The CCA ARTS REVIEW

THE SELLING OF AN ARTISTIC IDENTITY

or the branding and selling of Latinx art

by Fredi Lopez 

Exciting for a brief moment

In the summer of 2016 on the way to Lollapalooza with some friends, we just happened to stumble upon a museum that was named the National Museum of Mexican Art. Since we’re all of Mexican descent, we were pretty ecstatic about finding a museum just for us. I grew up in Madison, Wisconsin where the only comparable institution was the Hispanic Center. And that wasn’t specifically meant for the arts but rather just a nice, general community meeting place. While I don’t remember the exhibition that was up at the time, it was most likely, Estampas de la Raza: Contemporary Prints from the Romo Collection, a supposedly comprehensive exhibition of post-1960 Mexican-American printmaking. While my memory of the exhibition seems to have blurred in a post-music festival high, I do remember feeling excited and gratified in exploring the museum’s collection.

The National Museum of Mexican Art is best known for hosting works from major artists like David Alfaro Siqueiros, Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and Frida Kahlo, as well as hosting an annual Day of the Dead festival. Founded by Carlos Tortoleron in 1982, the museum is dedicated to Mexican art and servin the growing immigrant Mexican community. Though I might be critical of institutions like this, in some sense we can’t live without them; they come to life when there is simply little or no representation. The problem is that they get stuck in a mindset that doesn’t adjust to a changing cultural landscape.

These two again

I should also explain that I was a 16-years old and a junior in high school; I had only just begun to get a sense of the larger world, both politically and culturally. Only after high school did I begin to understand how artists of color navigate a White dominated art world, which is why at the age of 16 The National Museum of Mexican Art seemed like, at least to me, the pinnacle of all Mexican art.

What I’m questioning is how these founding institutions and the types of exhibitions they’ve produced continue to push the same ideas of representation over and over again. For instance, the 1980’s Chicano Art and Resistance and Affirmation exhibition (CARA) brought Latinx art to the masses through respectable institutions like UCLA and SFMOMA. They also brought, and maybe they were necessary at the time, overarching labels that show little sense or regard to California’s diverse and evolving Latinx culture. Exhibitions like CARA focus and rely on an identity politics that seem mired in the past, little more than propaganda, and stuck in an aesthetic iconography from the 90’s. The strategies of these early exhibitions are only effective as an opening gambit. As an ongoing ideal, they are sorely lacking.

A Crucial Moment

Art critic William Wilson’s “Chicano Show Mixes Advocacy, Aesthetics” describes this one-sided lackluster approach as “a traumatic disjuncture between the intellectual and generalizing mind-set of the social historian and artist. Even when the artist consciously shares the intellectual’s goals, his creative product and its scholarly rational repel each another like magnets turned the wrong way” (Los Angeles Times). At the time this exhibition was actually engaged in the politics of representation because there was so little representation, but Wilson’s right; the obvious iconography, the cultural assumptions, and the scope is too broad to really matter. Again, it feels more like propaganda than art, and lackluster propaganda at that.

As a result, cultural “Chicano only” show a kind of intimate and one-sided sharing of a prefabricated experience, with no regard towards a larger audience, real latinx people, and life as it’s actually lived. Instead, the viewer is greeted with stereotypes of Chicanx culture: reliance on cholo, catholic and mural aesthetics. While it's true that murals are rooted in Latinx cultural identity; they just become flat and uninteresting when they become representative of everything.

It got everyone together, but was this everyone?

Given the era of the 90’s CARA did good work criticizing how we view contemporary art and how white dominated it was and still is. In response to William Wilson’s harsh critique, Maria Acosta-Colon’s Chicano Art: It’s Time for a New Aesthetic posits that CARA “is a phenomenon of Euro-American art criticism that dictates that art must be divorced from its social context and must be ‘universal.’” (Los Angeles Times) We might say that the exhibition’s politics are a 90’s depiction of the unique cultural experience of Chicanes during the 60’s and 70’s. In the 70’s the Chicanx experience was new, and the idea of being Mexican American (Chicano) was only just becoming more integrated into the mainstream. So, in representing that experience, Latinx art was and had to be inherently political and rooted in identity politics.

Which is exactly what present-day cultural institutions cannot get past. In a time where Latinx culture is in a constant state of redefinition, these institutions are stuck in themes and stereotypes that have not aged well. Though, sometimes an institution like LACMA can host more conceptual and culturally rooted work. The exhibition Home-So Different, So Appealing organized by the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center is divided into 8 sections that take on the notion of place, such as “Model Home”, the “Utopian American Dream” and the “Archeology of Home” to name a few.

The Resistance?

What separates Home-So Different, So Appealing from CARA is its conceptual breadth. The name of the exhibition is a direct reference to Richard Hamilton’s Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different so appealing?”an iconic pop art collage from 1956. Moreover, while some of the pieces relate directly to cultural experiences in the U.S, most if not all of them take on broader themes such as classism, homeland and identity. LA art critic and curator Andrew Berardini writes that “shared histories can be easily pointed out both politically and aesthetically, but perhaps what makes this show really daring in its way is that it doesn’t attempt to too easily reduce a wild array of viewpoints in to a narrow, closed notion of place, rather it opens it up. Terremoto) Home-So Different, So Appealing prizes multiplicity over cultural exclusivity, something that’s deeply necessary when thinking about how broad and varied Latinx culture is.

You can see this approach seen in Carmen Argote’s “720 Sq. Ft.:Household Mutations - Part B” a minimalist sculptural installation of the artist’s humble childhood home. Argote presents this nostalgic representation of a physical home alongside pristine gallery walls that swallow the installation by its meager size. The strength lies not only in being able to represent many first-generation immigrants in the states, but allows for conversations on wealth, class and privilege that can extend beyond the Latinx community.

720 square feet takes up some symbolic space

The exhibition is intentionally broad, not only in the variety of Latinx artists, but also the way the curators describe the exhibition as “open dialogue, sometimes seeking out contradictory notion and chronological anomalies in the same sections” (Hyperallergic). The exhibition is unafraid of the contradictions and sways away from the homogenous hivemind of exhibitions similar to CARA.

What’s dismaying is that for the most part institutions are lagging behind the incredible dynamic Latinx experience. I’m not sure if places like the National Museum of Mexican Art must present certain kinds of exhibitions to prove their cultural worth and standing. We’ve barely talked about money and how it influences many of these situations. The issue then becomes, what are these institutions selling, which too often seems lazy reinterpretations of muralismo or traditional Mexican portrait painting. It’s boring, consensus-driven art.

I’ve come to the conclusion that the reason I have a grudge against this type of work is that it’s something White artists never have to worry about: and that is having their lives and their art reduced to one simple narrative.

©Fredi Lopez and the CCA Arts Review