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R.G.: Octavio Paz, one last question: What are your plans for the future?

O.P.: To abolish it (2003, p. 470).

As I have mentioned elsewhere, a dark view of the indio and the pre‐Columbian past defines an important part of the aesthetic attitudes (and writings) of the Mexican artists and intellectuals who reached modernism through surrealism (Medina 2003, p. 195‐213). Employing the concept of “Gothic Indo‐American,” I have argued that modernizing Mexican elites conceived their relationship with the Mexican Indian based on the metaphor of the living‐dead: the “survivals,” ghosts and “half‐buried structures” of a “murdered” indigenous world must be treasured and channeled, even as they must be attenuated to guarantee the whitening of modernization.⁶ We now see clearly how the claims of a modernity inhabited by aboriginal spectrality were implicated in Paz's interpretation of Tamayo. The “indigenous” was not only an administrative mechanism for cultural and ethnic difference, but also a surface on which to project the political terrors of the world. Just as Paz suggested years later, in another essay on Tamayo, “the twentieth century teaches us that our place in history is not far from the Assyrians of Sargon, the Mongols of Genghis Khan or the Aztecs of Itzcóatl” (1986, p. 369). By the late 1960s, this discourse, where ancient wisdom is imbricated in the crisis of modernity, had taken on new features. For example, in “La nueva analogía: poesía y tecnología,” (The new analogy: poetry and technology, 1967), it had become one of the elements of Paz's radical critique of modernity:

Believing that the world could end at any time and losing faith in the future are non‐modern features, and they negate the suppositions that founded the modern age in the eighteenth century. It is a negation that is also a rediscovery of the central wisdom of ancient civilizations. … Today it reveals to us the same question that it did for the Aztecs at the end of each cycle of fifty‐two years: will the New Sun rise once more, or will this night be the last? (1973a, p. 20)

Even by the end of the 1960s, negotiating the modern crisis meant for Paz the need for a vision that would imbricate the past and the future. This theme would become central to his aesthetic research. In fact, a further discussion could be had regarding the mature Paz and his project for developing an aesthetic that he called “transfiguration” or “analogic imagination.”⁷

As we are well aware, toward the middle of the 1960s, Paz began to call attention to the exhaustion of the avant‐garde, both as concept and as practice – a theme to which he dedicated several books of essays including El signo y el garabato (The Sign and the Scrawl, 1973) and Los hijos del limo (Children of the Mire, 1973). Interpreting modernity as the expression of the linear time of Western Christian civilization, itself derived from the enlightened critic of the cyclical time of ancient mythology (1973a, p. 12), Paz denounced the paradoxes that arose from the fact that poetry and modern art conceived themselves as part of a “tradition of rupture” in which each generation inherited the tic of iconoclasm (1993, p. 333). In part, for Paz this meant examining modern culture as a dialectic of two operations: analogy and irony. On the one hand, he argued, ancient civilizations all had a vision of the world organized around the analogy (meaning, the relationships of metonymy and metaphor, correspondence and resonance) between the heavens and earth. This continuity had been broken by the basic critical operation of irony, understood as the discovery of the failure of correspondence. As a result, Paz identified the emergence of the extraordinary, irreplaceable, bizarre, and unique beauty of the moderns, defined by Baudelaire as the logical source of the ironic process (1993b).

This “rupture of analogy” of the first modernity gave rise to subjectivity, but also to the experience of nonsense. Paz attributed the reification of the world, understood as the loss of a symbolic plot, to the effects of criticism. His interpretation of the effects of irony was, in fact, a version of the dialectics of Enlightenment and myth: “Man enters the scene, he evicts divinity, and then faces the nonmeaning of the world. Double imperfection: words have stopped representing the true reality of things; and things have become opaque, mute” (1993b).

This reasoning had a direct effect on the development of Paz's taste. Naturally, for a poet associated with surrealism, who therefore lived until the end of his life with the persuasion that art (visual or verbal) was “essentially metaphorical,” – since “the essential poetic operation” is appearance, in other words, “in this, to see that” (1994, p. 264) – the development of art after the war was nothing but a continuous process of degradation. When in 1980 he composed, somewhat artificially, an outline of North American art, Paz admitted that he did not consider Jackson Pollock a great painter, but rather a “powerful temperament” whose opportunity to develop his extraordinary gifts was cut short” (1994, p. 87). Nothing could have seemed more alien to Paz than the Greenbergian positivism of the intrinsic development of mediums. It is not accidental that the only essay that Paz dedicated to abstraction as such, in 1959, was in fact an invitation to move beyond abstract expressionism toward a hypothetical “Mannerism, the Abstract‐Baroque,” characterized by an “impure pictorial language,” riddled with forms and meanings common to all (1994, p. 283).

Threaded through Paz's writings of the late 1960s is an account of the disenchantment of art. On the one hand, Paz argued that the history of modern painting – its reduction to a visual language without symbolic meaning yet still subject to an analogic poetic interpretation – had reached “the gradual transformation of the work of art into an artistic object” expressed as the “transition from vision to a perceptible thing” (1968, p. 66). Paz interpreted modern art after the impressionists as the abandonment of the “great tradition of Western painting” – in other words, of painting based not on aesthetic sensation as an end in itself, but rather as access to a cosmovision. Even so, Paz wanted to avoid the interpretation of pure modernist painting as a radically antisymbolic endeavor. He insisted that modern painting was not “anti‐literary,” but that it formulated an “artistic” language where “the ideas and myths, the passions and imaginary figures, the shapes that we see and dream, are realities that the painter has found within painting” – something that must emerge from the picture; not something that the artist introduces into the picture (1973a, p. 170). However, he realized that by renouncing representation, painting had become “a beam of signs projected onto a space empty of meanings” (1967, p. 34). Instead of responding to the spectator, it questioned him/her with its language of omissions and allusions, in other words, with “the signs of an absence.” “Sensitive [sensible] or not,” art had become an interchangeable object: “the conception of art as a thing … that we can separated from its vital context and house in museums and other security deposits” (1967, p. 41).

Paz knew, however, that the crisis had not stopped at the mere thingification of the artwork. After World War II, painting and sculpture became merely products of an industrial society. Like many of the old Dadaists and surrealists, pop and neo‐Dada, assemblages and happenings seemed anathema to him. He saw “the constantly expanding body of artwork that was meant to be unique, exceptional” as a mere repetition of the gestures of the first avant‐garde, housed in museums and contemporary collections like “an enormous piling up of heterogeneous objects – the confusion of waste” (1967, p. 41). Once the critical element was removed from modernist artworks (Paz lists “romantic irony, Dada and Surrealist humor”), art became mere merchandise. Even worse, art became an inane object subject to fetishistic worship. It is this extreme thingification, according to Paz, that Duchamp's readymade questioned:

Now we are suspicious of the very idea of the “work of art,” especially after Marcel Duchamp and his “ready‐made” … a critical gesture designed to show the inanity of artworks as objects (1967, p. 16). … The modern beatification that surrounds painting and that sometimes prevents us from seeing it is nothing but the worship of an object, the adoration of a magical thing that we can touch, that like other things can be bought and sold. It is the sublimation of the thing in a civilization dedicated to producing and consuming things (1968, p. 51).

Almost as if he were following early Lukács or Adorno, Paz destroyed the image of the world by negating the function of things as signs, while accelerating historical time: “for technology, the world is neither a perceptible [sensible] image of an idea nor a cosmic model; it is an obstacle that we must overcome and modify” (1967, p. 13).

It is against this background – Paz's disappointment with the neo‐avant‐garde, and his belief that modern art coincided with the reduction of the world to a mere instrumental thing – that we must understand his extraordinary decision to write a monograph on Marcel Duchamp. His first book on Duchamp, Marcel Duchamp o el castillo de la pureza (Marcel Duchamp or the Castle of Purity) from 1968, is not only extraordinary because of the box‐object designed by Vicente Rojo to accompany facsimiles of Duchamp's work – a true “popular” edition of La Boîte‐en‐valise (Box in a Suitcase, 1935–1941) (Figure 7.1). What is truly unorthodox about the book is the way in which Paz extracts Duchamp from the mere discussion of modern and contemporary art, to venture a double analogical and interpretive‐iconographic⁸‐comparative‐transhistorical‐pluricultural interpretation, elucidated in part by his reading of Lévi‐Strauss, but above all by his intention of showing Duchamp as the point of inflection of modern tradition. If the “artistic thing” was the paradoxical result of the criticism of traditional allegorical and representational art, Paz saw in Duchamp the model of double negation – a “criticism of criticism.” In other words, a return to the analogic tradition, to the work of art with a verbal and poetic correlate, and to the reappearance of a negation of myth and its criticism. No longer a modern work of art, but rather a work of art that signaled a re‐beginning:

As a Myth of Criticism, The Large Glass is a painting of Criticism and a criticism of Painting. It is an artwork turned in on itself, insistent on destroying the very thing that it creates. The function of irony now appears more clearly; negative, it is the critical substance that permeates the artwork. Positive, it criticizes criticism, negates it and in this way inclines the balance more to the side of myth. Irony is the element that transforms criticism into myth … The circle closes; the end of one era and the beginning of a new one. The Large Glass is the boundary between one world and another, between that of a “modernity” that agonizes and a new one that begins but still has no shape (1968, p. 49).

Figure 7.1 Octavio Paz and Vicente Rojo, Marcel Duchamp o el castillo de la pureza (Marcel Duchamp or the Castle of Purity). Mexico City: Editorial Era, 1968.

Source: Photograph, Robin Greeley.

As a new analogic artwork, Duchamp's Glass not only comes with an instruction manual (The Green Box), but also requires yet another “translation.” More important, Paz believes it possible to “read” it as an iconographic apparatus. With the enthusiasm of a Structuralist, Paz sees The Glass as a “version of the venerable myth of the great Goddess, the Virgin, the Mother, the Exterminator and the Giver of Life.” Stressing this idea, he clarifies: “It is not a modern myth; it is the modern version of myth” (1968, p. 36). Indeed, no longer a thing but a vision: “We move from farce to the sacred mystery, from the retablo to religious mural painting, from the tale to the allegory. The Large Glass is a scene from myth, or to be more exact, from the family of myths of the Virgin and the closed society of men.” (1968, p. 38)

Paz is so convinced that The Glass is the starting point of a “new allegory” that he finds it perfectly legitimate to read it parallel to the goddess Kali, depicted in the Bengali tantric imagery: “Kali is the phenomenal world, incessant energy …, butchery, sexuality, propagation, and spiritual contemplation. Obviously, this image, as well as its philosophical explanation, shares more than one similarity with The Large Glass and The Green Box; Kali and the Bride, the Eyewitnesses, and the two companions, male passivity and feminine activity” (1968, p. 40). In fact, concludes Paz, what both myths convey is an explanation for the circularity of time “as a phenomenon of creation, destruction, woman, and reality.” (1968, p. 41)

Paz imagined for a time that contemporary art would abandon the literalism of artwork from the 1960s to reach a new form of art deduced from his reading of The Glass – itself a rewriting of the Kantian aesthetic: “The value of a picture, a poem, or any other artistic creation,” wrote Paz, “is measured by the signs it reveals and by the possible ways of combining them. An artwork is a machine of meaning”(1968, p. 59). This machine was to be the reconciliation of the “universe of symbols” and the “sensorial universe” [universo sensible] that would show us that “we are the transmission channel” where “languages flow and our body translates them into other languages.” (1967, p. 30)

After the rebellions of 1968, Paz came to believe that two cultural tendencies were about to emerge. On the one hand, the romantic realization of surrealist revelry, which would erase the boundaries between life and poetry – an “art of incarnation of images that could satisfy the need for collective rituals in our world.” And on the other, a new kind of artwork that would be neither object nor negation, but instead a new sign – the postmodern equivalent of tantric painting:

How can we not imagine another art, at the opposite end of the pole, designed to satisfy a more imperious need: meditation and solitary contemplation? This art would not be a relapse into the idolatry of the “artistic thing” of the last two hundred years. Nor would it be an art of the destruction of the object. Rather, it would see in the canvas, the sculpture, or the poem, a point of departure … . Not the restoration of the artistic object, but the establishment of the poem or picture as an inaugural sign that opens a new path.” (1967, p. 46–47)

An object/image that would release the power of combinatory association, valued not so much for its intentional meaning as for its productivity. It is within this framework that Paz fashioned an entire program of art criticism that focused no longer on interpreting the codified message of an artwork, but instead on exploring its analogies, correspondences, and parallels throughout the history of thought and images. This is the method of reflection (or, better yet, drifting) used, for example, in Conjunciones y disyunciones (Conjuntions and Disjunctions, 1969), in which Paz explores a print by José Guadalupe Posada of a freak child with the image of a face imprinted on his ass – while employing a poem by Quevedo (“The graces and disgraces of the ass”) that at the same time he dedicates to Velázquez's Venus del espejo (Venus at her Mirror). “Words are no longer things, yet they continue to be signs that come to life, that take shape.” Paz sees a variation of Posada's ass/face metaphor in Velázquez's Venus, but without the “humiliation of either the face or the sex.” For him, this is a moment of “miraculous concordance” (1969, p. 19).

Further research might examine to what degree Paz's obsession for artwork created from the combination of symbols accounts for the abundance of serialized art in late 1960s‐early 1970s Mexico. At one end, the computer‐designed canvases of Manuel Felguérez, the “aesthetic machine” of his “multiple spaces.” And at the other end, the rebirth of an intensified symbolism to be found, for example, in the films of Alejandro Jodorowsky. Unfortunately for Paz, contemporary art in the metropolis never focused on any of these new mannerisms; on the contrary, it probed deeper into the radicalization of literalism and critique.

Perhaps Paz expected that a Rousselian computer would emerge through mixing the enigmas of Joseph Cornell and the mesostic poems of John Cage. What happened instead was that the art world turned toward dematerialization and information‐art. Paz would reject conceptualism as a radical perversion of the Duchampian project:

The work of art is not a thing; it is a hand‐held fan of signs that opens and closes, alternately concealing and revealing their meaning. The work of art is a sign of intelligence in which sense and nonsense constantly switch places. The danger of this posture, a danger that Duchamp (almost) always avoided, is that of falling to one side and winding up with the concept but without the art, with the trouvaille but without the thing. This is what has occurred with his imitators. … They often wind up without the art and without the concept. It is scarcely worth repeating that art is not a concept; art is a thing of the senses (1994c, p. 66).

Naturally, in the 1970s Paz would shift his interest from contemporary art to the baroque of Góngora and Sor Juana. Perhaps it was this mad symbolic deluge that led him to become interested in Athanasius Kircher and Neoplatonism. The obsessive search for rotating signs with the most varied meanings led him away from the fine arts and back toward metaphor. Meanwhile, his remythification project was quashed, precisely by a new hegemony founded oddly enough on a kind of generalization of Duchamp's readymade. Paz's analogic aesthetic, of course, became one of the critical models discarded in the second half of the twentieth century – a marginal modernism. With regard to the “universal Mexican” and all the associated connotations, this archaeology should help us finally to throw it into the trashcan of history.

Translated by Jackie Robinson, with revisions by Robin Adèle Greeley.