the century” (1997, p. 193–194). More than a decade earlier, Paz had distanced himself from an aesthetics of social commitment. But it was not until he wrote an essay for the magazine Sur concerning the controversy between David Rousset and the French communist left over Russia's forced labor camps that Paz publicly asserted his “open” and definitive “rupture” with the Soviet dream. Starting with the title “Soviet concentration camps,” Paz identified Stalinism with Nazism. Getting straight to the point, he denounced the USSR as an incipient “aristocratic society” that owed its “ferocity” to the constant need for “fresh blood” for its purges and for the enormous financial projects that secured the power of the bureaucracy (1995, p. 92‐95).

It was in the context of these political, poetic, and spiritual readjustments, when the new intellectual scene of the Cold War was forming, that Octavio Paz wrote his first and definitive intervention into art criticism. “Tamayo en la pintura mexicana” (“Tamayo in Mexican Painting”) appeared on the front page of México en la Cultura, the famous cultural supplement of the newspaper Novedades, on 21 January 1951. Despite the heated tone of his words, however, this essay was in no way a literary outburst. Rather, it was a Cold War operation – a political demarcation in the midst of a hegemonic struggle between two world powers, written under the shadow of atomic destruction. Although Paz had behind him an important career in cultural journalism, up to this point he had journeyed into the territory of fine arts only sporadically, with a few brief (and hardly transcendent) articles here and there on the exhibitions of Juan Soriano, José María Velasco and Jesús Guerrero Galván. True, an article of his appeared in Novedades on 5 July 1943, sardonically titled “Arte tricolor” in which Paz criticized the nationalist obsession of Mexican art and literature, and pronounced himself in favor of an art that can assimilate “the universal tradition … no matter how rich its artistic past” (1999, pp. 363–364). Yet even this reproof was glib compared with the scandal involving Luis Cardoza y Aragón and his publication of La nube y el reloj (The Cloud and the Clock) in 1940, in which Cardoza condemned “the false values placed on art by social concessions and symbolism,” and described muralism as an expression of “the ideas of a political state and of the party that rules it: the National Revolutionary Party” (Cardoza y Aragón 2003, p. 51‐53). No, Paz's importance does not simply lie in marking a rupture with the hegemony of muralism for his contemporaries; rather, it lies in being the start of a new visual hegemony.

With “Tamayo en la pintura mexicana (Tamayo in Mexican Painting),” Paz entered the dangerous strategic game of shaking up the artistic appraisal of his time. In fact, his intervention coincided with – and contributed to – the first reorientation of the local artistic scene of the postwar period. In 1946, during the regime of President Miguel Alemán, the new Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura (National Institute of Fine Arts and Literature, INBAL), directed by Carlos Chávez, was founded. Starting with the ambitious entry Mexico sent to the 1950 Venice Biennial, Tamayo was catapulted to fame (not without some friction) by the museographer Fernando Gamboa, becoming one of the official representatives of Mexican culture. The Mexican state began to represent Tamayo “on par” (as Chávez wrote in a letter to the artist) with the work of the so‐called three greats – Rivera, Siqueiros, and Orozco. Reactions to this enthronement did not take long to appear.² David Alfaro Siqueiros, from the assumed pedestal of having won the second prize of the Venice Biennial, felt obliged to attack Tamayo by saying that his relationship with Mexico was merely superficial and touristy, like “any painter from the School of Paris on a quick tour through … the country.”³ Tamayo responded in an article that November: “We are witnessing in our pictorial life the tyranny of gangsterism ready to shoot its gun.”⁴ This debate, which would continue throughout 1951, is known as the “Tamayo controversy.”

Paz's “Tamayo en la pintura mexicana” became the canonical essay accompanying both Tamayo's ascent and the subsequent disputes involving the painter and artistic freedom. The essay should be seen as part of a coordinated campaign, along with a poem from ¿Aguila o sol? revealingly called “Ser natural” (Natural Being). The latter alluded to Tamayo's images as erecting a “bridge of blood between the living and the dead,” a territory where “everything is endless birth” (1990, p. 189–190). The essay was written for Tamayo's first solo exhibition in Paris at the Galerie Beaux‐Arts in November 1950. The catalog also included an essay written by André Breton, which denounced the decadence of Mexican social painting, while praising Tamayo's desire to portray the “eternal Mexico” (1982, p. 303).

Tamayo insisted that the reason Breton wrote that essay for him was because Octavio Paz asked him to (Suckaer 2000, p. 209). Indeed, if this is true, then today we would say that Paz took a curatorial role in the exhibition. The essay, therefore, was part of a larger campaign. We must take Paz seriously when he confessed in the 1970s and 1980s that his relationship with Tamayo had been more one of identification than of wonder:

He had asked himself the same questions I had and he had answered them with those paintings that were simultaneously elegant and savage. What did they say? I translated his primordial forms and his exalted colors into this formula: the conquest of modernity is resolved in the exploration of Mexico's substratum. Not the historical or anecdotal substratum of the muralists and the realist writers, but rather the psychic substratum. Myth and reality; modernity was the most ancient antiquity (1986, p. 29).

According to Paz, Mexican painting was “a child of the Mexican Revolution” because, beyond the rhetoric and ideologies, it was an “immersion of Mexico in its own self.” Yet this self‐gnosis was never transparent. To begin with, Paz argued, the profound meaning of the Mexican Revolution had more to do with critique than proposal; it consisted in showing how colonial Catholicism and Mexican liberalism, the two battling ideological models of the nineteenth century, were “merely historical overlappings” destined to fail. Things being what they were, reasoned Paz, painters had to face the fact that the Mexican Revolution had lacked a world vision. He suggested as much in El laberinto de la soledad:

The Revolution was first a discovery of ourselves and a return to our origins, then a search and a tentative synthesis aborted several times. Unable to assimilate our tradition and offer us a new project of salvation, in the end it was a concession. The Revolution has not been able to articulate its entire salvational explosion into a world vision; nor has the Mexican intelligentsia resolved the conflict between the insufficiency of our tradition and our need for universality (1950, p. 164).

This lack was, according to Paz, the reason for the Marxism of the muralists, “a shell” that “had no other purpose than to replace the absence of philosophy in the Mexican Revolution with a philosophy of international revolution” (1951, p. 1).

Rather than criticizing mere aesthetic motifs, Paz reproaches muralism for its political and argumentative inconsistencies. In a peculiar “self‐interview” on muralism and expressionism in 1978, Paz notes that the relationship between muralism and the Mexican state had been “a game of masks” (1986, p. 265). What he condemns above all, however, is the fact that muralism lost itself in the fruitless search for a messianic project. Disparaging their ideological affiliations, Paz states that Rivera is a “materialist” of the constant creation and recreation of material; Siqueiros, a painter of incessant change, movement and contrast;⁵ and Orozco solitary, critical and tragic. Paz then makes an explicit effort to situate these painters as representatives of the initial phases of the 1910 revolution. By historicizing them, he simultaneously validates them and declares them obsolete.

Diego Rivera, argues Paz, represented “the rupture with lies and dictatorship, and a return to origins,” whereas Orozco represented “sarcasm, denunciation and quest” (1951, p. 6). It was apparently in this context that Paz first used the term “rupture,” which would later be adopted by Mexican art history to designate both the opposition to muralism, and Paz's theory of modern art. According to Paz, artists such as Carlos Mérida, Julio Castellanos, Frida Kahlo, and Agustín Lazo were motivated by a desire to find a “new kind of artistic universality.” But Paz's expectations for this concept did not stop at a lesser or greater interaction with metropolitan Western art. What he had in mind was to formulate artistically an alternative to the crisis of civilization. And it is at this point that we can detect his very bold endeavor: to transform what until then had been a secondary urban ideology – the belief in the contemporaneity of the Aztecs – into cosmopolitan dogma.

What separated Tamayo from this group, and inspired Paz to see him as a milestone, was nothing less than the “authenticity” of his “Mexicanness.” For Paz, Tamayo's task was to reestablish cultural communality with pre‐Columbian civilizations. And the determining factor here was that, unlike ordinary European primitivism, Tamayo returned to his magical, non‐European origins through instinct. “The naturalness with which Tamayo reinstates the lost contact with old pre‐Cortesian civilizations,” wrote Paz, “distinguishes him from most of the great painters of our time, Mexican or European.” With the exception of Picasso and Miró, stated Paz, for all modern painters the “discovery of innocence is the result of an effort and a conquest.” Tamayo was unique for this reason: he did not require anthropology, history or archaeology, or a tour through museums in search of the effect of antiquity. He was capable of unearthing the primitive in himself because “he does not need to conquer innocence; he only needs to delve into the depths of himself to find the ancient sun, supplier of images” (1951, pp. 6, 7).

This primitivism, however, was rooted in a contemporary aim validated by reenchantment: Paz wished to acquire for Tamayo worldwide political status so that he could be enrolled in the competition to define new painting. There was an ongoing search in the late 1940s involving several scenarios and actors on both sides of the Atlantic who sought to recover the attention that the School of Paris had lost. In this context, Paz offered Tamayo as a herald. If “Tamayo [had] discovered the old formula of consecration,” then he could speak directly and unreservedly about the contemporary world's atmosphere of terror. “This modern man is also very ancient.” In this seemingly innocuous statement, Paz hinted that the Mexican painter was fully prepared to describe the twentieth century's potential apocalypse, because his civilization had already experienced the brutality of historical collapse:

The painter opens the doors to the Old sacred universe of myths and images that reveal the two‐fold condition of man, his atrocious reality and, simultaneously, his no less atrocious unreality. Twentieth‐century man suddenly discovers what through other means others who had lived through a crisis already knew: an end to the world (1951, pp. 6, 7).

Paz's essay on Tamayo should thus be seen as a digression from the El laberinto de la soledad, in which Tamayo represents the new sensibility of the modern Mexican in the face of the historic “desolation” of the postwar. Written for consumption by the modernist urban elite to which Paz belonged, El laberinto de la soledad sought to uncover the mythical “masks” of the Mexican, before inviting him to remove them and join the rest of humanity in the “nakedness and vulnerability” of “truly thinking and living.” According to Paz, the Mexican elite had exhausted both its local myths and its adopted ones, to find itself in a state of total alienation from modern man:

And now, suddenly, we have reached the limit. In only a few years we have depleted all the historical forms that Europe possessed. There is nothing remaining but nakedness and lies. For after the collapse of Reason and Faith, of God and Utopia, no new or old intellectual systems arise capable of harboring our anguish and easing our bewilderment. There is nothing in front of us (1950, p. 191).

Paz interpreted Tamayo's almost metaphysical scenes of the 1940s – the naked, cuboidal figures confronting skies crossed by eclipses, defending themselves against the violence of the elements or the threat of occultation – as an allegory of postwar disillusion, “mad forces” that were “a direct and instinctive response to the pressures of history.” A determining factor was the way in which the reactivation of “the sacred” in painting and art was not, for Paz, an invitation to the restoration of ancient civilizations. Rather, it was a way to commune with the orphanhood produced by the failure of the communist project. “With the impossibility of returning to the ancient [values], and with the failure of those whom we thought would one day replace those of bourgeois civilization, the artist transforms his creation into an ‘absolute’” (1951, p. 7). The “primitivism of Tamayo” was not an offering of Arcadian fantasy, but on the contrary, a more direct contact with an understanding of catastrophe. Bringing these contradictions together is what Paz understood to be a kind of negotiation with the sacred:

The merging of the modern and the primitive – what could also be described as a sensibility willing to confront death and catastrophe – appears in Tamayo more naturally than in others. The world of terror and the mechanical is the other side of the solar and blissful world. The canvas is where all these forces meet (1951, p. 7).

We should not be surprised by the eccentricity of this construction; particularly, the echoes of Artaud and Péret should not distract us from the fundamental operation at play here.

Serge Guilbaut and others have suggested that toward the end of World War II there was an international race to define the new artistic world geography – a symbolic competition won, in the end, by the New York of Greenberg and Pollock (Guilbaut 1983). Paz's mythological‐thermonuclear operation must be seen as an expression of that hegemonic ambition – an attempt, like many of the return‐to‐myth projects of late surrealism, destined to fail. Instead of submerging his metropolitan spectator in the glow of a world subject to termination, Tamayo was marginalized by the center as an example of a new kind of emotional illustration – what Clement Greenberg denounced as “illustrated” emotion, that is, denoted rather than embodied (1986–1993, p. 284).

Oddly enough, Paz's bold endeavor (the jump from the particularity of judgment to the generality of symbolic power) produced an effect in a terrain other than that of world painting. Instead of “Aztequizing” Westerners, Paz imposed Tamayo as a local Mexican glory; in fact, as a new official canon. For half a century, Tamayo became the referent for “good Mexican painting,” a highly paradoxical model of the supposedly aboriginal artist who, because of his direct contact with his Indian roots, can converse with the international avant‐garde. This was a much more watered down version of Paz's argument in 1950, a shadow of the original critical operation. However, Paz himself authorized the rewriting.

Conveniently, after 1957, Paz's version of the essay on Tamayo was reformed to suppress its postatomic allusions, and to direct the weight of the argument toward criticism of muralism. In other words, Paz transformed his inability to generate a new global artistic hegemony into a new model of national representation. We have, then, a case where a type of self‐censoring reframes an eccentric critical operation to re‐localize it. With the so‐called “triumph of American painting,” the circle of Tamayo and Paz once again became peripheral. Under the regime of modernism, the peripheral‐excluded were inevitably transformed into “national art.” I would even add “(cosmopolitan) national art.”