Pictorial Eviscerations, Emblems and Self-Immolation in Mexico
Dissensus in the Work of Enrique Guzmán and Nahum B. Zenil
‘The hired applauder, considered by someone as recent as Daumier as an excrescence, has now attained respectability as an official agent of the cultural system.’ Theodor Adorno, ‘Death of Immortality’ (1945)1
‘I must rebel against my submission/and submit myself before my rebelliousness./The stagnant waters watch me fixedly’. José Emilio Pacheco, ‘Status quo’ (1969)
‘Think of the storm that with rain-blast disorders everything into shreds’. José Emilio Pacheco, ‘1968 (III)’ (1969)2
‘He fell to the ground, was kicked, lost his marijuana. Then they put him against the wall with his trousers round his ankles and hands in the air. With a sidelong glance he managed to distinguish the murderous gleam approaching, as the scissors penetrated his hair and moved up to the top of his scalp with their atrocious hissing, destroying his once legendary locks […] Day by day the repression was becoming more brutal and a bayonet could ensure that his entrails would suffer the same fate as his hair.’ Juan Villoro, ‘1969’ (1986)3
‘Reality in Mexico is subversive. This is how things are now. I would go so far as to claim that it isn’t even necessary to adopt a political position on the left. Repression (torture, disappearances, censorship) is deployed so that through the instrument of terror it may be possible to prevent others from speaking of and denouncing what a few had refused to silence. And likewise so that also through intimidation and a sense of insecurity, the so-called agitators of protest rein in their activity. In short, reality on being known becomes denunciation, on being denounced becomes subversion. The repressive measures that have taken place have revealed that the dominant class, at every level, has so much to hide that civil liberties/freedoms instead of being expanded are being reduced.’ Octavio Rodríguez Araujo, ‘Reality is subversive’ (1978)4
‘Art does not turn us into rebels by throwing in our faces the despicable, nor mobilizes us simply by dint of pursuing us outside the museum. Perhaps it can infect us with its critique, not only its indignation, if art disengages itself from the languages that are complicit with the prevailing social order.’ Néstor García ‘What are we Talking about When we Talk of Resistance?’ (2009)5
‘“– Excuse me, Don Alfonso [Reyes, the celebrated writer and luminary] would you mind if I take the liberty of removing my jacket?
– Ye Gods! After the monstrosity that we have just heard, you can defecate on the table if you feel like it”’.
Jaime García Terres, The Theatre of Events (1988)6
‘The Mexican populace like all peoples educated to an exacting ethical standard – today fallen out of fashion – is convinced that the world is made up of goodies and baddies. We are the goodies and the rest are the baddies. The following step in this logic consists in assuming that everything that comes from outside can infect us, or, what is even more serious in Mexican terms, denigrate us. So have come into being a variety of legal instruments serving as the prophylactics of censorship, the operations of which may be unconstitutional, but that spring from the very depth of the Mexican soul, which left to its own devices likes to interfere where it has no business and rub out what it doesn’t like.’ Jorge Ibargüengoitia, ‘An Examination of Patriotic Conscience’ (1974)7
‘I will not renounce the abyss/Nor the tightrope/When I plummet/I fear being injured by the net […]/If you tell me to stop/I will continue to the end […]/Demolitions fortify you’. Marco Antonio Montes de Oca, ‘Retobos’, from Splinters (1973)8
‘But sometimes undulating it descends/Silk Manta ray/carnal flag/living wave […]/I am knocked awake/ a purple gash/cuts the wind’s tail/ the turbulence of exiled flesh boils […]/clearly visible the wounds stitched/ with the white thread trailing behind boats’. Montes de Oca, ‘Journey Around a Pillow’ (1973)9
‘We call on the militant student community and on revolutionary intellectuals to transform schools and workplaces into the frontline of the struggle for the Socialist Revolution. We call on all the population to fight the rich capitalists wherever they may be, to attack their wealth and property and destroy their police-military forces and their exploitative and oppressive system. The duty of every revolutionary is to prosecute the Revolution with weapons in hand: Victory or Death!’ Communiqué from Lucio Cabañas, Party of the Poor, Mountains of the State of Guerrero (March 1973)10
The Poetics of the Razor Blade
In the 1970s, the Mexican painter Enrique Guzmán (1952–1986) turned the disposable razor blade into a personal double-edged emblem that spoke of the self-embedded nature of his pictorial disassembly and desecratory splicing of a conservative image environment and its dogmatic nationalist iconography. The illusionistically rendered Gilette blade, its sheet steel as slice-thin as the promised closest of close shaves, evokes the epidermic proximity of a body of wincing superficiality not always in the frame; a body often represented through truncated extremities, such as the ambivalent clasp of clasped hands compressing flesh on the slit insertion of reciprocated blades in Friendship (1974); or as the series of absented self-portraits in ink and pencil where solitary hand or thumb brandish the eponymous safety razor’s wafer-thin, reflective surface and its seamless cutting double-edges.11 The gestural language of choreographed solidarity, insubordination and subaltern power that Diego Rivera developed in mural narratives and graphic illustration in the 1920s, so ubiquitous a device as to inspire the satirical dislocation of mannequin’s fists and arms in José Clemente Orozco’s The Carnival of Ideologies (1937–38),12 is here, in Guzmán’s figuration, rescaled and segmented into disassembly rather than panel sequencing turning the dramatic body language of epic rebellion into that conceptual ‘double-edge’, the paradox of self-suppressing art. On reflection, the guarantee of the safety razor that its incisions may be trusted to cut but not to wound creates an interestingly equivocal emblem of an artistic practice that while at first seeming to flatter a dangerous facility to sever, slice and puncture, is peculiarly resolved into the nullity of the blunt, disposable blade, a mere symbol of its lost incisions and incisiveness. Therein lies the suspenseful possibility, conveyed by the gravity-defying hovering of blades in his spatial compositions, that the blunted through overuse may be only a simulated inertia reactivated by the scalpel-effect of a self-immolating reflex. So we turn to the fragile contours of the sketchily rendered, kitsch laughing baby and fluffy–bunny pet encircled by the radii of out-sized blades (1973) or the decorous Tehuana substitute of Señora Tehuana (1976) coifed with archetypal ‘Huipil grande’ as she clasps a razor blade as if to pluck an implausible folkloric tune. And then perhaps obediently recoil before the carefully modelled reclining head in profile, Untitled (see Figure 13), the tendons straining on the exposed neck, mouth open, a daintily held blade between thumb and forefinger glimpsed into view as if piercing the frame from above against a celestial blue and, unexpectedly, register the applied scalpel scraped brush strokes in formless textures disfiguring the eyes and forehead, interjecting our vision of the painted gaze. The expectant baring posture seems compliant, prepared for the approaching blade yet our attention is displaced to the effect of an actual rather than imagined contact. The impasto of virulent, overlaying strokes, in a neat inversion, surfaces a subtext of insubordination inflicted on the image by an inferred, much less regulated second hand. The sacrificial and self-mutilating intersect in the preserve of Guzmán’s figurative equivocation on the fine razor line between inconformity and restoration. In Sacrificio (1976), the razor’s countercultural sorties are involuted as its edge, upscaled to resemble a guillotine, protrudes from a proffered neck, the head of the victim resting on a window sill with blood dripping frozen in a tear below. A white flag of surrender and an emasculated agave cactus in a pot allude metonymically to the severing of a pictorial jugular that would have led irrevocably to the Escuela Mexicana de Pintura [Mexican School of Painting], and perhaps, to Orozcos’s own emblem of a foundational cultural castration, the maguey topado (or pruned cactus). Found in an initiatory mural panel evoking conquest and coerced conversion, it appears as a still-life composition beneath the prostrate body of the sacrificed Indian male lying at the feet of Hernan Cortés and his native consort La Malinche (1926, located in the former Escuela Nacional Preparatoria).13 In Guzmán’s painting the familiar trope of the window and exposed casement seen from behind, so that the framework is reversed into view, acknowledge the mimicry of figuration but converted into the site of a gratuitous act of self-inflicted violence. For the conceit of trompe-l’oeil has been excised from the domain of artfulness and inserted into the scenography of its discontents, a caesura manifesting impotence rather than ironic ingenuity. The anti-establishment disfigurations and the anti-painterly practices of collectives in Mexico, with conceptual infractions of civic infrastructure and museum spaces, articulated provocations at odds with reputable canvas, art school diplomas and an aesthete’s realism, leaving Guzmán to unfurl his self-negating emblems and icons in a knowingly discredited currency. And if the razor blade may be the instrument of choice of the cutting and pasting, splicing and dissective techniques of the iconoclasts of fine art’s superfluities, perhaps the pictorial assimilation of such an eviscerating aggressor in Guzmán’s series of subtractive self-portraits (in pencil and ink) may be understood as complicitous rather than as a prelude to a wounded victimhood.14 For example, the Promethean hand as transformative utensil of homo faber, the limb denoting technical mastery and metaphysical grace, encountered in Albrecht Dürer’s hyper-naturalistic sketches of hands in grasping and gestural poses, provides a meta-pictorial counterpoint for Guzmán’s line drawing Hand with Flag and Blade (1976). Here the consecrated trinity of figurative art, nationalism and defensive violence acquires a self-parodying irony. The irregularly scaled emblems defy their naturalistic rendering and the drawing hand, the active principle, is stilled and objectified – appearing, in its dismembered state, rather more like a prosthetic appurtenance. Such disabused juxtapositions may appear unsurprising in the discrepant artistic environment in the aftermath of the 1968 Tlatelolco Massacre and the intensifying repression and neutering of the media that ensued, but its derision is tacit and calibrated.15
We find the precedent for this evocation of a facile and self-congratulatory art co-opted by the State in Guzmán’s painting Sound of a Hand Clapping or Wounded Marmot (see Figure 14), where two pairs of applauding hands of a compliant (art) establishment (alongside frankly sycophantic smiling heads) are pictured so as to resemble, with calculated ambiguity, the praying gesture of the worshipful. The hollow resonance of such ingratiating art-making is matched by other emblems of flaccid or diminished power providing a wallpaper pattern at once inanely decorative and well-mannered, as well as surreptitiously scatological and obscene. The Mexican National Flag (or Tricolor) folded limply on its mast is picked up in a repeated, diminutive motif. Equally miniaturized penises create a parallel line of unassuming display. The paradigmatic trompe-l’oeil object, the square of blank paper pinned to canvas often carrying the artist’s signature, in Guzmán’s flattened composition provides a fringe of small, illusionistic shapes showing indecipherable, blurred marks on their white surfaces. A sequence of lurid red tongues neatly rendered, each with the perforation used for hanging ex-votos of limbs and organs in commemorative altars, turns their potential branding of irreverence into something incongruously demure and obsequious. The vivisected body of a hare-like creature, sliced belly with entrails exposed, extending its limbs in a crucified pose occupies the centre with furred sexual orifice visibly splayed. Between the clapping hands, the disturbing anthropomorphism of kitchen still lifes with hanging, eviscerated game reflects obliquely not only on Christian sacrifice and punishment but also on carnality (both rabbit and hare imagery being traditionally associated with lasciviousness).16 The flesh of this quintessential victim of violence, the wounded persecuted animal, has been unfurled and its cadaverous blue entrails re-arranged decorously as pleasing pattern and form, conflating its status as a memento mori and bibelot artefact. If Dürer’s iconic hare exemplifies an unsurpassed lifelikeness, in Guzmán’s painting it is this very lifelikeness of art that is made captive and eviscerated in an act of sardonic and unpalatable consumption. How much more stilled and deathly for being the body of an animal glimpsed for speed and evanescence. Guzmán’s penned quarry opens a view onto his peculiarly dyspeptic devotion to a cult of painting fixated by its own iconicity: as Carlos Monsiváis observed of Guzmán’s inclination to subvert his non-conformist art-making: ‘someone so far removed from all conventionalism in art still believed it to be sacrosanct’ (2004, 8). Of course to call a hare by another name is to reveal the inadequacy of the resemblance, to expose the grain of the self-deprecating pastiche: a marmota does not have the art historical pedigree of a hare, it is a poor equivalent and a tellingly inferior execution. Can one read these entrails as shamans of old (or Josef Beuys) reviewed the palpitating innards of tribal familiars? Surrounded as it is by decontextualized emblems, the dead animal congregates the conventional signs (flags, roses, doves) with the disjecta that exceed their meaningful plasticity yet which invite, through the physical disclosure of the wound, a deeper scrutiny and perplexity.
Guzmán’s exhibitionary autodestrucción [self-destruction] traverses a commonly held ground of meta-subversive practices in creative media that turned provocation into burlesque and self-parody, that included cells such as Roberto Bolaño’s vandalic Infrarrealistas (1973–76) and the self-annihilating mock nihilism of No grupo (1977), a parodic guerrilla who targeted the solemnity of engagé artist collectives.17 His attachment to the razor blade in painting only simulates the inertia of the emblem, for it intersects with multiple fronts of non-conformist art and performance implicating the body as site of pain, injury, substance abuse and protest that radicalize the stillness of his compositions. From reflexive still lifes such as Alternativa 2 (1977), where it peers from a blank fold of paper in a glass jar, to the transfixed mannequin against a transversed wall impaled by protruding blades of El melancólico (1977), the object acquires a less enigmatic versatility for example when it is reprised in the widely referenced wounding and incising actions of the founder of body art Gina Pane from 1970 to 1976. Pane resorted to photographic stills in black-and-white and in colour, using the graphic supports of scrapbook, grid or contact sheet, for a posthumous visualization of her self-infractions.18 This vein of artistry based on the affects of literal mutilation and the commingling of blood-letting (through the use of a razor blade) as symbol, trace and technique sought to suture the biological, the psychological and the social by affronting the spectator through the directed spectacle of the wound. Works such as Blessure théorique (1970), Azione sentimentale (1973), Action mélancolique 2 x 2 x 2 (1974) and Action Le Corps pressenti (1975) incorporated gestures of self-mutilation in the history of art, such as that of Van Gogh, as a tribute to an estranged and yet aggressively invested practice of image-making predicated on a disassociated individualism. If we turn to Guzmán’s Pacto de sangre (1975), the instrument of self-expression and the instrument of torture are one and the same. The title here alludes to a lexicon of negotiation, adhesion and complicity that is frequently disarticulated from the vantage point of the empty zones and insular figures of his disjunct scenarios, cleft frames and black mirrors, and the transubstantiated interior landscapes (see Interior Landscape, 1975) that posit elsewhere as structures of visual entrapment and marooning (see Platform with Signal, 1975). The pact in this painting seems sealed by a self-destructive pledge: grasping hands align in close-up with the fingers interlaced over biro pen and razor resting on the white paper presumably to collect the signature in blood. The overlaying hand is marked by a sharp bleeding cut on skin obtruding into the central viewing punctum of the frame. These penetrating, puncturing implements, grasped so as to turn their points of contact inwards while enacting a haptic moment, serve to belie what is evidenced, to undo the relational act emblematized on canvas and turn it into a mordant undercutting of its symbolic code of communication (reverentially associated with victimhood and transcendence that Guzmán had thematized in Estigma [1974]). This curtailing of signifying agency through a suppressive design that deflates the potency of the body language represents Guzmán’s deployment of self-defeating processes as a form of ‘selfless’ dissent and de-consecration.
¡Oh Santa Bandera!: Civic Decorum, Disrespect and Dissensus
A recurrent preoccupation in Guzmán’s work during the years that witnessed the Dirty War, guerrilla activism and sabotage (Lucio Cabañas [1936–74] and the Party of the Poor)19 and the emergence of gay20 and feminist militancy in Mexico, was the reconfiguring of the symbol of state nationalism and patriotic fervour, ‘Oh Holy Flag!’. Distressing its immutable verities, Guzmán relocated it within the unstable territory of his painting, alongside an eccentric mythology of revolutionary relics, dismemberment, popular replicas and self-absenting portraiture that figuratively defiled and soiled without actually attacking the material integrity of the painting as object of the specular gaze and curatorial regimes. In La patria (see Figure 15) he transgresses a conventional patriotic still life, replacing the national coat of arms in the centre with the yawning cavity of a mouth stretched into a wordless shout. Rather than the well-rehearsed defiance of the anthem or the ritual ‘Grito’/’Shout’ of the insurgent Padre Hidalgo performed at celebrations of Mexican independence, the painting commemorates the deadly fixations of an official populism disinclined to respect the freedom of speech of its people. A discarded brogue-like shoe, redolent of the officious clerks of capitalism and of bourgeois respectability, holds the balance of power in the composition, treading down the white square of cloth within an inch of the gaping mouth in lieu of a paper weight. A commemorative rose positioned so as to absorb the blood red square on the flag seems to speak a language of remembrance and disenchantment.
We live in indecorous times and it is worth being reminded of the decorum, deference and ceremony that prevailed in Mexican political and civic life, the ossified pageantry and longevity of which was memorably satirized by writers such as Carlos Monsiváis and Jorge Ibargüengoitia, along with multimedia artists such as Felipe Ehrenberg, Alejandro Jodorowsky and Helen Escobedo.21 It is important to acknowledge the extent to which the prerogatives of these official symbols of nationhood and collective identity, and of the ceremonies in which they were paraded and venerated, were and are enshrined in laws that protect the inviolate appearance of patriotic symbols such as the flag and the national anthem.22 It is interesting to note that despite the existing regulations to standardize uses and properties of the national flag, it increased in size and ubiquity in public spaces as the crisis of the one party state under the PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional) and the discrediting of official nationalism deepened in the 1990s. The Monumental Flag programme was inaugurated in Mexico City in 1999 by presidential decree and then spread countrywide. Administered by the Ministry of National Defence this amounted to a campaign to renationalize symbolic spaces of cultural power in the mass-mediatic age with flagpoles reaching 50 metres and flag dimensions ballooning to over 14 metres in height. With this degree of vigilance and prohibition centred on the national emblem, the bellicose lyrics of the anthem and the etiquette of spectating, irreverence can readily turn into a criminal act with overtones of treason. From this presumption of wrongdoing to sabotage of the nation state is an easy extrapolation to make in relation to even the most taciturn yoking of such references to dissent as in the case of Guzmán’s derisory flag-waving. In Patriotic Day (1978), the bisected picture plane reflects on one side a framed classic landscape of transparent blue sky and unmatched luminosity seen through a circular inset, while on the other, outside the pictured frame an ashen-hued tree and makeshift hut in sullied cobalt speak of a fall from the Mexicanist sublime. A long-stemmed flag cuts across the panoramic view of the central valley of Mexico reminiscent in both style and eagle-eyed perspective of José María Velasco’s foundational geographies, large-scale illusionistic works exhibited in salons and international fairs during Porfirio Díaz’s nation-building dictatorship. Velasco’s awe-inspiring vistas had become synonymous with the idea of a pictorial heritage of splendid monumentality even as the terrain it idealized in the late nineteenth century was disappearing under the urban sprawl.23 While not flying at half-mast as the funereal drop in iconic value might suggest, the cloth sports the tell-tale shoe on white ground where the prophetic symbols of Empire should be, the eagle on a cactus gripping a snake with its talons signalling the site of a prophesied Aztec homeland. The valedictory irony of this painting encompasses the pathway of the figurative in the Mexican tradition, as if Guzmán’s return to a painterly tradition was itself a threshold to spectrality, to a deracinated and irrecuperable site of foundation.
As we have seen, Guzmán’s figurative art-making, through careful excisions and re-assembly of segments, slices at the surface of its semblance and rescales the constrictions of his own picture library (full of readymade images and conventional icons). His hyper-framed works, with casements, panels, edges, trompe-l’oeil partitions and underscored contours seem to point to a closed world of pictorial objects and their margins – but the displacements of things in his paintings often yield to the lure of desecratory appropriations, tacitly irreverent yet well-presented in the stultifying decorum of the public picture frame. While retaining faith in the capacity of the figurative as a strategy of ironic and dissective inscription in a contemporaneity marked by state terror, censorship and the radicalization of art practices influenced by Fluxus, Arte Povera and non-conventional media, Guzmán gained notoriety not through his painterly insolence but through an act of seemingly spontaneous vandalism that sought to sabotage the operations of the cultural institutions controlling awards, exhibitions and the politics of visibility in the arts.
In 1978, Guzmán attacked and sought to destroy the winning entry by artist Beatriz Zamora (b. 1935) at the awards ceremony held in the Palace of Fine Arts before assembled media, critics and cultural bureaucrats. The large monochrome painting with an abstract expressionist texture that Zamora was to perfect and execute in a continuous series of black canvases for the next four decades absorbed his assault (wielding a fire extinguisher) with little damage to its coarse-grained surface.24 Guzmán used the ensuing fracas at this Salon of National Painting (SNP), in which he was arrested and publicly berated by art historian Raquel Tibol, to make known through the media the contestatory agenda behind what he defended as a ‘lucid’ act of sabotage against work that he claimed was both cynically derivative and instrumentalized.25 The apparently frenzied performance elaborated on Guzmán’s contrarian defence of creative disaffection from within what he upheld as the exacting labour of figuration. It made explicit his opposition to deferential and retrograde mimicry of non-figurative ‘high art’ in a prevailing international, New York-based style that offered portentous solemnity without content or engagement. Although his incursion was roundly demonized and ridiculed, it is worth remembering that it was part of a wider phenomenon of insubordination in 1978 against the state-funded art establishment’s political ties and lack of independence, as charted in the press of the period: the alleged corruption and ineptitude of judges behind exhibition selections, patronage and awards had been the source of vocal protests by artists and art historians (including Raquel Tibol).26 Compared to the no less implosive interventions based on his style of subtractive exposure in Patriotic Symbols (1973), The Swallows Escape to Switzerland (1977), La patria (1977) and ¡Oh Santa Bandera! (1977), Guzmán’s action (rather than act) in the gallery seemed out of artistic character with its dramatic and overt testimony and its affirmative self-daubing. Yet it served to reinstate, through the collateral damage to his reputation, the necessarily self-inflicted destruction prescribed by the Devil’s pact with an aesthetic co-opted by a hegemonic cultural nationalism. It vindicated the self-immolating pact Guzmán had visualized, his compromising espousal of ‘the art of killing art’ in Marco Antonio Montes de Oca’s line from his poem about a new sentience ‘The Art of the Deaf and Dumb’ of 1973 (17–20):
The art of inverting everything/The art that erases the blank page/The art of reading the entrails of an eviscerated female python/uninhabited and taciturn art/The art that lives cursing history.
The possibility of a self-defeating and misguided act provides a disposable aura of menace to the exhibition of his paintings, presaging an indiscipline apparently at odds with the formal finish of his works. In 1983, in his guise as unfaithful disciple of figurative art, Guzmán slashed with a cutter his own mise-en-abyme painting Well-known Young Lady of the Club, the Arrival of Happiness Having Its Picture Taken with a Parasol (1973) while it was being shown in the art gallery of the Casa de la Cultura of Aguascalientes, sealing his reputation for self-arresting development. The many anchored ships and empty perfume or medicine bottles portrayed in his work provide a poeticization of becalmed vanguards, evocative of an art aware of its superfluity where image is a shade of a shadow, like the imperceptible olfactory memory clinging to an empty vessel used to contain masking or suppressing infusions. If this constitutes Guzmán’s self-sabotage it can only be so in the most diffuse mimicry of the contemporary instances of political acts of sabotage, predicated on violent action, against a social order and government taken to be illegitimate and oppressive. In pressing the analogy further it yields a troubling equidistance, pointing to the two sides of the coin that Guzmán liked to flip literally in pictorial close-ups. Assaults, the aim of which is to disrupt and destroy the operations or symbolic sites of power, presume an adversarial engagement based on irreducible polarities. While bent on pure negation such tactics of sabotage rather than effecting the rupture so urgently desired, enact a retaliatory dependence that interpenetrates fatally the enemy of the state and the defenders of the system. Not only two-sided but also duplicitous, the only exit from this paradoxical two-way street, in which subversion perpetuates the subordination it is intended to overcome, seems to reside in the zone of utter indeterminacy, placing a death wish at the centre of figurative art. As to whether an act of mutilation that is self-destructive can be made interchangeable with the terminology of subversive guerrilla movements without a qualifying irony or ethical scruple, remains a pressing question since its violations register a comparatively harmless sort of harm and require a different kind of courage in confronting public opinion and authority. In Montes de Oca’s consoling poetic vision of generational rebellion (in the wake of the repression of the student movement of 1968) the sullen human meteor falls but does not extinguish his spirit of contradiction and disobedience ending on the axiomatic promise ‘Demolitions fortify you’. Against this optimistic re-pledging of resistance it is not at all clear whether Guzmán’s deconstructions, his disrespect, can be regarded as a successful strategy of counter-demolition resistant to the coercive ideology of the nation state whose signage he so overtly interjected in the cultural domain. It seems that Guzmán was exercised by the unbridgeable lack of consequence of an iconoclasm operating within a reflexive and merely tautological pictorial frame.
Guzmán’s conflictual relation with the canvas, art institutions, masculinity, representational traditions and posterity had a reflexive dimension that resonated as a polymorphous insurrectionary attitude beyond the poetics of the razor blade and the pictorial gestures of self-harm that culminated in the destruction of part of his own corpus in a bonfire in 1983 and finally in his suicide in 1986. The bayonet-sharp mast of Guzmán’s Oh Holy Flag! (see Figure 16) offers his acerbic tribute to the national flag and its power of seduction and mystique of sacrifice in the aftermath of the 1968 massacre by armed troops that had ushered in a militarization of surveillance and counterinsurgency. He toyed with its corporeal overtones through the transposition of the open-mouthed visage device as an alternative coat of arms with a homoerotic potential that was to be exploited by a key artist of post-modern Neomexicanismo, Nahum B. Zenil (b. 1947). The implicit carnality of the national flag had been amplified into grandiloquence by muralist Jorge González Camarena’s Allegory of the Patria (1962), the celebrated long-serving cover design for the textbooks of the National Commission of Free Books.27 In this canonical work of pedagogic illustration, González Camarena reprises the embodiment of the nation found in the academic painting by Petronilo Monroy in which the 1857 liberal constitution was personified in female form (1869), to vindicate an equally anthemic vision of popular education as the guarantor of unity and sovereignty.28 Holding a large, billowing flag in one hand and an open book in the other, the dark-skinned woman stares proudly forwards in a composition of unmitigated banality. It is against this civic image environment that Guzmán’s scatological Miraculous Image (1974) acquires its putrid efficacy and secures its afterlife in the neo-figurative trends of the late 1980s. With its monochrome folded flag, levitating WC of immaculate conception and blessing hands, the painting vies to evacuate sacrality from a frame in which a disembodied Christ-figure cut-out, in floodlit celestial radiance, shares the foreground with the blank oval of a no less generic emblem, the raised toilet lid.
Artist and gay rights’ activist Nahum B. Zenil sought to texture affinities with Guzmán through self-referential, cross-dressing and progressively explicit if ludic homoerotic desecration – of religiosity, chauvinism and masculinist rituals – in the context of the rampant Neoliberalism of the 1990s and the identitarian crisis prompted by the discourse of desnacionalización within a still undemocratic, homophobic one party state.29 Zenil’s early interrogation of self and pre-packaged pictorial identities played on the ‘En busca/Se busca’ [In search of/Wanted] (1992) of sought and prescribed elements which, as in Guzmán, turned on a preoccupation with figuration’s cannibalistic practices, dwelling on social masquerades and acts of aesthetic estrangement and personal negation/denigration.30 Its overt performativity overstated deliberately the implicit subversion of Guzmán’s self-effacing compositions. The narcissistic turn in his self-representation, understood as a measure of artistic ingenuity with allusions to the conceit-prone colonial baroque, Casta paintings’ racial typologies and the circus freak show, was acknowledged in the title of his exhibition The Invention of Narcissus (2002).31 In the title of another work Y el ver… dugo? (1993) Guzmán coined a Joycean neologism that twinned seeing (ver) with a form of execution (verdugo or ‘executioner’) – a punitive act of sanctioned violence that implicated representation as a categorizing tool of identification and exhibition with sadistic, authoritarian overtones. In Game of Darts (see Figure 17), Zenil portrays (on wood) with emphatic frontality his nude self as the target in a competitive game.32 His body splayed in an x formation substitutes the ideally proportioned Vitruvian man of the Western art canon, occupying the centre of a large tricolour bulls-eye anticipating the wounding gaze of spectators in a ritual of homophobic denigration. In In the Zócalo in Front of the National Palace (1992), Zenil donned the politicized body language of Diego Rivera’s imagery of proletarian marches and scenes of solidarity from mural narratives in the National Palace and the Ministry of Education, their radicalism neutered by institutionalization, to impersonate the protesting crowd with multiple self-portraits of Zenil as the prototypical engaged artist in workers’ overalls holding up a banner calling not for Marxist revolution but for something perhaps less utopian but as challenging in the Mexican context: ‘Respect For Human Rights’ as the manifesto of civil plurality and equality.33 The carefully crafted and self-parodying phallocentricity of his paintings in the late 1990s and his prominent support for campaigning events such as the Semana Cultural Gay (which used his paintings on publicity posters) prepared the way for the themed mixed media exhibition in the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City, The Great Circus of the World (1999).34
The design of the installation, combining retro fairground, puppet theatre and wrestling arena, and which included labial and other suggestive openings through which the spectator was obliged to penetrate as part of the tour, emphasized the guilty pleasures of voyeurism and consumption, of violent entertainment and sensational spectacles. It synthesized the gratification of the museum flâneur or habitué with the less elevated popular distractions and appetites of the masses, placing the artist persona in a risible Grand Guignol construction of national myths and symbols (not excluding the biggest myth in the room, namely that of a uniquely Mexican art).35 Making good on the vernacular of the scurrilous and inane within the Modern Art Museum’s architecture of modernistic good taste, Zenil reminded the academy how impolite and indecent figurative realism could be when courting the discreditable vote. The exhibition unabashedly insinuated the prevalence of homoerotic desire within the scenography of cultural nationalism.36 Zenil orchestrated risqué and carnivalesque appropriations of sacrosanct imagery through painting imbued with a knowing archival patina typical of the polished anachronism of his technique.37 He thereby both affronted and embodied an aesthetic tradition predicated on difference rather than impersonality. If bodily indiscretion was the recurrent gag of the farcical environment he created for the art museum, the painting Eye Contact (1998) exemplified its scatological humour. The one-eyed Zenil peers from his foreshortened unbuttoned fly directly at the viewer as if his tumescent stare was an overture for a sexual arousal if not a palpable encounter. Interspersed within an installation display that made use of actual intervened objects (mostly domestic furniture) was a notable and still controversial take on Guzmán’s countercultural ¡Oh Santa Bandera!, an artistic heirloom of a more disturbing genealogy than even the Buñuelesque recreation of the Last Supper on show. Zenil’s homage took the form of a vertical or inverted triptych, ¡Oh Santa Bandera! (a Enrique Guzmán) (see Figure 18), which perpetrated a sadomasochistic manoeuvre with a fetishized object intended to exploit the fear of homoerotic contagion. The artist portrays himself in a full-length nude as a contortionist whose anal orifice provides the support for a stately flagpole in all its pompous scale and phallic glory. From its elevation the national flag hangs limply rather than with heraldic symbols dutifully displayed as envisaged by the towering flag masts that began to be erected in landmarks to compete with the espectaculares or huge advertising hoardings dominating the capital’s skyline.
The lavatorial referencing of the body and its profane humours in the works on show made ribald use of what in Guzmán had been the allusive and decontextualized but equally provocative deployment of Duchamp-inspired ‘excusados’ or WCs in works such as Daddy’s Advice (1971) and Miraculous Image (1974) which perpetrated offenses against patriarchy. In Guzmán’s intervened iconicity, the emblems of discreet hygiene (for processing the expelled and the impure) are rendered with finely observed, undeluded realism, yet volatilized so as to join the realm of transcendent purities. If implied fecal matter can be as potent a repellent as defecating in public can serve a political or aesthetic protest, then Guzmán’s sanitized toilets are designed to offend hypocritical morality rather than transgress the boundaries of the permissible. Conversely, by introducing a full-frontal self-referentiality, Zenil dispels euphemism in favour of a face-off with the ever-present inferred spectator without repudiating the emetic uses of such art for expelling bigotry from public life.
If the untouchable homosexual is remembered in Man with Condom (1994), in which a giant prophylactic sheaths the naked Zenil from head to toe like transparent full-body armour, then Circus Character (1997) exposes a further degree of complaisant abjection, with the artist look-alike sat disconsolately on the toilet facing the public in an unflatteringly intimate representation that leaves little to even the most prurient imagination or kitchen-sink aesthetic. The dissensual tension of contraries that animates the inertia and depersonalization of Guzmán’s still painting becomes in Zenil’s work a simplified political dissensuality that is non-consumable but also non-transferable in its physiognomic determinism. The exhibition nevertheless perpetrated a less expected immolation by devaluing the very Neo-Mexicanist currency in which his work had been traded internationally and most especially across the border.38 His illusionistic landscape with a stitched vagina in the higher register where conventionally a bucolic epiphany might be effected (Forbidden Zone, 1998) and his blown up studies of the male and female genitalia in lieu of sanctimonious portraits of progenitors, Portraits of Mum and Dad (1999), put paid to the easily trivialized erotic masquerades and transvestitism that had made his reputation, agitating for a rather more disreputable niche.
In August 2000, Zenil hosted a burlesque act of collective indecency in his religiously themed home, full of Catholic paraphernalia. The mock orgy under the punning title Tras–eros [Erotic Behinds]: Homage to Buttocks. United Cheeks Against Censorship, featured a sadomasochistic performance which urged the public to do the unthinkable and defile the buttocks of a woman artist before assembled journalists and photographers.39 The political expediency of nakedness had been memorably enacted by striking miners in Pachuca, Hidalgo in 1985 during which they kept the characteristic implements of their labour (including helmets and boots) while baring their scandal-inducing bodies in a protest captured by photojournalist Pedro Valtierra. These violations of public decorum although clearly not equivalent share a faith in the viability of symbolic capital in the mediatized terrain of the everyday. This performative supplement in Zenil emerged even as the theme of self-immolation gained ground in his painting. Persistently developed within the iconography of martyrdom and transfiguration that he admired in Frida Kahlo, it acquires explicitly suicidal overtures to Guzmán with works such as Suicida I (a Enrique Guzmán) (1995) and Suicida II (a Enrique Guzmán) (1997). By acknowledging an insufficiency, a formal inadequation between consequences and intentions in art, Zenil seems to have disowned the impersonations of relational pacts of his earlier paintings where popular emblems assisted in creating the deceptively companionable and consoling dwelling-place of the canvas. The dispersal of any kind of esprit de corps that might be assuaged by the fictitious communality of emblems such as the flag introduces a perplexity for the representational process of vandalizing the symbols of authoritarianism. For it turns the trope of internecine conflict, of a country or society at war with itself, into something akin to an internal bleeding for art, undetected but haemorrhaging its vigour.
The 2013 collective exhibition Los irrespetuosos [The Disrespectful Ones] held in the prestigious Carrillo Gil Museum of Art (MACG) in Mexico City (curated by Carlos Palacios) comprised mostly non-pictorial works that sought to challenge art historical establishments, museum spectatorship and the normative styles of the contemporary art market.40 While the organizers adopted Guzmán’s self-lacerating razor blade as the rebellious emblem of choice for the cover of the exhibition pamphlet, its redeployment may have inadvertently confirmed its disposable applications, turning it into a neutered retro trophy. Recycled within an obtrusively tamed and scaled down terminology of disenchantment, insolent play and reflexive critique that recalled the well-tried derisions and infringements of the 1970s to the 1990s but divested of political controversy and existential urgency, its equivocal edges usually seen in Guzmán’s paintings from oblique or angled purchases, had been flattened by the cover design into a brand icon (with unconvincing punk associations) in keeping with the theme of adolescent rebellion as a reproducible act rather than a condition. The curatorial text alludes ineluctably to cynicism, parody and scorn as shared traits behind the defiance and feigned indifference of most of the exhibits which are described as not concerned with radical supplanting but with a sarcastic occupation of the infrastructure of vanguardist projects. In this context of disingenuous play with the legacy of one’s elders and betters (the curator cites Alfonso Reyes, prepared to exchange seniority to be the butt of a new generations’ mockery [Palacios 2013, 4]), Guzmán comes to symbolize failure as the only truly connective finality of art.41
This chapter has discussed the transgressive or risk-taking playfulness of Guzmán and Zenil’s figurations which they supplemented with acts of subversion and inconformity through which their own aesthetic separateness and integrity were undone publicly. By contrast the sardonically low-key and disbelieving provocations of Los irrespetuosos at the MACG are pitched so as to appear self-servingly evasive and opaquely defiant – as if the embarrassment of conviction, even of a self-destructive kind, could not be countenanced seriously within the precinct of non-figurative art-making’s globalized discontent and recursive ironies. On the more wryly retro end of the agents provocateurs convened in the gallery we find Óscar Cueto’s I Love Contemporary Art (2008), a panel series in oil portraying scenes of erotic gratification through the handling and ogling of glossy art monographs with prurient titles such as ‘ART NOW’. The avid young collector’s dirty secrets are exposed in a figurative style: treated as sex toys and cult objects in the privacy of the home, we see them being looked at, hugged, licked with the arousal culminating in the open book being penetrated by a full frontal erection, followed by a genuflexion scene in which the image icon on the page is kissed. Iván Argote opts, in another, perhaps lacklustre twist on graffiti rebellion, for the gallery drama afforded by spray can ‘retouchings’ of classic works of modern art, interventions caught on video in real time (see Retouch 2008). It is by turning away from comparable platitudinous disrespect to the work of Ilán Lieberman (b. 1969), which painstakingly dissects internet archives, video and photographs in Mexican print media, slowing down the process of representation through his drawing and re-installation, that Guzmán’s meticulously executed eviscerations of emblems and Zenil’s arduous infractions of heteronormativity may be understood as prosceniums for heterodox viewing; viewing that disowns its objects so as to register beyond the frame the blinded facility of a contemporary regime of image saturation.42 In ‘Mexicans arise in battle cry’ (2007–2009), which borrowed its title from the lyrics of the national anthem, Lieberman devised a video animation based on the daily ceremony in honour of the national flag held in state primary schools. He created a montage of still photographs of disappeared children in which the mouths dutifully sing the patriotic rhetoric while making faces; the spontaneous shots of the individual children used after their abduction for purposes of identification provide, when animated together, a wide gamut of grimaces and expressions. This lip-synching to the lyrics which the artist described as ‘an archive of mouths’ (Lieberman 2010, 19) is not dissimilar in its visual conceit to Guzmán’s visceral scream in the central panel of his defaced flags in the 1970s. By superimposing the mouths of the disappeared on the voices of primary school children, the animated composite resurfaces the subtracted life and gives the living a flavour of the posthumous, making speechless the song, and voicing the wordless. There is an apt precariousness in this metaphorical presentation of long-lost children, of art silencing its own proficiency in fixing fugitive moments, resisting, as perhaps Jacques Rancière would have it, its own tendency to supplant resistance (2013, 183).
Coda: ‘The same indocile innocence’43
In 1978 the poems of José Emilio Pacheco on the theme of childhood inspired Vicente Rojo’s series of serigraphs Jardín de niños [Kindergarten] with collaged and pop-up elements and flaps that created a palimpsest effect of doodles, handwritten pages, diagrams and childish daubs, combining a highly elaborate construction where the learned and the spontaneous intersected, and random and directed effects alternated. The stilled rebelliousness of youth in Pacheco’s poem, ‘Reading Primer’ provides a fitting epitaph for the breakage within the ancestral house of art that Guzmán and Zenil perpetrated with both deliberate deceptions and unwitting betrayals. Always knowing that with every stroke he takes possession of something not only irreversibly inhabited by previous disorderly children but also, inescapably, the place where ageing is more acutely present than living, a place where precocity turns into premature ejaculation: ‘The child breaks all the things of THE HOUSE./He wants to take over THE HOUSE./He breaks all the old things that are in THE HOUSE./The child represents THE new LIFE./THE new LIFE is condemned to become THE old LIFE./One day he will become like the old things that are in THE HOUSE’. The prevalence of the still-life effect in Guzmán’s output is more credibly a testament to its eloquent inaction when translated back to his native terminology, naturaleza muerta/dead nature, for as his partial eviscerations insist nothing is quite so un-lifelike than the appearance of living in art.
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