Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 16 Number 3, December 2015
___________________________________________________________________
Stavans, Ilan and Jorge J.E. Gracia. Thirteen Ways of Looking at Latino Art. Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2014. 240pp., 13 color illustration. ISBN 9780822356349. Paperback £14.99 Library cloth £54.99
Reviewed by
Universidad Autónoma of Madrid
In this book, the essayist, translator, fabulist, and cultural commentator Ilan Stavans and the philosopher Jorge Gracia engage in an astonishingly refined dialogue in which they use thirteen works of visual art by Latino artists who live in the United States as catalyst for a conversation that encompasses not only analysis of the art works but also includes reflections on philosophy, literature, politics, history, and art history. In the introduction they already clarify that their interest lies in questions such as “to what extent is art a map of our environment” (2) and their belief that through dialogue, and only through dialogue, for it “requires that the parties that participate in it be willing to consider the views of the interlocutors and, more than that, be willing to change their views when presented with a better view” (5-6), the possibility of accessing new dimensions of interpretation arises, not just as far as these specific thirteen art works are concerned, but as far as we ourselves and we ourselves as viewers are concerned. They even go so far as to assert that “art is actuality: it exists in dialogue” (13).
The compilation is divided into an introduction, brief biographies of the artists, thirteen chapters that correspond each with one art work, whose image is reproduced in color, and an epilogue in which they discuss their own artistic contribution in the form of the dialogic texts – Stavans suggests that it could be considered as the fourteenth art work, which would consist of the serendipitous narrative that formed a series out of the otherwise autonomous images, and which acquires coherence only because of the dialogue the two authors have woven. Although they contend that the decision to chose thirteen works is fortuitous, Stavans hints at Wallace Stevens’s poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackboard”, while Gracia delves into the classical, medieval, and also mathematical connotations of the number thirteen. The artist that were finally chosen, by consensus, personal preference, and compromise between the two interlocutors, are Adál, Luis Cruz Azaceta, Jean-Michel Basquiat, José Bedia, María Brito, María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Einar and Jamex de la Torre, BEAR_TCK, Carmen Lomas Garza, Francisco Oller, Martín Ramírez, Andres Serrano, and Mariana Yampolsky.
The way their dialogues unfold is what makes the collection special. La reconquista (2010) by Einar and Jamex de la Torre is used by the authors as a springboard for reflections on the Spanish conquest of Latin America. The two Mexican brothers used Hans Memling’s Last Judgment to create a lenticular photographic image on a translucent medium that shows a copy in which the original faces are replaced “with their equivalents [of] today” (27), such as Frida Kahlo, Carlos Slim, Emiliano Zapata, and Pancho Villa. This process is viewed not as an isolated phenomenon but rather as a characteristic aspect of the Latin American DNA, given its propensity to “copy foreign models, to adapt them” (27), while still creating utterly different and new works of art, which, as we might expect, reminds Stavans of Borges’s Pierre Menard.
María Brito’s Conversation, from 1984, prompts an exchange first about the “magic” number three – the painting depicts three women in conversation. Their masked faces then raise issues of identity, as well as the labyrinthine structure that is “based not on difference but on similarity”, since the three masks are identical. The authors further argue that identity is not static but rather flexible and malleable, recalling Whitman’s “I contain multitudes” (43), and that Brito’s painting raises questions such as “who we are, who we pretend to be, what others think we are, and the roles we play, or try to play” (46).
Probably the most famous of the works treated in the book, which for the most part focuses on relatively unknown artists, is Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ, a type c photographic print of a small plastic crucifix submerged in the artist’s urine. Stavans and Gracia question the huge controversy and scandal it caused when it was first shown in New York in 1987 and a vocal minority unable to see beyond its overt content considered it to be an attack on Christianity. The interlocutors here, however, express sympathy for Serrano’s “anger at religion for curtailing human freedom” and argue that iconoclasm is a necessary and progressive human impulse. Carmen Lomas Garzas’s Heaven and Hell (1991; oil, alkyd, and gold leaf on canvas), then leads discussion back to a reflective philosophical analysis of the Christian doctrine, while also opening the spiritual question to the tenets of other faiths. The other best-known artist represented here is Jean-Michel Basquiat, with his piece Untitled (Skull) from 1981. As a “racial mixture of two marginalized social groups” (169), that is half Haitian and half Puerto Rican, Basquiat was considered “an aberration and his art as something foreign, born from an alien experience” (169), so, like Serrano, the art establishment resisted recognizing him. Stavans and Gracia have chosen an acrylic and mixed media painting on canvas, because it illustrates well his best-known style, but his career – though short since he died of a heroin overdose at the age of twenty-seven – went through three different stages, from graffiti art to a period in which he filled his pieces with revolutionary words, voodoo incantations, etc., and finally the more complex and sophisticated phase of his “maturity”.
Mariana Yampolsky’s outstanding black-and-white photograph Elva, a gelatin silver print from 1962, gives the authors the opportunity to delve into the trusty subject of photography as art, as well as its evolution in the age of iPhones and other snapshot devices. They analyze the feminine innocence this particular image portrays, and Gracia contends that the girl is also depicted as “alone, helpless, caught in a world she does not quite understand, at the mercy of forces that are beyond her power” (79). Stavans, who admits to having become increasingly fascinated by the photograph over the course of time, observes that the artist becomes interpreter through the image, which he believes that any other photographer would have captured differently.
Another chapter deals with the self-taught artist Martín Ramírez, who produced his works in mental institutions after being diagnosed with catatonic schizophrenia. The image chosen here is No. 111, Untitled (Train and Tunnel), produced around 1960-63, treating one of the artist’s typical subjects: trains and tunnels, which hearken back to his time in Mexico as a railroad worker. The conversation winds around the topics of madness and naiveté, two key aspects of the modernist artistic aesthetic that take on new meaning in the person and work of a mad naïf.
Francisco Oller’s El velorio from 1893 is the only 19th century work included in the compilation and serves as the stepping-stone to a discussion of costumbrismo. At the other extreme, we find four works that were produced in the 2000s. The first one, Adál Maldonado’s La Spanglish Sandwich Bodega Bag (2000), is a paper bag with printed text. Here language is at the center of the work, and the dialogue accordingly evolves around semantics and artifacts. The title of the object is at the same time the title of the poem that covers the bag, and Stavans and Gracia discuss the artsit’s concern with “the hybridity of his identity and how language is part of that hybridity” (201). Gracia suggests that we, as people, could all be bags, which leads the conversation back to the issue of identity and the “self”. Again, we are witness to an expansive exchange of ideas that travels from Ancient Greece to Tolstoy, to Woody Allen’s Matchpoint, to urinals and Guernica. The next work, chronologically, is by José Bedia from 2001, an acrylic painting that also illustrates the book’s cover, Siguiendo su instinto. Bedia’s Cuban descent steers the conversation toward an interesting debate about his home country, but also about drugs and initiation rituals, as well as the notion of art as an escape. María Magdalena Campos-Pons, another Cuban artist, is represented with Above All Things (1997), three large-format Polaroids that show a black woman. The picture is broken into three panels, a fact that, according to Gracia, reflects the artist herself, “first, because above all things Campos-Pons is a black woman; […] second, because also above all things she is broken” (185). Her piece raises the issue of minorities within minorities, as well as the overarching theme of the book, that is, “what makes Latino art Latino?” (194).
The other two pieces, both dating from 2010 are Luis Cruz Azaceta’s Slaughter, acrylic on canvas, and BEAR_TCK’s Chicano Graffiti, mural on wall. The first is a depiction of violence, though in a quite unexpected way. Overall, the image looks a lot like a succulent many-layered sandwich, but its components are severed limbs, and with trucks transporting more limbs in its center, a metaphor for war, madness, and destruction which introduces a discourse about horror. The second represents the “street art” genre, which distinguishes it from the other works under discussion, and here, Stavans and Gracia do agree that some graffiti may rightly be considered art and other not, since it ranges from “scribbles to sophisticated depictions of human emotion, such as the ones BEAR_TCK has given us” (114).
On the whole, Thirteen Ways of Looking at Latino Art is an interesting and sometimes provocative compilation of visual art works of which many will likely be new to the reader, brought together in this exchange that was “born at the crossroads where art and thought meet” (1). But the real pleasure, and this certainly says something about the place of art in our intellectual and emotional economy, is in following the sinuous paths the thoughts of these two erudite and imaginative discutants chart through history, art, philosophy, and personal experience: time and again we feel like the privileged observer of an extraordinary private conversation.