Throwing the Book At Mexican Muralists

Review: Roberto Cantú, Ed. Mexican Mural Art Critical Essays On A Belligerent Aesthetic. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, UK. 2021.  

ISBN(10): 1- 5275-6224-7

Michael Sedano

 

 

Editor Roberto Cantú’s Mexican Mural Art Critical Essays On A Belligerent Aesthetic, arrives as a singularly important book for a quintessential American readership that includes arte professionals like scholars and artists, students, collectors, hasta language students, will gravitate to the collection, not alone for its subject matter but to appreciate Cantú’s unique cohort of scholars who write in English, or Spanish, or both when citing freely in untranslated quotations. Each idioma stands on its own, y que?

 

I don’t know if textual inclusiveness like this makes the book belligerent like the arte, but readers comfortable en ambos idiomas of north American linguistic pluralism will appreciate the editor’s matter-of-course approach to language pluralism. Let the essay speak its own language, translation unnecessary; Mexican Mural Art, after all, is a United States book published in England about Mexican arte featuring scholars from Mexico and the United States.

 

English monolinguals won’t be excluded from gaining general understanding of the entire set of essays, owing to editor Cantú’s exhaustive Introduction. Cantú weaves an historical narrative linking the essays with historiographic and aesthetic contexts. A constrained reader might cherry-pick the body of the collection by letting the Introduction offer its keen précis of the scholarship.

 

You want an “executive summary” of Mexican Mural Art? Read the Introduction.

 

One beauty of the book also offers a blemish. The publisher needs to lavish a few euros or pesos or dollars on an aggressive illustration program for this book about murals. A book about murals shouldn’t have a paucity of illustrations, and at that, low-resolution black and white images with no color plates. 

 

There’s a solution, of course, to © and licensing and lawyers: the web. 

 

When, for example, where Mary Coffey describes a segment of the Orozco Dartmouth mural, “It culminates in a highly unorthodox scene of Christian Apocalypse in which a mortified Christ chops down his own cross and thereby refuses to redeem the civilization created in his name”, a hyperlink to a ©-cleared, or fair-use, image gives that text stunning impact.

https://www.dartmouth.edu/digitalorozco/

Leonard Folgarait’s essay, “Thinking Mexican Muralism through Still and Moving Photography” illustrates the inherent problem with “the web” in a text resource like a chapter in a book. Folgarait dutifully documents his images via footnotes that include permalinks-as-text. Readers eager to see what we're talking about will be typing out 100 weird characters on just that one footnote!

Hyperlinks aside, Mexican Mural Art offers accessible, useful, reading. For the most part, the Conference provenance of the works leads essayists to employ a colloquial style, first person in many instances. In other instances, there’s an argumentative stance, less the critic’s dispassion and more the voice of a seminar speculation finding solid ground. The published words keep the liveliness of a conference talk. Thanks to Editor Cantú’s expectations, the scholar whipped those remarks and talking outline into something publishable.

 

Mostly. My comprehension has to depend on Cantú’s account of Fernando Curiel Defossé’s, “El Ateneo Muralista,” which is written in Spanish. I do not recognize the structure of the essay, and have no idea what’s going on. Cantú explains:

 

“A historian who knows the history of Mexico by heart, a literary critic, poet, and radio announcer, Curiel Defossé draws from different fields and a variety of topics related to Mexican muralism, guiding the reader through apparently distant or unrelated accounts that nonetheless cohere at the end. The essay’s mural-like composition, with a variety of interpretations of the history of Mexican art and post-revolutionary Mexico is traced with evident mastery of the subject at times formulated through satire, irony, or understatement so as to encourage the reader to think critically and independently.”  

 

The 2019 Conference must have been a highlight of an academician’s year. The essays look like the scholar had fun writing, you’ll have fun reading. I like to think of the sweep of the collection, alternating from language to language, man to woman, akin to watching a one-camera b&w film of a live staged production.  You didn’t have to be there to get it, but it must have been something in person!

 

Adding to the accessibility of the collection is the scholars’ motive to revisit and newly-explore accepted ideas, maybe turn something on its coco. As Cantú avers, the propósito of the collection is to revisit comfortable ideas.

 

“Studies of this scope are evidence that Orozco, Rivera, and Siqueiros, including other Mexican muralists, were caught in an international network of interests and conflicts from day one, often beyond their comprehension or control. Such is the aim of the essays selected for this volume: to propose alternative theoretical and critical perspectives on Mexican mural art, distinguishing between aesthetics and its relation to beauty and taste, and the aesthetic Mexican muralists sided with: belligerently against “bourgeois” taste in art; against capitalism; against the Mexican government (e.g. the Calles regime), against Stalinism, against Trotskyism and, at times, against each other.”

 

As they cover old, familiar ground, being responsible scholars, they take nothing for granted. The essays don’t assume a deep knowledge of the cultural and historical milieu of the periods in ferment, hence added usefulness.

 

Re-envisioning ways to assess and understand renowned, well-loved classic murals, and explain your ideas even to well-informed tipos, demands deep background to place historical context  around ideas discovered in murals. The essays assume an informed reader. The scholars own up to a responsibility to give readers a good history lesson, especially the anglophone audience. Maybe a Mexicano got all this in high school, but a United Statesian won’t have any idea which Mexican liberator cut down the nopalera and didn’t lie about it, or why Rivera painted Marx in a Mexican scene?

 

Diego Rivera, Palacio Nacional, CDMX