GIFT BOOKS : Painting a Doorway Between North and South

A farmworker (dressed unexpectedly like a pachuco instead of a peon ) is bent forever down, short hoe in one hand, a spring plant from the fields in the other. Though the field and the sky are large, this worker is larger. He is atlas, his bent back strong enough to carry the earth on which he works. He is Van Gogh’s peasant in a pastoral landscape--elegant and holy in his simple tastes. He is the masculine working class hero in the posters of the I.W.W., his labor condemning the greed of the industrial bosses. He is the revolutionary in a Diego Rivera mural. His shirt is the color of the sun: he is the post-conquest Aztec warrior. He is at work, yet he is clean enough to be a Zoot suiter about to out for the evening with his novia . He wears tatoos on his hands to remind himself he has control over his own flesh. He is alone, isolated, standing in an uninhabited, liminal place--and yet we know his work is communal. He has no face; he is only a body with a hat. He is the image of a survivor who resists being swallowed up by the North American landscape. He grows strong off a land he is forced to work for his material needs--and for the needs of an insatiable nation. He is the representative of the new people in the new world.

Daniel Desiga’s “Campesino” is emblematic of the exhibition in which the painting appears. CHICANO ART: Resistance and Affirmation (UCLA Wight Art Gallery: $50 cloth, $35 paper; 375pp.) is an exhibition which exposes the viewer to the many influences which produced Chicano Art from the mid-sixties to the mid-eighties. It is unfair and untrue to characterize the Chicano Art movement as nothing more than a “primitive” propaganda movement that enlisted “art” as a means to a “political” end. The story is much more complicated that that--and much richer. It is necessary to mention a few of the influences in order to glimpse the sophistication and complexity of this important body of work: Mexican muralism, proletarian art, U.S. television, Hollywood, Cowboy mythologies, Racist U.S. discourse, urban barrio life, Mexican-Catholic iconography and popular indigenous religious practices, Aztec mythology, rural family life, Viet Nam anti-war politics, feminism, Capitalism, Marxism, farmworker life conflated with European pastoral traditions--the list weaves in and out of Eurpoean and indigenous aesthetic and political movements.

In absorbing this work, it becomes evident that there is not real separation between “popular” art and “high” art just as there is no privileging of the “aesthetic” over the “political.” Each work is a narrative that manipulates the many influences of Chicano culture in powerful and absorbing ways, and each work positions itself in a doorway between nations, between aesthetics, between classes, between the European, the Indian, and the mestizaje , between the competing cultural languages that can have no clear boundaries.

Similarly, the artistic expressions in LA FRONTERA/THE BORDER (San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art/Centro Cultural de la Raza: $29; 199pp.) profoundly mix the politics of class, ethnic and gender identity, rage, post-modern sensibilities, and border humor. The project, co-sponsored by the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego and the Centro Cultural de la Raza is an uncontestable testament to the relevance of art in contemporary society. As Gloria Anzaldua comments: “The museum, if it is daring and takes risks, can be a kind of ‘borderlands’ where cultures co-exist in the same site . . .” After experiencing the expressions in the exhibition, she observes: “The border is a historical and metaphorical site, un sitio ocupado , an occupied borderland where single artists and collaborating groups transform space, and the two home territories, Mexico and the United States, become one.”

The work in these two exhibitions confronts the viewer with images of racism, images of shifting gender positions, images of class, nationalisms, violence, racial pride, and rage. The subject matter here is a people in struggle, a people in search of self-representation. These exhibitions are ultimately about power and oppression. Both these works are also about a people’s sense of humor and the urgency of artistic representation.

Unlike “CARA” and LA FRONTER/THE BORDER the Smithsonian Institution’s SOUTH OF THE BORDER examines the representation of Mexico through the eyes of U.S. artists from 1914 to 1947 (Smithsonian: $75. cloth, $29.95 paper; 296 pp.). The paintings trace the mythologies of Mexico produced and reproduced inside and outside of Mexico. We can only know anything through representation and the politic and ideologies that inform those representations. Karen Cordero Reiman’s accompanying narrative is an intelligent and insightful contribution to understanding the role art plays in forming our view of “the other.” She ends her essay with this observation: “Although from our vantage point in the 1990s many of these are difficult pictures to welcome back, formally and iconographically, together in their diversity they reveal the extent to which American preconceptions and prejudices have informed (and misinformed) our understanding of Mexico, our neighbor south of the border.”

Cultural isolationism is no longer possible (it never was). In the late twentieth century, art without a cultural, political and historical urgency makes little or no sense at all. Art is more than a formal decoation--art is a cultural necessity precisely because it creates a space for us to re-experience the complexity of our material conditions, our preoccupation, our obsessions. Ultimately, these three exhibitions succeed in presenting us with provacative and intelligent contexts for border artistic endeavors--endeavors which are communal in nature and not merely the endeavors of “creative individuals.”