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Curator's Essay on Enrique ChagoyaExtracted from "Enrique Chagoya: Borders of the Spirit", Nowadays, "Art for Art's Sake" is a fantasy left to be enjoyed by the naive or the aesthetic onanist. --Enrique Chagoya, 1992 In Chagoya's case, political and social activism is far more than a convenient art-world cloak tried on for recognition and acceptance. It has been a basic concern for him, in fact, since his student days in Mexico City before he began making art. Chagoya credits the close relationship with his Indian nurse as awakening in him a special regard for the indigenous peoples of Mexico and their history. His time at the university was one of great intellectual fervor and political unrest, following the student riots of 1968. He was one of the many students sent to work in rural development projects, which for Chagoya was "an incredible growing experience...[that] made me form strong views on what was happening outside in the world." He was married to a North American woman doing research in Mexico on the immigrant labor issue. After they moved to m US. in 1977 he worked in McAllen, Texas, with farm laborers for eight months. Such experiences have steeled his regard for art as much more than an aesthetic concern. Themes including the bloody subjugation of the native Mexican nations, cultural imperialism, and the economic and political exploitation of indigenous peoples around the world reverberate throughout his work. Naturally, his focus falls primarily on the U.S.-Mexican axis, and he feels that his perspective from the U.S. gives him a certain interpretive advantage for reflecting on life and history in Mexico, pointing out that very few young artists living today in Mexico have undertaken such themes. Partly out of nostalgia and partly from a need to reexamine and reaffirm the Mexican side of his identity, he leads us into confrontations of north and south, new and old. A definite kinship is felt with earlier Mexican artists whose work featured strong political commentary, such as Posada and the 20th-century muralists, as well as the anonymous ancient artists who chronicled early Mesoamerican life in their codex drawings. From the blunt, stylized realism of such sources springs Chagoya's emphasis on immediacy and clarity, achieved by simplification of form, abrupt juxtapositions, and a stark coloristic range often limited to black, white and red. The American cartoon characters Chagoya remembers vividly from his youth provide a fund of immediately recognizable references more iconographically complex than might first be judged. Mickey Mouse, Olive Oyl, and Superman, for example, recur frequently, putting us off guard as their lovability and humor are subverted through sinister roles of intrusion, deception and monumental force. Chagoya moves easily between different media and feels equally at home with paintings on canvas, paper or metal, constructed boxes in the style of Joseph Cornell, large-scale drawings in charcoal and pastel, etchings and monotypes, or smaller montaged works combining phototransfer images with ink and watercolor drawings. Basic to all is the collage effect of juxtaposed disparate elements, recalling the expressive photomontages, for example, of John Heartfield and Max Ernst. Indeed, for Chagoya the act of "sketching" to gather ideas for different works very often consists of collecting photocopies of images that strike his attention in books or articles, which might later be manipulated into his own compositions. Recombined intuitively or "subliminally", as Chagoya puts it, these juxtapositions release new and sometimes unexpected meanings: "When two things get mixed, a third reality appears. This is part of my own history--new things are constantly being shaped in life--old borders are being crossed." Almost always in this appropriation technique, however, the borrowed image is reworked in one medium or another to give it a new life within Chagoya's own compositional world. In some of his recent monotypes, for example, such as Diosas and Broadcast, photocopy transfers are changed in color and printed over, and transfer images in Uprising of the Spirit are repainted, changing their character markedly. Such image transfers are particularly abundant in Chagoya's codex books, an art form that links him directly to pre-Columbian traditions. Chagoya appropriate[s] a cast of small Indian warriors, priests, and other figures and interject[s] them into a cross-cultural melee of images drawn, for example, from Catholic iconography, modern European art, cartoons, pre-Columbian monuments, and modern military hardware. Specific narrative subthemes are difficult to identify, but all take part in the cultural cross-fertilizations basic to Chagoya's art. Chagoya's sometimes bitter, sometimes humorous, but always engaging montages of imagery and associations propose a communal internal voyage. As he puts it, "In a world which has masses of people who move, we are talking about a spiritual experience in everybody. Everybody is an immigrant of some kind." In the excursions on which he leads us across historical, geographic, and cultural limits, we bring our own personal and national histories and the sensitivities they entail. Chagoya understands as well as anyone the power of art to combat inertia, shake self-satisfaction, and provoke consciousness in a way that can join disparate peoples with little in common but their underlying humanity. He takes us across artificial barriers to make us feel more acutely our place in this human continuum and also our responsibilities in the international sphere. |