Social Studies, With a Twist
Inside a modest bungalow located just a stone’s throw from the lush cultural center of Balboa Park, Raul Guerrero paints a mix of fiction and history. Praised by critics and other artists, during his 25-year career Guerrero’s has moved from making Conceptual photographs, sculptures and installations to creating paintings that are an investigation of complex heritage issues. But whatever his medium, Guerrero’s focus is on issues of identity, narrative and romance.
This month offers a rare opportunity to see Guerrero’s work--past and present--at three different venues. Opening this weekend, the downtown location of San Diego’s Museum of Contemporary Art is presenting “Problemas y secretos maravillosos de las Indias/Problems and Marvelous Secrets of the Indies.” Nearby, a solo show of his current paintings is at the Porter-Troupe Gallery. And at Santa Monica’s Bergamot Station, he is included in the exhibition “Chairs, Plazas, Faces, Gardens, Rooms: Paintings by Robert Burtis, Raul Guerrero, Thomas Lawson, William Leavitt and Margaret von Biesen,” curated by Leavitt, at the Rosamund Felsen Gallery--his first show in the Los Angeles area since 1990.
Guerrero sees history as a form of fiction, and he selected the San Diego museum show’s title from a 1591 text by the Spanish explorer and adventurer Juan de Cardenas, a choice that reveals the motivation behind much of the artist’s recent work. Organized by Toby Kamps, the museum’s assistant curator, the show includes about 80 paintings, sculptures, photographs, prints and drawings made since 1973.
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Although his curriculum vitae lists extensive exhibitions at galleries and museums in California and elsewhere, with dozens of articles written about his work, both Guerrero and his art remain somewhat elusive and hard to characterize. It is as though the 52-year-old’s penchant for storytelling has permeated his very being.
Leafing through a stack of canvases leaning against the wall of his living-room studio, Guerrero brings out his copy of Velazquez’ famous “Rokeby Venus,” depicting the goddess at her mirror. Deciding that the figure’s nude hindquarters were vaguely shaped like the northern perimeter of Peru, Guerrero has painted the 16th-century expedition routes of the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro over her white skin.
“She encapsulates those 200 years when the Spanish were at the height of their power and the beginning of their decline,” he explains. Pointing to other paintings that also blend art history with social history and fiction, he adds, “they are like scenarios that relate to the collective history of this continent.”
Guerrero regularly travels to remote locations and allows his own observations to mix with ways each place has been represented by other artists or on film.
“I like the idea of going out and exploring,” he says. He has made series based on trips to Venice, Italy, Tijuana and a farm in Iowa.
His trip back from Iowa in 1990 produced another body of work. When Guerrero’s car broke down in the Black Hills of North Dakota, he was captivated by the fabled landscape. “I was in the midst of this mythology of cowboys and Indians,” Guerrero recalls. “Wild Bill Hickok and Annie Oakley had been there.” He painted pictures based on the original observations of other artists who traveled with the Indian tribes or the settlers, observing cavalry charges and buffalo hunts. Loosely copied from the work of Karl Bodmer, Alfred Jacob Miller and George Caitlin, some of these works will be shown at the Porter-Troupe Gallery.
Using the triptych format, Guerrero enlarges his borrowed images to a 20th century, cinematic scale, but he signs them with the names of the original sources. “It’s an appropriated image used as a way to literally see that period through the eyes of the artists who were there and to whom I could be compared because they, too, were adventurers traveling around and painting what they saw,” Guerrero explains of his Western-style images. “They were painting around the 1860s, a time when an indigenous culture still had its pride intact. I feel that I am honoring what has not been honored.”
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Guerrero has the high cheekbones and wide, black eyes of his Tahumara grandparents, whose tribe still lives in the Sierra Madre Mountains of Mexico. Since 1973, when he used a wall-mounted and motorized Yaqui mask to emulate a tribal dance, Guerrero has investigated the meaning of his own ancestry. Although the artist was born in Brawley, Calif., and raised in Blythe, as a Mestizo-Anglo, he searches for affinities with his multiple histories.
“For contemporary artists, the issue is content. What are you going to express and for what reason. In 1984, I turned to painting from photography or installation art, because it’s more malleable. In two-dimensions, I can investigate an incredible number of possibilities, though I needed to learn the technique of painting, which takes a long time.” Guerrero moved to Oaxaca for six months in 1985 to teach himself to paint. “I like the touch of the artist’s hand. There is a personal expression brought into the artwork when you create it directly. I love the Romantics--Velasquez, Delacroix, Goya, Picasso.”
Guerrero also has painted a series of posters for imaginary films, coming up with titles like “El Che en Bolivia,” which features an apocryphal love affair between the rebel leader and a German-Argentinian woman who followed him until she was killed. The artist made the painting after a trip in 1990 to Nicaragua, where he bought the book “El Diario de Che en Bolivia” and wondered whether Tamara Bunke was Che’s lover. Guerrero also completed a group of paintings depicting the last frame of his more beloved films with the script “Fin.”
Growing up without television, Guerrero was passionate about movies as a boy, and films continue to have a potent attraction for him. Mexican songs like “boleros,” “danzones” or “tangos” also have inspired work. “Such beautiful, humanistic music,” he muses.
Most important, however, was that his mother used to read to him. “It really created an interest in narrative in the poetic sense. It developed my interest in other places.”
Guerrero’s parents married during the Depression, and after years of hard work as hired farm workers, his father became a contractor and his mother owned a beauty shop. This modest background did not provide exposure to the realm of fine art. That introduction was made by the artist John Baldessari, who taught Guerrero briefly in the early 1960s, at Southwestern College in Chula Vista.
After living for a while in Mexico, Guerrero came to L.A. in 1966 to attend Chouinard Art Institute (now California Institute of the Arts) on scholarship, graduating four years later. “When I got there, it was like finding the tribe, the camaraderie of other artists.” Among his teachers were Robert Irwin and Stephen Von Huene. “The primary influences were Pop art and the Ferus Gallery group--Ed Kienholz, Ron Davis. I liked English Pop artist Richard Hamilton and the way he preferred social commentary and a kind of Duchampian attitude. It led me to think about subject matter, but the content of my work at that time was more introspective, less universal.”
Guerrero’s Duchampian period lasted throughout the ‘70s, during which he lived in downtown L.A., married, and had a son, Quinn. The premature and unexpected death of his wife from cancer led him to move with his then-6-year-old son to San Diego in 1980. “I thought it was best to raise him where life was simpler,” he says. There, his extended family were supportive. And away from the L.A. scene, Guerrero started to paint. “The paintings were more subjective than my earlier work,” he says now. “All of the earlier experimental work was learning how to understand myself, how to examine my thoughts and the culture. Then I used the theory I had learned to explore more subjective ideas.”
This year, Guerrero completed a series of 12 paintings called “Historia y Leyendas de Las Calles de Mexico” based on a trip to Mexico City, with all its urbanity and crime, sophistication and naivete. He depicts Americans looking at Mexican art in a museum and the Mexicans adopting some of the American ways. “If I go to Mexico, I’m a gringo,” the artist admits. “I’m in a schism between cultures. But a topic like this could only happen in a country like America. In Mexico, it is all much more proscribed.”
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* “Raul Guerrero: Problemas y secretos maravillosos de las Indias/Problems and Marvelous Secrets of the Indies,” Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, 1001 Kettner Blvd., San Diego. July 25-Oct. 25. (619) 454-3541.
* “The Great Plains: 1830-1880s, Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture,” Porter-Troupe Gallery, 301 Spruce St., San Diego. (619) 291-9096.
* “Chairs, Plazas, Faces, Gardens, Rooms: Paintings by Robert Burtis, Raul Guerrero, Thomas Lawson, William Leavitt and Margaret von Biesen,” Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica. Ends Aug. 1. (310) 828-8488.