Enrique Chagoya: Adventures of the Modernist Cannibals
Walkthrough of the SAMA
Written: April 27, 2003
The San Antonio Museum of Art is indeed a walk through time and space. By organizing this massive collection of human output relative to each work's historical significance and originating geographical location, the influences of cultural heritage and that traditions' preferences for specific mediums and visual form is fully integrated into the visual background experience of each work. This approach weaves each artist into a quilt of human expression which exists outside the lifetime of individual artists while retaining an intimacy of regional understanding.
Specifically, the grounding (works on the first floor) of Mexican folk art, tools and artifacts of celebration, and the Pre-Columbian era's Mayan and Aztec statuettes and tools are filled with the same spirit. It is the layout of the SAMA, the closeness of these works, that allows this harmony to be expressed in physical terms. It is similarities in both the scale of these objects and their abstraction of human and animal forms that unifies the artistic priorities of this geographical location. The works of the Maya document the day to day lives of villages, their religious worship, and the needs of a growing populous. Stone gives credence and shape to an inconceivable deity's earthly presence, all the while centering the depiction on the unmistakably human body plan.
Unlike greek and roman examples of stone also on display on the first floor (again, a metaphorical grounding) the Maya never hide the material in favor of discovering pure human form. The material always implicates itself in these early works of the area, showing a connection between earth and mankind still heavily present. The works of Rome and Greece show the triumph of human tools over earthly stone. Mayan works seek not this idealized perfection, relying more on the utilitarian and the universal. This puts the Mexican folk art in an interesting light as well, because the dominance of wood and wood-carving is certainly aware of the Mayan tradition. Wood is "of" the earth, carving is direct interaction with the physical world. The human form is recognizable for it's dominant features; two eyes, two ears, two legs, two arms. Religion is also consistently present, weaving together another aspect of human experience through visual and plastic representation.
A walk through these areas of the museum can be an in depth study in the history of the region, the continually changing beliefs of that region, or simply the influence of time and place on individual artist's choice of medium. The transgression from stone carvings of (decapitated) Mayan human sacrifices to the wood carvings of ex-votos (the miraculous made physical) illustrates the power of place within Latin America. There is a clear relationship between the maker of these objects in the physical world, and the power these objects have for that maker in a realm outside the temporal. Each work's placement within a particular region of the museum relies on this power, because each object benefits from the humanity which surrounds it (both physically in terms of museum and space and spiritually/culturally in terms of historic time). More explicitly, the creation of objects gives physicality to locally shared beliefs, and these mental ephemera are best communicated by organizing these artifacts, as SAMA has done, by geographic location. This is undoubtedly because of each locality's immense influence over that area's artistic practices and visual memory.
In fact it is the globalization of the world's visual culture that has made this local influence even more important. In choosing Enrique Chagoya's Adventures of the Modernist Cannibals for directed study, I found myself viewing what I would like to refer to as a hinge-piece. This being a work which relies on both a solid foundation (early Latin American art) and a constantly changing collection of visual references (American consumer culture, comic books, faith in Modernism) much like a hinge relies on a wall for support, in turn to support the opening of entrances. This work is so effectively curated, that its intention of visual confusion and reliance on art-historical reference are easily found within the museum's own collection, and in fact it is this investigation that I found most interesting about the piece. Adventures uses the ancient Latin American codex form of handmade paper to collage contemporary icons with ancient symbols, this blending brings with it associations with the cultures that these icons respresent. In fact, the very codex which one of Chagoya's panels references exists in reproduction one floor below in the Maya/Pre-Columbian area!
This quotation is another reason for this work's inclusion in the museum's flow, because it links (both physically and thematically) the first floor's emphasis on ancient local forms to the second floor's gravitation toward globalized visual consciousness (and the confusion that can create). Adventures links well with the collage-based spatial systems of some of the paintings and prints displayed on the second floor's American/Contemporary art collection. By approaching the work from the west side of the museum (instead of from below where Maya works are), I passed the large airbrush of Commander Spock which shares this spatial sensibility and odd humor, specifically in reference to Captain America and Asterix in Adventures. Earlier on the west side of the museum, I am conscious of three large Roman sculptures which also resonate (although in two-dimensional form) in Adventures and links Europe historically to the Latin American traditions. This tension between the Latin American cultural past and the distinctly European forms, lends the piece energy and loads it with charged imagery. The "meaning" then exists mostly in the viewer's arena, and relies on how these images interact when combined.
By design, the museum is the best place for work similar to Chagoya's, because it is this kind of work that relies so heavily on knowledge of our visual past. It is self-conscious work, that acknowledges tradition. This visual past, however, should always be treated as an evolving set of knowledge, because new works will continue to bring new interpretations of ancient ideas, especially those which rely on the museum's cultural combining.