A Damn Good Art Review

Latin Art Deathmatch! - Part 1

by Shane Wiggs

Debased by its own redundancy and passive-aggressive relationship with the western tradition, Latin art has, for the most part, become merely political. The same tacky color schemes support recycled Aztec/Inca/Maya symbols, while simultaneously denying the brutality of the hideous, polytheistic, human-sacrificing cultures they conceal. Because we cannot avoid the monocultural deluge, the summer Latin art inundation will be addressed directly here, in a two part series. Blood will be spilled.

Posted on June 7, 2007

What happened to multiculturalism? This annoying PC imposition on American culture used to bring OTHER cultures to areas that didn’t have them…Asian or African art made inroads into major galleries, and museums spent millions revamping their “primitive and aboriginal” collections. And while I have gleefully witnessed the demise of “southwest art,” the new “Latin art” has weaseled it’s way into the spot formerly occupied by the sludge of Santa Fe. Debased by its own redundancy and passive-aggressive relationship with the western tradition, Latin art has, for the most part, become merely political. The same tacky color schemes support recycled Aztec/Inca/Maya symbols, while simultaneously denying the brutality of the hideous, polytheistic, human-sacrificing cultures they conceal. Because we cannot avoid the monocultural deluge, the summer Latin art inundation will be addressed directly here, in a two part series. Blood will be spilled.

Jose Cisneros is a hack… plain and simple. How the hell you can go through a 55-year “career” of drawing people without ever bothering to learn anatomy and the human figure is beyond me. Cisneros work, although historical in nature, is a perfect marriage of ignorance and arrogance. Ignorance in that he never found it necessary to educate himself or attempt anything outside his narrow, unexamined “vision,” and arrogance in never deciding it necessary to challenge himself, change his style, or evolve at all. While there is some passable work (mainly from the 1940’s) in costuming and historical vernacular, one can’t help but wonder about the saccharine, shallow and staged tone of his work. This is amply illustrated in prints and drawings named for friars, Europeans and Mexican historical figures, while the indigenous and native Americans in the same pictures enjoy a condescending anonymity. That crushing silence you hear is the racism no one wants to talk about.

Cisneros was unable to attain the level of virtuosity of the artists he imitated (Durer, Dore and the like…), while simultaneously refusing to loosen up, and free himself into a more modern style. But because there is a large local community dedicated to perpetuating bad art and mutual ass-kissing, this garbage keeps appearing on gallery and museum walls. The El Paso tradition of mediocrity is perpetuated… unquestioned. Thanks for that, EPMA. My favorite aspect of Cisneros work would be the clumsy, out-of -proportion figures, often sporting unintentionally distorted hands, with their backs to the viewer, all of whom seem to have the same waxen faces despite their sex… you know, the hallmarks of an inept artist dealing in figurative work. Another “highlight” of the exhibition are the border portraits, executed in 2004 - these are so bad I actually laughed out loud, and are a testament to the diminishing of what small skill he may have once possessed. I also find it ironic that Cisneros is celebrated for depicting Colonial culture (badly) while John Houser is derided for doing it well. Go figure. Anyway, if you’re interested in seeing someone strangle the joy and wonder out of historical art, as well as lumpy, stiff, amateurish rendering, with rigid, uninspired linework, this show will be hanging until September 30 at the El Paso Museum of Art. It’s comedy at least, even if it wasn’t meant to be.

A stark contrast to the aforementioned atrocity exhibition (thanks Ballard…) is mercifully provided by UTEP’s Rubin Center in “El Maestro Franicisco Toledo: Art from Oaxaca, 1959 – 2006” which will hang until September 22. A true master of many forms, Toledo freely borrows from Western, Latin, and indigenous points of view without becoming imprisoned or limited by them. He neither overuses nor worships any particular culture, and presents us with a completely realized personal vision. The first thing that struck me about this show was the muted palette – earth tones and black and white work that illustrate a conscious deviation from the gaudy “naco-ism” that dominates modern Latin art color schemes. He also uses animals extensively, but doesn’t hit you over the head with tiresome totemic references. One of the best works in the show is called “The Turkey” and is replete with layers of detail, symbol, and value (artistic and metaphoric…). It’s a work that rewards a long stare with humming patterns of emerging meaning and inspires awe at the sheer creativity and detail embedded in the paper. There are small prints and drawings like “Blood and Urine” and “Man Slaughtering Cow” that synchronously attract and repel. It is in works like this that Toledo is able to elicit curiosity, recognition of the familiar, wonder and repulsion. He works in textiles and ceramics as well, and can summon genuine laughter and terror from his audience. “Deer Stew” is a sculpture that manages to do both through crude, yet uncannily accurate form that seems to be screaming out in pain. “The House of Beans” is another ceramic piece that has a toy-like quality, asking to be handled and played with, while protected and overseen by a simplified skeleton. Life and death are at play and at peace. “Skeletons Making Love” invokes this theme, while also pointing to the true reward of debasing oneself with empty sex.

Some of the most satisfying works in the show are culled from a series called “Report to an Academy” and are based on the Franz Kafka story of the same name. Toledo is able to approach this exceptional story from a point of purity, because he sees beauty and truth everywhere - even in the places Latin artists usually heap disdain and condescension… like Western literature. Instead of retreading the tire of cultural resentment, he uses a bike-riding, liquor-drinking monkey as a doorway to self-deprecation and examination.

The prints are jarring and dreamlike, and place the viewer in uncomfortable recognition of animalistic behavior both observed and lived through the fog of drunkenness. He makes you reel through double vision and slurred speech. You can almost feel the hangover. At the same time, sympathy oozes through the images and the pitiful monkey in the prints seems to hold more of ourselves than we might be comfortable with; an edifying quality Kafka would, no doubt, admire.

Go see this show. Now… in fact, go see it twice. There’s stuff I can’t even address here – surprising textures, slinky sexuality, innovative use of materials, creepy moments laden with vermin and insects and humor that reflects life as it should be. The genius of Francisco Toledo lies in his flexibility and refusal to be pigeonholed. It’s a lesson El Paso artists should take to heart.

***
Shane Wiggs will, undoubtedly, lose a friend and several acquaintances over the content of this article. Somehow, this doesn’t phase him. He can be reached by bullhorn.

Latin Art Deathmatch! Part II

by Shane Wiggs

These gangster portraits, while well rendered, are so played it’s ridiculous. I get that he’s trying to show the “beauty” of a people that go largely unnoticed and unexamined, but these are the folks who sell drugs to your kids in school, beat up your friends down the street, tag on your walls, steal your cars, and stab your cousins.

Posted on June 21, 2007

When I went to see Sister Cities: Testing Boundaries at the El Paso Museum of Art I was expecting to see a balanced artistic discussion of border issues. With a few exceptions this show displayed a whining victim mentality that trapped it in mere politics like a moth frozen in amber. What I left with was a pessimistic, heavily skewed propaganda show that could have just as easily been titled Blame Whitey: Why America is the Root of All Evil.

Let’s clear the crap off the field first. There are a few pieces in this show that have no place in either a museum or the bathroom wall of a truck stop in Hooker, Oklahoma. Guadalupe Serrano’s small pornographic collage is the kind of thing we used to laugh off the wall in art school. It appears to be a weak attempt to address the Juarez murders, but succeeds only in debasing this sad story even further. Because it has little to offer in technique or content, shock value is the tired card played here. Unfortunately, my 9 year-old son found this before I did, and was quick to ask me what it was doing in a museum. What, indeed? I was pondering an answer when the Summer Art Camp for Kids ambled by… ouch. I wonder how the tour guide handled that. Next on the B-list would be Adriana Peraldi. Her unexceptional painting “Desert Road” could have come from any number of sad “southwest” galleries. I guess the absence of faces was supposed to separate it from the crowd of bad paintings it emulates. Is this trying to be a profound insight into the struggle of border-crossers? It also has some distracting, irrelevant texture that resembles sausage from a pizza. Last I checked, art wasn’t an equal-opportunity program and artists from Mexico were expected to perform at the same level as anyone else in the world. Finally there’s a piece called “Drowned” by Juan “Jufrago” Gonzalez that is so shoddily constructed that the Situationists would have recommended some touch-up work.

Next is the art that, while competent in technique, is laughably wrongheaded. Gaspar Enriquez is up to the same old tricks in his canonization of the common thug. These gangster portraits, while well rendered, are so played it’s ridiculous. I get that he’s trying to show the “beauty” of a people that go largely unnoticed and unexamined, but these are the folks who sell drugs to your kids in school, beat up your friends down the street, tag on your walls, steal your cars, and stab your cousins. The police blotter and obituaries will remember them better than any crass attempt at martyrdom and lionization. And frankly, I find his use of a social class he transcended cynical in the worst way. Far from drawing our attention to a worthy cause, Enriquez is glorifying an unworthy subject for personal gain and blatant careerism. He’s attempting to do for art what narco-ballads have “done” for Mexican music while slumming for alms. No, really… you shouldn’t have.

Antonio Castro Sr. contributes two paintings. One is amazing in technique, but stultifying in content. It’s called “The Terrorist’s Weapons,” and the brushwork is immaculate… the color and value, perfection. It is then that much more disappointing when one submits this painting’s content to examination. While there’s a little room for interpretation, Castro attempts, through demagoguery, to convince us of at least two ridiculous exercises in spurious logic. First, that artists have somehow been labeled terrorists. Are you kidding me? You’re not as dangerous as you think. Second, the “idea” that the artist is somehow persecuted in this country is patently absurd. Go paint protest art in Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Malaysia, or even Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, and see how long it is before you take a dirt nap. When was the last time anyone was "disappeared" because of their art in the US? The cowardly provocation in this painting represents one of the most disgusting inversions of truth I’ve witnessed in years. Just the fact that this painting hangs in an American museum, far from being an artistic coup, is verification of the profound freedoms afforded by this country. The “boot crushing the face of humanity” from 1984 makes an appearance in his other painting… apparently there’s no well-known Latin American dystopian fiction from which these guys can appropriate images. The reference is just too obvious.

Speaking of the stolen jackboot image, it pops up in the disastrously racist work, “Border Shoes” by University of Arizona professor Alfred Quiroz. Let me first say that if I were to paint the same painting depicting “brown” people in the way he depicts whites, I would be prosecuted for hate crimes. It presupposes that only gringos can be racist, and the same hate coming from hispanics is somehow justified. As a political piece, this painting feebly attempts to address NAFTA and the tense state of border affairs. Also, this painting uses color to get your attention in the same way a clown or streetwalker would. Let’s analyze it using the same tools we might use to dissect Nazi propaganda posters. The first step in any kind of propaganda is to identify the enemy… in this case, white people. The next step is to dehumanize the enemy through caricature or by blending their image with animal, insectoid, or other subhuman features. All the Caucasians in the painting are fools: wearing exaggerated noses, overly pink skin, bulging eyes, tongues hanging out – you know, rednecks, hillbillies and yahoos. And those are the Canadians. There’s only one American in the painting, and he’s a sneering Border Patrol agent. The rest of us are reduced to corporate logos. The Mexicans in the composition are transformed into noble, golden sculptures. They are painted beautifully and sympathetically, raised above the status of mere humans. The crudely rendered Border Patrol agent is using his “fascist jackboot” to trample the face of one of the poor, suffering, eternal Mexicans while he discharges his firearm into another golden SuperMexican. Puh-leez.

Now the good stuff - Mauricio Saenz is to be commended for calling communism what it is… evil and murderous. Reversing the trend of sanctifying criminals in his painting “Abyss Has No End…” he uses images of Latin Communist dictators and revolutionaries walking on the skulls of their victims to bring his point home. It’s refreshing to see Che Guevara portrayed as the homicidal thug he was. Jorge Javier Lopez’ “Relapse” print series is probably the best in the show. It deals with injured, incomplete and sometimes amputated figures and obliquely refers to our fallen, distorted nature. Sometimes scribbled over, the people in Lopez’ compositions painfully persist despite catastrophic deformity and injury. It is art that crosses boundaries and applies to everyone. It’s eternal and echoing. Some of the figures seem genuinely malevolent while others, despite the creepy ambiance, possess a noble hope and perseverance. The tension and irony are truly profound.

There is one piece, though, that perfectly sums up the entire show. Francisco Delgado contributes a sculpture called “Myth vs. Reality,” consisting of a small Lucha ring occupied by two found-object wrestlers. Defeated, and on the mat, is what appears to be a Mexican luchador built of a can of refried beans (a beaner…) and sporting the colors of the Mexican flag. Towering over him is an American with red, white, blue, and olive-drab uniform. The wrestling metaphor works perfectly because everyone knows Lucha is staged, the outcome dramatic and predetermined. Everyone plays their stereotypical roles in iconic fashion. Often the “bad guys” (read: Americans) win so that the underdog can come back for a “righteous” victory next week. People, hypnotized by the idiotic spectacle, suspend disbelief and think of the crass, planned violence as “just entertainment” while their taste, intelligence and character visibly coarsen. Americans are to be ashamed of their success, and pity the hispanics who victimize themselves. Frankly, I am a little embarrassed that someone might get off a plane from Anywhere, USA, go to the museum and see this exhibit urinating on our country. A little balance and less white-guilt could have gone a long way towards saving this show.

* * *

Shane Wiggs will be called a racist for this article (nevermind that Mexico is a country, not a race…). He will get dirty looks at art openings. His son is Hispanic... so there. He can be reached by petroglyph.