Orozco text in English

Body, gender, gesture: Indias by José Clemente Orozco

Karen Cordero Reiman, Departamento de Arte, Universidad Iberoamericana

What would it mean to look at Indias (1947) by José Clemente Orozco from a feminist perspective, taking into account the criteria of gender studies? I have always been fascinated by this work, as a strong, coherent, modern representation of the female body that highlights unabashedly forms that refer to pregnancy and maternity, without recourse to the rhetorical devices that are frequently associated with these themes in murals and other easel paintings of the same period. In addition, it shares with other works from the “Los Teúles” cycle, of which it forms a part, an anti-naturalist posture in its treatment of space and subject matter; even though it is an apparently figurative representation, it becomes almost immediately evident that its treatment corresponds to symbolic criteria, poetic allusions resumed in visual form.

In the same manner, but even more forcefully than in other works of this series such as Cabeza flechada and El desmembrado, created in the same year, Indias locates us in a disconcerting spatial and empathetic relationship with the bodies it represents, a relationship that opens the possibility of diverse constructions of meaning on the basis of affect, without denying the historical allusions of this series.[1] Cabeza flechada and El desmembrado, for example, refer clearly, through recourse to the symbolic use of expressionism, to the interracial and intercultural violence of the Conquest. Similarly, a work such as Culto a los huicholes--where skeletal figures drawn with a caricaturesque touch advance parallel to the picture plane, forming a sort of frieze in front of a monumental sculptural head, flanked on the one side by light and the other by darkness—can be read as a symbolic inversion of the procession with Indians on the one side and Spaniards on the other in Nuestros dioses by Saturnino Herrán; in Herrán’s work these two processions converge harmonically in a synchretic Christ-Coatlicue figure, an icon of the idealized concept of mestizaje that characterized the visual culture of the second and third decades of the twentieth century in Mexico. In Orozco’s work, while the figures advance toward the light, their posture is progressively deformed into a configuration that increasing recalls Neanderthal man, suggesting perhaps that the passage toward “civilization” laid out by nationalist indigenism corrupts and distorts rather than elevating the figure of the Indian and his culture.

The purpose of this essay, however, is not to imply a single or simple ideological reading of Orozco’s work of this period. Both the figure of the Indian and that of woman are complex elements of his iconography and it has often been suggested in the literature on the subject that he treats them with disdain and irony. Rather, I would like to open up the possibility of a more complex visual analysis of these elements in Orozco’s Indias, since I consider that the treatment of the body in Orozco is a key factor in our reading of his work from our own bodies. Moreover, from the perspective of women (and my own perspective as a woman) there are affective elements that influence our perception of his production, that facilitates the agency of the work, a rereading that is situated in opposition to, and as an intervention in, the linear interpretations regarding Orozco’s racism and misogyny; rather, it invites the viewer to identify with this powerful pictorial creation from a distinct perspective, from a position of alterity, closer to that of the subject, and more distant from the scenarios of hegemonic power that have traditionally been the showcase for Orozco’s work: government “palaces” or central offices, schools, orphanages, libraries, universities.

Much of Art History has concerned itself with the insertion of works of art in the time of their creation and the analysis of their meaning in relation to this context, but in this case I would like to propose a close reading of the possibilities of constructing and transforming the context and the spectator, from the standpoint of the work itself, weaving together several diverse readings of Orozco’s work that reveal both the range and some of the limits of its field of signification.

I.

My point of departure for this multiple inscription of Indias is my own curatorial script for the permanent collection of twentieth century art of the Museo Nacional de Arte (MUNAL), in which it has occupied a distinctive position since the end of 2000, when a renovated installation of the collections was completed. There, upon entering the central exhibition hall of the final section of the exhibition script, a section focused on the rhetoric of the body in postrevolutionary Mexican art, Indias confronts us, from its prominent location as the focal point of our perspectival view of the far walls of the gallery. Together with two works by Francisco Goitia, it frames the doorway to a smaller gallery that contains works with a specific political or propagandistic function, including graphics, paintings and sculpture. In the main hall, it forms a part of the prevailing discourse on the representation of the body in postrevolutionary art, that highlights the invention in the period of a “Mexican body” characterized by monumentality and a block like volumetric structure inspired by Prehispanic sculpture and the use of materials (carved wood, earthly colors) that evoke a formal tie to nature. This recurrent element, that underlines both ethnic and aesthetic distinctions, constitutes a type of “Mexican primitivism” that echoes the strategies of the European avant-garde of the early twentieth century, in particular Cubism and Purism.

To the left of the spectator as he or she enters the hall, and to the left of Indias, we find a sequence of paintings, mostly also from the “Teúles” series, that echo the tragic, symbolic expressionism of Indias, reinforcing a reflection on violence as a founding principle of the Mexican nation. Moreover, this sequence directs out gaze toward the passageway that leads to the exit from the hall, and the permanent collection, which finalizes with Terror cósmico (1954) by Rufino Tamayo, a work that marks the transition between the expressionism of the avant-garde and abstract expressionism; a semiotic fragmentation of the human body in the style of Francis Bacon, coexists here with a formal decomposition of the figure into interpenetrating planes that recalls Picasso and Futurism.

¿What reading of Indias does this curatorial presentation suggest? Undoubtedly, it links the discourse of the previous sections of the exhibition script, that deal with artistic modernity and the nationalization of the avant-garde in Mexico, to the discussion of the political uses formal innovation, but at the same time its material qualities produce an experience that undermines our stereotypical expectations regarding postrevolutionary art, and the formal and symbolic stability that characterizes the majority of the works included in the display.

Griselda Pollock, in Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum: Time, Space and the Archive suggests a strategy for rereading canonical works of art through their combination with other elements of visual culture from diverse periods, in order to construct a feminist reading of art history that, because of the hegemonic character of museum, is absent from these institutions.[2] This reading, present in interpretative processes that introduces affect as an element of the narrative, is not static but strategic, an action that destabilizes discipline based processes that consecrate truths, bypassing the rationality that underlies traditional interpretative methodologies of analysis of the signification of objects.

In Indias, both the two female bodies that dominate the canvas and the skeletal fragments that occupy the lower right corner, remit us to the experience of abjection, frequently identified with the status of marginalized groups; according to Julia Kristeva the experience of abjection situates us outside the symbolic order, between object and subject. [3] In confronting and provoking a process of identification with those elements that we commonly exile from our symbolic system—the skeleton and the mother—we put at risk both the ritual systems and the rational disciplines with which we normally seek to keep in place the border between the semiotic and the symbolic. We are confronted then, with something strange and yet familiar, sinister, or as Kristeva puts it, with “the stranger within ourselves”.[4] To write on the basis of this experience, without imposing categories that repress or normalize the impact of this trauma, implies abandoning the conventional rules of writing in order to allow language to follow as materiality and gesture, as has been suggested in the production of feminist authors like Hélène Cixous.[5]

Indias, through the dynamic angle from which we observe the nudes, confronts us with two figures whose voluminous breasts and belly evoke the corporeal identification of woman with potential maternity, while the situation from which these protagonists emerge is identified with death and destruction. In the case of the figure on the left, whose face is covered by her abundant dark hair, our gaze is drawn inevitably to the rounded contours that recall ancient fertility figures such as the Venus de Willendorf (ca. 25,000 B.C.). Furthermore, if we follow the line of her body to its base, we find her feet that seem to be planted on a surface that tilts up vertically, as if the figure were emerging from the painting into our space. In addition, the figure in the upper right hand corner seems to shoot out towards. Her face, masklike, recalls the nude in the upper right corner of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907); it confronts us, not as a face but as its cipher, since it has no eyes and in any case, the angle in which it is presented implies that the gaze of the figure would be directed toward the ground, which would lead us once again into the background of the image. One shoulder, the breasts, the belly and the upper thighs—fragments that we relate as parts of the same body on the basis of phenomenological experience rather than the modeling of the figure—suggest that this unstable crouching nude also threatens to zoom out of the frontal limits of the composition. Below, in what can be read as the ground tilted up vertically, we find a mound of skeletal fragments which—on the basis of the use of a lighter, more luminous palette in their upper registers—also seem to lose stability and topple toward the spectator.

Everything them, seems to engulf us at once, in a composition that recalls Cézanne in its spatial structure composed of various angles, while the formal resolution of the figures recalls in part the cubist Picasso, and in other aspects suggests the inspiration of the heavy figures of the neoclassical Picasso, in a poetic composition, availing itself of select illusionist elements, characteristic of modern European art. But on the other hand, Indias has an aggressivity that differentiates it from the other works mentioned, with their intrinsic harmony and self-contained compositions. It constitutes a radical visual experiment, even in relation to other works of the “Teúles” series, recreating the sensoriality of the female body as a primeval force, linked to its capacity for reproduction and its inherent difference, but without inscribing these elements in a symbolic or historical narrative. In distinction from the other works in the exhibition hall, these bodies are not symbols but mass and gesture, alluding to race and gender as dissonant elements, and establishing corporality and sensoriality as part of an open-ended statement, an experimental act that opens up meanings rather than closing them, sowing a fertile field for creation, interpretation and imagination, from a variety of bodily experiences, perspectives, disciplines and historical moments.

II.

In October 2009, the Museo Nacional de Arte inaugurated an exhibit in which the contemporary Mexican artist Roberto Cortazar offered a reinterpretation of three emblematic works by Orozco: precisely Los desmembrados, Cabeza flechada and Indias, in a sort of homage based on his perception of this series of paintings as a break with Orozco’s prior trajectory, that reveals—avant la lettre—strategies that coincide with those that would be employed in the ensuing years by De Kooning, Bacon and other protagonists of European and American abstract expressionism.[6] While he is better known for his highly aestheticizing studies of bodies interspersed with abstract elements, in recent years Cortazar has explored the recreation, on the basis of expressionist gestures, of themes and figures drawn from mythic and epic traditions; this was the case with his exhibit “Saturno en el mundo de los parricidas”, presented at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey in 2007, as it is here, where he has chosen to elaborate on the late work of Orozco, that was inspired by the chronicles of the Conquest.

It is interesting to observe the associations that Cortazar establishes between Orozco’s work and other emblematic forms, on the basis of his method of drawing with light his reinterpretations of the canvases; on the basis of this preliminary registry of traces of meaning, he created his own series of paintings entitled Los desmembrados según Orozco. In this process, where affect is put into play, the female figures represented by Orozco are identified with a spider that in turn seems to be a rereading of the intertwined forms of bones piled up next to the standing nude. This association suggest the predominance in Cortazar’s reading of a threatening, devouring quality in the abject figure of the Indian woman, who he perceives as a sort of fanged monster, reflecting what is perhaps an unconscious reaction to the mass of corporeal elements that allude to maternal otherness, elements that are significantly obfuscated in the linear reworking of the figure. [7]

This repression of the maternal in order to create a symbolic representation of the bewilderment and anxiety it provokes, has its counterpart or foil in the work of the grande dame of feminist art, the sculptor del arte Louise Bourgeois, whose monumental metal spiders, identified in her pictorial genesis with the feminine principle, have been exhibited in prominent urban and museum spaces all over the world, in an ironic inversion in which this symbolic embodiment of fear is resignified—with a touch of black humor--as a locus of identity.[8]

Cortazar’s automatic gestures also establish a relationship between Indias and the iconography of Picasso’s Guernica, a work that share with this series by Orozco a reference to the context of war and violence. However the light pen of the Chiapanecan artist materializes an association between Orozco’s fertile figure and one that in Picasso’s work represents a mother with her dead child in her arms; her mouth, upturned toward the sky, opens in a scream of desperation, and in Cortazar’s version the implicit violence on her teeth is exaggerated, again suggesting the archetype of the mother as a devouring monster. The impotent light bulb/sun in Guernica emerges in Cortazar’s works based on Indias, although it does not seem to respond to a specific formal referent in Orozco’s painting.

Finally, the postures of the two nude figures that in Orozco’s work resist any naturalist spatial logic, are recreated in one of Cortazar’s canvases on the basis of the study of anatomic fragments, restoring a physiological logic to the legs and their relationship to the head, while leaving implicit the location of the breasts and belly in an empty area of the green background.

It would seem that, in his reinterpretation of Indias, Cortazar resolves some of the ambiguities and polysemic possibilities of Orozco’s work by means of its reinscription on the basis of a masculine symbolic paradigm; motivated by the terror provoked by abjection, he asserts a principle of formal and semiotic logic that neutralizes the female body and the maternal principle, while also erasing the Orozco’s references to the indigenous.

III.

What would happen if, taking up Cortazar’s example, but inverting it, we interpret Indias from the standpoint of female affect, in a different act of agency of its aesthetic potential? Orozco’s artistic development facilitates this task, since from his early “House of Tears” series, as Adriana Zavala has argued persuasively, he develops a series of representations of woman that situate themselves in an oblique relationship to both the prevailing modernist opposition of the femme fatale and the innocent virgin, and the emergent nationalist canon with its idealized vision of the mother, the teacher and Indian women. [9] The watery areas of color in images such as La hora del chulo (1913-1915) and Baile de burdel (ca. 1913) fill the space that corresponds to the female body with delicate textures that contrast with the exhausted, worn visages of the prostitutes that protagonize these works, in a curious inversion of the pseudo-pornographic dynamic of the black and white drawings that the artist created of lively, curvaceous colegialas, as in La carta (1914). Although concepts such as grotesque and deformed have frequently been applied to the description of these representations, it seems to me that Orozco’s treatment of these figures distances them from the conventional modernist markers of decadence and the stereotypical devices used in caricature. The individuation of the women represented by Orozco in these works on paper and the expressive impact of his simple but powerful line drawings of their faces, contrasts with the evocative semi-abstract areas of color and evokes empathy with real people, not stereotypes, from a humanist perspective, rather than one of categorical judgment of his subjects and their context. The formal treatment of the works facilitates our identification with the figures and their situation, constituting an event that reorders, or dislocates, the affective field and, consequently, the political fixity of the viewer, in a deliberately anti-rhetorical operation. Moreover, the celebrated mural of Cortés and Malinche in the National Preparatory School, painted by Orozco in the 1920’s, constitutes a clear antecedent for Indias; Malinche’s torso prefigure the sensual massivity of the standing figure in Indias, while the closed position of her half bent legs is very similar to that of the figure in the upper right hand corner of the 1947 painting. In addition, the stony visage of Cortes’s companion anticipates the schematic treatment of the heads in the later work. In a deliberately ambiguous manner, Malinche seems to emerge toward our space, while at the same time Cortes stays her movement with one hand and holds her back with the other.

In Indias, where no masculine figure is present, with the possible exception of the anonymous skeletons, the nude figures of the indigenous women assume a powerful position, permitting a less problematic process of identification on the part of the female viewer. The bodies Orozco represents are not regulated by a canon or a stereotype, nor is their impact constrained by a narrative context. Their corpulent figures do not embody an ideal of beauty of the mid twentieth century nor of our present time; we relate to them on the basis of their difference, their alterity in relation to the norm, their idiosyncrasy, which is our own. The formal and spatial dynamic of Indias confronts us with abjection and turns it into an event that resignifies both the painting and our bodies.

The transformative semiotic operation that is catalyzed by Indias, shares several similarities with the strategies of feminist art. Recall, for example, the work of Alice Neel, that deliberately presents nudes that challenged the normative conditions of gender representation in art: nudes that openly present the aging female body (indeed, her own aging female body), or the distinctive proportions and configurations of the pregnant body, without idealization and aesthetic veiling.[10] We might also evoke here the performative operation taken on by Louise Bourgeois in the 1970’s, when she designed, wore and shared a latex suit decorated with a multitude of “breasts”, thus permitting the transformation of the everyday human body by means of the aesthetic of multiplicity and excess that characterized the representation of ancient goddesses, and allowing participants of both sexes to exhibit “body parts that normally are inside clothes--. . . on the outside”.[11] The almost excessive tactile voluptuousness of Indias, that surpasses the archetype, can be understood as subversive in relation to these initiatives.

Undoubtedly, as in underlined in the exhibition script of the permanent collection of the MUNAL, the corporeal aesthetic presented in Indias can be contextualized in relation to the massive figures created during the postrevolutionary period by painters such as Manuel Rodríguez Lozano and Julio Castellanos and by sculptors such as Francisco Marín and Carlos Bracho. But the dynamism and a certain discomfort of the figures in relation to their pictorial format, reflected as they push against the spatial and conceptual limits that frame them, suggest an aesthetic similarity with the work of María Izquierdo in the preceding years of the decade; in works such as Maternidad (1943) and La tierra (1945) her female figures express through their gestures a physical resistance to the iconographic typologies implicit in the titles of these works (the Madonna and Mother Earth, respectively).

Thus, in its dynamic, indisciplined character, and in the challenges it proposes to the conventional modes of representation of women in general and indigenous women in particular in the postrevolutionary period, and to the conventions of painting itself, Indias can be resignified on the basis of the contributions of critical theory, gender studies and feminist artistic practice, opening up the possibility for new readings and modes of reception of the past and its artifacts, enriching as a consequence our cultural, corporeal and political experience in the present.

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[1] I am using the concept of affect here in the manner of Spinoza, taken up by Bergson and Deleuze, among others. Spinoza defines affect as “the modifications of the body by means of which the active power of that body is increased or diminished”, while Bergson defines affect as “that part or interior aspect of our bodies that is mixed with the body’s external image”. See http://csmt.uchicago.edu/glossary2004/affect.htm, consulted on December 15, 2009, and Gilles Deleuze, En medio de Spinoza. Buenos Aires, Cactus, 2003, pp. 75-91.

[2] Griselda Pollock, Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum: Time, Space and the Archive. London and New York, Routledge, 2007.

[3] Julia Kristeva, Extracts from Powers of Horror (1980) and Strangers to Ourselves (1989) in Kelly Oliver, ed. The Portable Kristeva. New York, Columbia University Press, 2002, pp. 229-294.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Hélène Cixous, “Coming to Writing” and Other Essays. Cambridge and London, Harvard University Press, 1991.

[6] Merry MacMasters, “Roberto Cortazar externa en el Munal su diálogo con un clásico”, La Jornada, November 8, 2009, p. 2, http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2009/11/index.php?section=cultura&article=a02n1cul, consulted on January 23, 2010.

[7] My reflections on monstrosity in this essay are indebted to the texts of Frida Gorbach on this topic, particularly her book El monstruo, objeto imposible. Un estudio sobre la teratología mexicana, siglo XIX. México, Itaca and UAM-Xochimilco, 2008.

[8] See Frances Morris, ed. Louise Bourgeois. London, Tate Publishing, 2007, pp. 272-279.

[9] Adriana Zavala, Constituting the Indian Female Body in Mexican Painting, Cinema and Visual Culture 1900-1950. Ph.D. thesis in Art History, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, 2001, pp. 151-235.

[10] See the exhibition catalog Alice Neel: Painted Truths. New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2010.

[11] See WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution. Cambridge, M.I.T. Press, 2007, pp. 220-221 and Morris, op. cit., pp. 2 y 60.