dieser beitrag wurde verfasst in: englisch (eng/en)
verfasserin/verfasser: José Luis Cuevas
titel: The Cactus Curtain: An Open Letter on Conformity in Mexican Art
+: Evergreen Review 2, 7 (Winter 1959), p. 111-120. Translation by Lysander Kopp
«I do not pretend to be a leader of the young, and I am not trying to recruit an army of rebels to storm the Palace of Fine Arts. I will limit myself to stating what I firmly believe to be the convictions of other members of my generation both in the fine arts and in other intellectual fields. If what I have to say is of any use to young artists, either now or later, I will feel that I have paid a debt…
I propose to use the narrative form, in order to express my ideas more coherently.
Juan was fifteen years old. His father was a plumber, or a cobbler, or perhaps a minor official, one of those who, for a ten-peso bribe, will settle within the legal period what would otherwise take months.
Juan was born with a talent that occurs very often among the population of the Republic of Mexico. This talent, this rich and ancient legacy, was not that of taking bribes, an infection poisoning the blood of the whole country, but of creating another, unknown world, the world of art.
Juan stood out in grade school because of his excellent drawings. A school inspector saw them and told his teacher to encourage him. This continued until one day, Juan was given a prize and entered art school. Let us pretend it was La Esmeralda, to make the fable more realistic. Juan completed all of his classes with the same competence he had shown in grade school. His professors praised him, his fellow students looked up to him, and he graduated from the school with diploma in hand. Thus far all had gone well. Mexico is a great nation, with opportunities for everyone. Even the sons of bribe-takers, or of plumbers or cobblers, have the chance and the right to study art. We live in a grand democratic country. Viva México!..
They had taught Juan at La Esmeralda to draw simplified figures—smooth, undulant, curvilinear, with large hands and feet—and to use special effects such as foreshortening, so that certain intellectuals would say that he produced “strong” works, of profound popular origin. They were not two-dimensional works. They tried to achieve three-dimensionality by an almost automatic method of drawing, a strict, uniform intensity of line. With such a formula, all is solved: it works equally well for portraying a man with a bandanna, an Indian woman selling flowers in the market, a worker in the oil fields, or one of those proletarian mother-and-child scenes which have been turned out for over thirty years without there having intervened, for the good of Mexican art, a single Malthusian or neo-Malthusian to hinder such an empty repetition of maternity.
Juan had not had access to books on the art of other countries either in school or in the public library, much less in the Palace of Fine Arts. Nor were there any museums in which he could see foreign art of the present or the past. When there was an exhibit of some artist who was not Mexican or who refused to follow the style he had been taught to believe was the only one, Juan’s friends told him it was not worth seeing, because it pertained to an exhausted, degenerate culture, to inferior races that have nothing like the grandeur and purity of the Mexican race, which is the only one in the world that has complete command of the truth. On one occasion a friend told him about a certain Hitler, who pronounced the same things about a blond race that talked from the esophagus. But Hitler was wrong: if he had known the Mexican race with its dark skin, straight blue-black hair, almond eyes and labial speech, he would have changed his doctrine. The superior race was in Tenochtitlán and environs, and it was the indisputable possessor of absolute truth.
But one day in a bookstore on the Alameda Juan saw an art magazine containing things very different from his own work. Some of them were unintelligible to him, and others struck him as absurd, but all of them fascinated him. “So there are artists in other countries too,” he said to himself, “not just here in Mexico.” He went back to the bookstore several times, and began to see meaning in what had at first been mere puzzles. The absurdities revealed a logic of their own, everything took on order and shape in his mind. After a number of these visits he no longer felt any desire to continue working in the style he had been taught. The new ideas had begun to intrude among the local themes he was treating, and his work was being dominated, and vitalized, by other concepts.
Juan needed support for his new work, because he had lived till then on what his proletarian father brought home after taking bribes at the office. One friend suggested the salon of the Plástica Nacional as a solution, another advised him to join a national association; both solutions offered him a certain breathing-space. He decided on the former, and to carry it out he had to see an abbot-like functionary in the Palace of Fine Arts. We shall call him Victor for convenience, although his last name may or may not have been Reyes. His friend took him to see this amiable clerk, but first he warned him not to bring any of the capitalist bourgeois works he had recently turned out under the influence of decadent foreign magazines…
Now that he was protected by official and semiofficial institutions, Juan began to make progress; he had genuine talent, even though he could not use it as he wished. He began to sell his drawings and paintings to tourists in search of souvenirs of their trip. He knew they were stale and lifeless, but the tourists did not care about their execution as long as they had local color, as long as their themes were Mexican. In this matter, his artist friends and his foreign customers were in complete agreement.
Juan sold so regularly that he could afford to marry. He observed that when he dressed his wife in a Tehuantepec costume or one of those other colorful folk-costumes… his clients paid better prices. After a while she hardly took off her disguises even to sleep, because a buyer might wake them up in the early morning after a night on the town.
Juan accepted all types of commissions in order to maintain his success. He always wore overalls, like a working-man, and huaraches, and a big mustache like Zapata’s. His style featured massive, corpulent figures, but if a commission for a mural specified lean, cadaverous figures, he painted them, knowing that the compromise meant a few more pesos in his bank account and increased prestige among his friends in the association…
Juan is a fictional character, but he is based on the actual people who swarm around our national culture. They stifle and terrify it, while those who ought to fight back are too apathetic or too frightened to speak up. I must admit, of course, that Juan’s story has a happy ending, exactly like those in Hollywood’s blissful dream-world. But it is also the happy ending of modern Mexican art, and although it is definitely happy, it is just as definitely an ending. I reject the idea that a culture should achieve a certain end and then halt there, and that is why I have rebelled.
My mistake—if I may speak of myself—has been to oppose the set pattern I have outlined in this story… I have not wanted to become a Juan; on the contrary, I have fought against the Juans all my life… Against superficiality and conformity...
I want to repeat that I do not consider myself to be either a pioneer or a reformer. I have tried to work within an accepted artistic tradition, and to bring to it something of my own, something that would carry it forward, however little that something might be. If what I am trying to do is not appreciated in my own country, if I am to receive personal insults instead of serious criticism, perhaps I should look for a different way of explaining my efforts. Perhaps I should consider the cactus curtain an impregnable fortress. But I believe we can progress only by refusing to conform, and I believe I have the right, as a citizen and an artist, to rebel against conformity. That is my unpardonable sin.»