Las paradojas de Quirigua

Las paradojas de Quiriguá

por Jesse Lerner

En el principio del video documental experimental Paradox, de Leandro Katz, aparece una toma de un joven guatemalteco en el sitio arqueológico de Quiriguá, en las afueras de un platanal. El joven aparece al centro del video y sostiene un pequeño fragmento de una antigua escultura maya, del mismo tipo de esculturas que se venden a los turistas que visitan los sitios arqueológicos mesoamericanos. El realizador coloca esta imagen de Quiriguá en medio de su documentado estudio sobre el cultivo y procesamiento del plátano para la exportación, en una plantación neocolonial gobernada por un gigante multinacional. Esta toma y otra muy similar se repiten hacia el final del video, como un eco de un par de secuencias muy parecidas en la obra maestra inacabada de Serguei Eisenstein ¡Que viva México!

Entre las notas de filmación salvadas en el tiempo, los guiones y las variadas versiones del filme de Eisenstein, tal parece que Eisenstein había intentado abrir su obra a nuevos significados, incluyendo los primeros planos estáticos de cabezas de indígenas mayas, recortados de perfil sobre las ruinas de Chichen Itza. Este montaje debía, de acuerdo con el plan del cineasta ruso, conducir a la secuencia del “entierro de los trabajadores”, inspirada por el fresco de San Ildefonso, de David Alfaro Siqueiros, una secuencia que se rodaría en medio de los campos de henequén de Yucatán, y es también la escena que introduce el tema de la opresión de las mayorías indígenas empobrecidas en México. (1) Estas composiciones diagonales con profundidad de campo se repiten en la secuencia final inacabada; de nuevo se trata de cabezas indígenas, ahora recortadas sobre el fondo de las chimeneas y del paisaje industrial. Parece ser que Eisenstein planeaba concluir su filme con una visión optimista del México futuro y socialista, un país fiel a sus raíces indígenas aunque moderno e industrial, producto de las luchas revolucionarias que sacudieron la nación en la segunda década del siglo XX. El México futuro —todavía en construcción— representa el final de la tiranía opresiva descrita en la secuencia previa. Existe una enorme separación entre los sueños utópicos de una Latinoamérica moderna, desarrollada, que Eisenstein presentó en su filme inconcluso, y las ideas que documenta Katz en su video. Esta separación o cisma, que separa las aspiraciones del sueño revolucionario latinoamericano de la actualidad sombría, representa el fracaso de los sueños latinoamericanos de modernidad y apunta a la paradoja que se encuentra en la esencia de la obra realizada por Katz.

Paradox , de Leandro Katz, representa el último entre numerosos trabajos en celuloide, fotografía, ilustración de libros, instalaciones plásticas y videos que exploran la vida intelectual y los sitios arqueológicos mayas. Los trabajos previos sugieren con gran riqueza alusiva una gran sensibilidad relacionada con temas como el calendario maya, las visiones sobre la historia y los mitos, los sitios arqueológicos como lugares turísticos que han perdido su autenticidad y otros temas relacionados que aparecen todos de alguna manera en Paradox, en el cual se presenta la toma mencionada antes en estrecha relación con los tres elementos constructivos que constituyen la obra. Primeramente, y de manera predominante, se presenta el cultivo, la cosecha, el procesamiento y embalado del plátano para exportación, justo en una plantación cercana al sitio arqueológico que se supone protegido . Esta parte está rodada en tomas estacionarias, en un estilo impasible y observacional pero, como el resto del video, carece de diálogos, voz en off o entrevistas. Intercalado aparece un segundo elemento compositivo: los retratos de residentes locales que miran a la cámara, retratados muchas veces con un objeto en las manos que sugiere su ocupación. Finalmente, hay largas tomas del llamado “Dragón de Quiriguá”, escultura del siglo VIII que representa a una criatura sobrenatural. Todos estos elementos se presentan con un sonido que parece ser sincrónico y ambiente, sin elementos de audio añadidos.

Al emparejar la producción y exportación de un producto agrícola con las gloriosas ruinas arquitectónicas mayas, se urge al espectador a contemplar, durante la media hora que dura el video, la relación entre el pasado monumental y el presente degradado; es decir, la paradoja de Guatemala y de Latinoamérica. Más allá, existe un contraste implícito entre las pequeñas miniaturas antiguas que se venden y los enormes, complejos monolitos también antiguos, dos tipos de objetos separados por sus escalas, funciones, significados y niveles de complejidad. En su imagen del vendedor de souvenires, Leandro Katz “desmonumentaliza”, por emplear un neologismo, el pasado precolombino, y reduce el patrimonio cultural al estatus de una mercancía en miniatura. Esta “desmonumentalización” es característica recurrente del arte latinoamericano, como puede percibirse en la instalación En el medio del camino, de Silvia Gruner, entre otras.

(…)

Los turistas están ausentes del video Paradox, de Katz, o al menos no se hacen visibles. Si bien las fotos del propio Katz para el Proyecto Catherwood mostraba nativos indolentes y sin expresión, ignorantes del pasado glorioso y riquezas potenciales que los rodean, en el video Katz describe frenéticamente el trabajo de esos nativos con salarios de esclavos, el final de la economía transnacional, dedicada a extraer las riquezas del Sur subdesarrollado. Vemos los enormes racimos de plátano colgados en un rudimentario sistema de cables. Cada racimo cubierto con una envoltura de plástico, cual mortaja, del mismo modo en que se envuelven los cadáveres en bolsas de plástico. (...) La infraestructura del mundo desarrollado entra en el video solo en esa zona de contacto, que relaciona el lugar de la producción en el sur y el de consumo en el norte.

Esta viene a ser la visión documental contemporánea de una Latinoamérica industrializada, lo cual añade un matiz irónico y amargo a la cita de Eisenstein con que comienza y termina la obra de Katz. La visión de Leandro Katz es pesimista a la hora de mostrar las realidades de una era globalizada. No hay nada que contraste más dramáticamente con el entusiasmo utópico que anima la conclusión de ¡Que viva México! Las composiciones balanceadas de Eisenstein entre las cabezas y las ruinas mayas, nobles y sin movimiento, son descritas en el guión de la siguiente manera: “El tiempo en el prólogo es eterno. Puede haber sido hoy. Puede haber sido hace 20 años o mil. La gente parece imágenes de piedra, y esas imágenes representan los rostros de sus ancestros”. Este es uno de los mitos de la historia occidental: antes del arribo de los conquistadores europeos, el resto del mundo estaba detenido en una especie de eternidad atemporal. Para usar el término de Levi-Strauss, esta era “una sociedad fría”, dejada atrás por la marcha del progreso, hasta que fue despertada de su inercia por el arribo de la Conquista. En contraste, hay una composición análoga en la conclusión del filme que en el guión de Eisenstein se describe en los siguientes términos: “Moderno... Civilizado... El México industrial aparece en la pantalla. Autopistas, presas, ferrocarriles... El bullicio de la gran ciudad. La maquinaria. Nuevas casas. Gente nueva. Aviadores. Choferes. Ingenieros. Militares. Técnicos. Estudiantes. Expertos en agricultura… La vida, la actividad, el trabajo de personas llenas de energía... pero si miras de cerca, se ven las mismas caras, que se parecen mucho a las que celebraban la antigua ceremonia funeral en Yucatán o que danzaban en Tehuantepec; aquellas que cantaban el Alabado detrás de los altos muros, aquellas que bailaban con extraños trajes en torno al templo, aquellas que lucharon y murieron en las batallas de la revolución. Las mismas caras pero gente distinta. Un país diferente. Una nación nueva y civilizada”.

La significación de esta secuencia no es solamente que México se haya transformado en una nación industrial, sino que es la misma gente de color, con sus rostros “desproporcionados”, lo que opera esas nuevas industrias. No solo los rostros son los mismos, sino que también son similares las tomas en una y otra etapa del filme, con sus composiciones diagonales profundas y los ángulos bajos de los perfiles vistos también en profundidad. En la creación del ritmo visual, Eisenstein ofrece al espectador una respuesta optimista al problema fundamental de la modernidad latinoamericana: el problema del indio. (…) Inspirado en la retórica de José Vasconcelos y en la iconografía nacionalista del movimiento muralista, Eisenstein propone una visión documental de una realidad futura más imaginada que vivida. Lo antiguo y lo moderno se funden sin fracturas. Si Latinoamérica consigue mantenerse alerta de la alienación asociada con la sociedad de consumo norteamericana, entonces conseguirá superar ese modelo más que imitarlo.

La severa realidad expuesta por Leandro Katz no puede ser más diferente. Su trabajo concluye no con proletarios triunfantes sino con la escultura de un guerrero desmembrado encontrado en el altar del Dragón. Como las riquezas de la nación, esta antigua víctima ha sido sacrificada y despachada hacia los cuatro puntos cardinales. La paradoja de Katz presenta uno de los problemas centrales de Latinoamérica: la abundancia de recursos naturales de la región ha conducido más a la inestabilidad, la explotación y la tiranía que a la prosperidad y a la estabilidad social. Son muchas las posibles explicaciones para ello, pero Katz no ofrece un discurso didáctico, sino que opta por entregarnos una rica metáfora, el microcosmos de un tiempo y un lugar que expresan un rango muy amplio de ideas generales.

Los antiguos mayas son conocidos por sus cálculos de calendario y por su casi obsesiva fijación con las fechas. Se cree que el calendario maya involucra dos sistemas simultáneos: uno que infinitamente se repite alternando ciclos de semanas y meses; otro, un largo conteo de días a partir de un punto exacto en el pasado distante. El filme de Eisenstein confía también en una serie de metáforas temporales, sobre todo a partir de ese estatismo atemporal, diverso, de la marcha hacia delante con que gusta verse la historia europea, una marcha evocada en las primeras secuencias en las ruinas, en la que se aplica la narrativa marxista de la historia, pues se presenta al capitalismo barriendo con el modo de producción feudal, el socialismo destronando al capitalismo, y también se muestra el eterno retorno al redescubrimiento de las raíces indígenas a través de la revolución industrial y socialista.

La característica más retadora e inusual del video de Katz (especialmente para el público no acostumbrado a los ritmos del arte visual experimental) debe ser su ritmo pausado, que propone otro marco temporal para comprender las paradojas de la América Latina contemporánea. Contrapuesto tanto al estatismo del Dragón como a la falsa promesa del progreso representada por el capital extranjero, Paradox, de Leandro Katz sugiere que comprendamos los procesos sociales y económicos actuales como algo similar a procesos tan lentos como la erosión del suelo, o las transformaciones geológicas, cuya duración es tan pausada que solo puede ser observada con medios especiales. Paradox propone un tiempo reflexivo y calculado que nos permite observar, y además refleja, todos estos difíciles, complejos y prolongados procesos que se están verificando no solo en Guatemala, sino en buena parte del mundo.



Nota:

1.- Después que el productor Upton Sinclair paralizó la producción, el material rodado se dio a conocer en una variedad de versiones no autorizadas: Tormenta sobre México, de Sol Lesser, Donn Hayes, Carl Himm y Harry Chandlee, en 1933; Time in the Sun, de Marie Seton y Paul Roger Bunford, 1939; Eisenstein’s Mexican Film: Episodes for Study, de Jay Leyda, 1957; y ¡Que Viva Mexico!, de Grigory Alexandrov, 1979. Recientemente, Lutz Becker está trabajando en lo que se supone será la versión reconstruida definitiva de este filme.

The Paradoxes of Quirigua

THE PARADOXES OF QUIRIGUÁ


by Jesse Lerner



Towards the beginning of Leandro Katz' experimental documentary video Paradox, there is a shot of a young Guatemalan boy at the archeological site of Quiriguá, just outside the banana plantations that are at the center of the video, holding up to the camera a small fragment of an ancient Maya carvings of the sort that is offered for sale to tourists who visit Mesoamerican sites. Katz places this image from Quiriguá in the midst of his deadpan, studied documentation of the cultivation and processing of bananas for export on the neocolonial plantation run by a multinational agricultural giant. Both this shot and a very similar one repeated near the end of the video both echo a pair of sequences in Sergei Eisenstein's unfinished masterpiece Que Viva México! From the available notes, scripts, and the existing (unauthorized) versions of the film, it appears that Eisenstein had intended to open his film with a series of static close-ups of the heads of Maya Indians posed against the profile of the archeological ruins of Chichen Itza. This montage was, according to the Russian filmmaker's plan, to lead into the "worker's burial" sequence, inspired by David Alfaro Siqueiros' fresco at San Ildefonso, a sequence shot in the midst of the henequen fields of Yucatan and the scene which introduces the theme of the oppression of Mexico's impoverished, dark-skinned majority.1 These diagonal deep-focus compositions were to be repeated in the unfinished film's final sequence, again of Indian heads, now set against the backdrop of smokestacks and industrial landscapes. Eisenstein, it seems, planned to conclude his film with an optimistic vision of a future, socialist Mexico, one true to its indigenous roots yet thoroughly industrial and modern, the product of the revolutionary struggles that shook that country in the second decade of the past century. This future Mexico--still under construction--represents the end of the oppressive tyranny depicted in the earlier sequence. There is a vast gulf separating the utopian dreams of a modern, developed Latin America embodied in the conclusion of Eisenstein's aborted film project and the mind-numbing, repetitive labor and exploitative drain of resources overseas that Katz documents. That gulf, the chasm that separates the utopian aspirations of Latin American revolutionary projects and the infinitely bleaker present-day realities, represents the failure of Latin American dreams of modernity, and points toward the paradox at the center of Katz' video.
Leandro Katz' Paradox is the latest of several decades of work with film, photography, invented alphabets, artists books, installations and video exploring ancient Maya archeological sites and intellectual life. The previous works are richly suggestive of a dense cluster of concerns relating to issues including Maya calendrics, competing visions of history and myth, and the archeological site as a place of touristic longing for a lost authenticity, questions which intersect with those raised by Paradox. Katz' Paradox presents the shot mentioned above woven together as part of the three elements that make up this half-hour video. Firstly, and the most predominant, is the extensive footage documenting the raising, harvesting, washing, processing, packaging and loading for export of bananas at a plantation just outside the archeological preserve that protects these ruins. This footage is largely shot from a stationary camera position, in an impassive, observational style, and as with the rest of the materials used in the video, devoid of dialogues, voiceover or interview material. The employees depicted do not acknowledge the camera, but are seemingly absorbed as they go about their monotonous labors. Interspersed throughout is a second element, portraits of local residents looking directly at the camera, often portrayed with an object or objects that suggests something about their occupation. The sellers of pre-Columbian objects are an example of this thread; other Guatemaltecos are shown with other wares for sale (iguanas, parrots, and of course, bananas). Finally, there are very long takes of the so-called "Dragon of Quiriguá," sometimes less poetically called Altar P--an VIIIth Century sculpture thought, at least by the current archeological establishment, as a representation of a supernatural creature. All of these three elements are presented with what appears to be ambient synchronous sound, and without additional audio elements.
The pairing of contemporary production and export of an agricultural product, in this case bananas, with the glorious archeological ruins of some of the most stunning sculptural achievements left by the ancient Maya, urge us to contemplate, over the half-hour duration of the video, the relationship between the monumental past and the degraded present, but more generally, the paradoxes of Guatemala and of Latin America. Further, there is an implicit contrast with the miniature ancient objects being sold and the enormous, complex monoliths, two objects separated by their scales, functions, meanings, and levels of complexity. In his image of the souvenir vendor, Leandro Katz "de-monumentalizes" the pre-Cortesian, to employ a neologism, reducing cultural patrimony to the status of a miniaturized commodity. The "de-monumentalization" of the Pre-Columbian is, as Tarek El-Haik has noted previously, a characteristic recurrent within contemporary, post-NAFTA Latin American art, as exemplified by Silvia Gruner's "Middle of the Road," installation, Ruben Ortiz Torres' "Breaking the Mayan Code," among others. If, in an earlier age, the original carvings had been removed and commodified, often by smugglers, looters, and black marketeers, it was in part the monumentality of the objects that made them so desirable as objects to be exported and sold. As with so much of the Western engagement with the ancient Maya, this process might be traced back to the antiquarian adventurer John Lloyd Stephens, author of Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan (1841) and Incidents of Travel in Yucatan (1843) and his traveling companion, the illustrator Frederick Catherwood, who visited and described the site of Quiriguá more than a century and half ago. Catherwood's engravings and Stephens' narrative underscore the monumentality of the ruins. The former at times includes a human figure alongside a stele or carving as an indicator of scale. The monumental scale of the carvings emphasized in both Eisenstein's footage from his never-completed film and Catherwood's engravings is implicitly contrasted in Katz' video with the miniaturized object for sale.
Catherwood's engravings appear in the end credit sequence of Leandro Katz's Paradox, accompanied by the tune of "Yes, We have no Bananas," and Katz has previously addressed Catherwood's work systematically, most notably in the photographic series entitled "The Catherwood Project." Stephens and Catherwood are justly celebrated for bringing the abandoned Maya sites to the attention of the outside world. Catherwood's illustrations of the architecture and carvings of the Maya are renown for their fidelity, in contrast to the fanciful--even laughable--renditions of these objects made by the Count Waldeck, Guillermo Dupaix, and other less than precise illustrations created by their contemporaries and predecessors. Katz has praised Catherwood for his ability to see beyond the conventions of the European tradition in which he was trained, and to recognize in the ruins something "entirely new and unintelligible" (Katz 232). Where previous Westerners who had attempted this found only vestiges of imagined Balinese, Norse, Hindu or Japanese influence, "he [Catherwood] saw them as something new," and rendered this with "a clinical, profound accuracy" (Katz 232). But Stephens and Catherwood are also associated with a darker legacy: one of plunder. In Stephens' account of their visit to Quirigua, he describes the bargaining with Guatemalan owner of the land on which the site is located:
…I called on Señor Payes, the only one of the brothers then in Guatimala [sic], and opened a negotiation for the purchase of these ruins. Besides their entire newness and immense interest as an unexplored field of antiquarian research, the monuments were but about a mile from the river, the ground was level to the bank, and the river from that place was navigable; the city might be transported bodily and set up in New-York. I expressly stated (and my reason for doing so will be obvious) that I was acting in this matter on my own account, that it was entirely a personal affair; but Señor Payes would consider me as acting for my government, and said, what am sure he meant, that if his family was as it had been once, they would be proud to present the whole to the United States; in that country they were not appreciated, and he would be happy to contribute to the cause of science in ours; but they were impoverished by the convulsions of the country; and, at all events, he could give me no answer till his brothers returned, who were expected in two or three days. Unfortunately, as I believe for both of us, Señor Payes consulted with the French consul general, who put an exaggerated value on the ruins, referring him the expenditure of several hundred thousand dollars by the French government in transporting one of the obelisks of Luxor from Thebes to Paris. Probably, before the speculating scheme referred to, the owners would have been glad to sell the whole tract, consisting of more than fifty thousand acres, with everything on it, known and unknown, for a few thousand dollars (123-124).


In the volume's afterward, Stephens describes the ultimate failure of this effort:


Having mentioned in the preceding pages efforts to introduce into this country some of the antiquities therein described, the author considers it proper to say that, immediately on his return home, a few friends, whose names he would have great pleasure in making known if he were at liberty to do so, undertook to provide the sum of $20,000 for the purpose of carrying that object into effect. Under their direction, the author wrote to his agent at Guatimala [sic], to purchase the ruins of Quirigua, or such monuments as it might be considered advisable to remove, at a price beyond what would have been accepted for them when he left Guatimala; but, unfortunately, in the mean time, a notice taken from Mr. Catherwood's memoranda, and inserted by the proprietors in a Guatimala paper, had reached this country, been translated and copied into some of our own journals, and one eulogistic paragraph, probably forgotten as soon as written, was sent back to Guatimala, which gave the proprietor such an exaggerated notion of their value that he refused the offer (469).

Though they were unable to purchase and export the archeological treasures of Quiriguá, Catherwood and Stephens did succeed in removing carved lintels and other pre-Columbian objects on their travels, objects which then did in fact manage to return home with, but which were subsequently lost, along with Catherwood's daguerreotypes, in a fire in New York City on July 31, 1842.
In the Guatemala that Katz represents, more than one hundred and fifty years later, the outbound flow of resources, still headed towards the North, has been accelerated, streamlined and industrialized. The exports however now are principally fruit rather than artifacts. Many have noted that the purchase, removal and attempted or proposed export of archeological artifacts functions as a symbolic claim-staking, a prelude for later imperial incursions in pursuit of natural resources and raw materials.2 Catherwood and Stephens worked at a time when the southern and western borders of the United States remained undefined, and Manifest Destiny and the Monroe Doctrine characterized North American foreign policy within this hemisphere. The adventurous antiquarian paves the way both for investors drawn by the natural resources and prospective riches they represent, and later for tourists, seeking to relive the initial encounter with the virginal jungle. Cuauhtémoc Medina writes of Katz' "Catherwood Project" that the photographs that the tourists depicted are "looking in every direction, especially on the ground, as if they had lost something. What is missing (what they are so bent on finding) is, perhaps, the aura of the mechanically reproduced prints"(35). The images reveal "how impossible it is to recover the sensation of the first contact"(35). The original encounter that these later visitors seek has been packaged and commodified like so many bananas sent off to a North American grocery.
Tourists, however, are absent from Katz' Paradox, or at least they are not visible. Where Catherwood's images showed indolent, faceless natives, lounging languidly, oblivious to the faded glory and potential riches which surround them, Katz depicts frenetically busy wage slaves, the bottom rungs of a transnational global economy that extracts riches from the "undeveloped" south and packages them for export. In the video, we see the bananas hanging on large hooks as they are transported from the orchards to the packaging plants by means of a rudimentary system of cables. Each large stalk, with dozens of bunches attached, is covered with a plastic bag; they look like nothing so much as cadavers returning from the battlefield in body bags. Here are the front-line casualties of neo-liberalism. The transport mechanism that hauls these corpses is propelled by a small gasoline engine, alongside which an operator is seated. Within the packing plant, the work is largely manual. A mechanized stapler aids in the assembly of the boxes, but the washing and packaging is done by hand. Nothing resembling contemporary technology is visible until the end of the process, when the enormous containers bearing corporate logos are loaded aboard oceangoing vessels. The infrastructure of the "developed" world enters the picture only in the contact zone that links the site of production in the south with the location of consumption in the north. The corporate trademarks that identify the containers' owners and a scene of the enormous cargo ships' departure are represented in naïve paintings on the dilapidated bodegas of the town.
This, then, is a contemporary documentary vision of an industrialized Latin America, one that adds a measure of bitter irony to the Eisenstein quotation near the video's beginning and close. Leandro Katz' vision is a pessimistic one, depicting the brutal realities of our globalized age. It could not contrast more dramatically with the utopian enthusiasm that animates the conclusion of Que Viva Mexico!
Eisenstein's dramatically balanced compositions of Maya heads and Maya ruins at the beginning of his film, motionless and noble, illustrate the prologue of his unfinished film, described in his script as follows:

Time in the prologue is eternity.
It might be today.
It might as well be 20 years ago.
Might be a thousand . . .
The people bear resemblance to the stone images, for those images represent the faces of their ancestors (Eisenstein 27-28).


This is one of the treasured myths of Western history and of Marxist theory: prior to the arrival of European colonials, the rest of the world stagnated in a timeless eternity. To use Levi-Strauss' term, this was a "cold society," left behind by the forward march of progress, until roused from its inertia by the Conquest. In contrast, the analogous compositions at the film's conclusion are described in Eisenstein's script in these terms:


Modern . . . Civilized . . . Industrial Mexico appears on the screen.
Highways, dams, railways . . .
The bustle of a big city.
New machinery.
New Houses.
New people.
Aviators.
Chauffeurs.
Engineers.
Officers.
Technicians.
Students.
Agricultural experts . . .
Life, activity, work of new, energetic people . . . but if you look closer, you will behold in the land and in the cities the same faces—
Faces that bear close resemblance to those who held funeral of antiquity in Yucatan, those who danced in Tehuantepec; those who sang the Alabado behind the tall walls, those who danced in queer costumes around the temple, those who fought and died in battles of revolution.
The same faces—
But different people.
A different country.
A new, civilized nation (Eisenstein 85-7).

The significance of this sequence is not simply that Mexico has become the industrial, but that it is the same brown people, with their “characteristic” “disproportionate” faces, that operate these industries. Not only are faces the same, but so too are the diagonal compositions in depth and the heroic, low angle shots of the noble profiles in deep focus.
In creating this visual rhyme, Eisenstein offers the viewer a hopeful, optimistic answers the fundamental question of Latin American modernity: What about the Indians? Nineteenth Century positivists found it impossible to imagine the Indian as a full participant in the modern, industrialized world. Their proposed solutions to this dilemma ranged from the genocidal to various strains of benevolent assimilationism. Inspired in the overwrought rhetoric of José Vasconcelos and the nationalist iconography of the Mexican muralist movement, Eisenstein proposes a documentary vision of a future reality that was imagined more often than it was lived. Like the drill press emerging from the terrifying, stony Coatlicue in Diego Rivera's mural for the Pan-American exposition in San Francisco, the ancient and the modern fuse seamlessly. The dilemma of old, how does the Indian find a place in the modern world, is rendered moot. If Latin American modernity steers clear of the alienation associated by so many with North American consumer society, then it supersedes rather than imitates.
The stark reality that Leandro Katz offers us could not be more different. His work concludes not with triumphant proletarians but with the carving of the dismembered warrior found on the altar in front on the Dragon. Like the riches of the nation, this ancient victim has been sacrificed and dispatched in the four cardinal directions. Katz's paradox is one of the central riddles of Latin America: the region's abundant natural resources have brought political instability, destitution, naked exploitation and tyranny more often than they have brought the region any semblance of prosperity and stability. The explanations for this are multiple, but Katz does not offer a didactic discourse on the variety of credible explanations or the range of diverse factors involved. Instead, we are given a rich metaphor, a microcosm of a single time and place that speaks volumes to a range of more general concerns.
The ancient Maya are renown for their precise calendrical calculations and for their nearly obsessive fixation on dates. It is thought that the Maya calendar involved two, simultaneous systems--one of endlessly repeated, interlocking cycles of weeks and months, the other an ever-rising long count of days transpired from a fixed starting point in the distant past. Eisenstein's film similarly relies on a series of temporal metaphors, the "timeless" stasis beyond the forward march of Western history evoked in the opening sequence at the ruins, the Marxist narrative in which capitalism does away with the feudal mode of production, socialism in turn does away with capitalism, and the eternal return of a nation's rediscovery of its indigenous roots through industrialization and socialist revolution. Katz' video, whose most striking or challenging feature, especially for audiences unaccustomed to the rhythms of experimental media art, must surely be its deliberate pace, proposes another temporal frame within which to understand the paradox of contemporary Latin America. Counterpoised with both the seeming stasis of the Dragon, and the false promise of progress represented by the regimen of foreign capital, Leandro Katz' Paradox suggests we understand the processes at work as nothing so much as a slow drain, like soil erosion or some other geological transformation whose duration is so protracted that it can only be observed by special means. Paradox dictates a calculated, reflective tempo that allows us to see and reflect upon these larger processes at work in Guatemala and around the world.




NOTES

1 After the producer Upton Sinclair halted production, footage shot for this film was released in a variety of unauthorized forms: Thunder over Mexico, by Sol Lesser, Donn Hayes, Carl Himm and Harry Chandlee, 1933, Time in the Sun, by Marie Seton and Paul Roger Bunford, 1939, Eisenstein’s Mexican Film: Episodes for Study, Jay Leyda, 1957, and Que Viva Mexico!, by Grigory Alexandrov, 1979. Currently Lutz Becker is at work at what promises to be a definitive reconstruction of the film.

2 See, for example, the treatment that Stephens receives in Roy Tripp Evan's doctoral dissertation, Classical Frontiers: New World Antiquities in the American Imagination, 1820-1915: "his primary motive for undertaking this first journey was more financial than scientific" (65).

The Cyanotypes of Charles Fletcher Lummis

by Jesse Lerner

In a modest, largely immigrant neighborhood north of downtown Los Angeles, the city's first museum, now financially strapped and largely forgotten, sits perched upon a hilltop like an adobe neo-colonial presidio. The Southwest Museum, a Spanish Revival structure, is approached from the bottom of the hill, where the visitor enters a long tunnel, evocative of a West Mexican shaft tomb, through neo-Maya/Zapotec archway. The tunnel is lined with miniature dioramas depicting scenes of indigenous American life: a ballgame at Chichen Itza, a group of Southern Californian hunter and gathering Indians gathered around a campfire, daily life at Machu Picchu. This passageway leads to an elevator that then takes the visitor up to the Museum itself, home of one of the largest collections of Native American objects in the United States. The Museum's Braun Research Library is repository for a collection well over a hundred thousand photographs, including extensive holdings of C. B. Waite, William Henry Jackson, Karl Moon, Adam Clark Vroman, and those of one of the Museum's founders, the colorful Charles Fletcher Lummis.
Lummis was a man who wore many hats. Author of nearly twenty books, champion of reforms in the government's treatment of Native Americans, crusader for the preservation of the California's Franciscan missions, newspaper reporter, ethnomusicologist, magazine editor, Los Angeles booster, amateur ethnographer and one-time city librarian, nearly all of his tireless activities aimed to promote the Hispanic and Native heritage of the southwestern part of the United States. One of Lummis’ multiple roles was that of a photographer, documenting ruins, landscapes, folklore and architecture as he traveled through the Southwestern US, the Andes, Mexico and Central America. He shot five-by-eight glass dry-plate negatives on these travels, and then later printed cyanotype for retail sale. When necessary he would create as many as eight hundred and fifty of these blue prints in a single day.1 The Southwest Museum's Braun Library holds these negatives, many of the cyanotype positives that he made from them, as well as latter-day silver gelatin prints done after his death, perhaps in the 1930s.
Lummis taught himself the cyanotype process while convalescing in New Mexico in 1888.2 It should not be surprising that, in spite of the convenience of pre-packaged photographic papers, which were soon to make silver gelatin prints increasingly dominant, that Lummis stayed true to the cyanotype throughout his photographic career. In part this was a pragmatic decision. Cyanotype was well suited to field conditions, and Lummis often printed while traveling in a less-than-light-tight adobe structure with no running water. Additionally, his was a sensibility deeply committed to the anachronism and the archaic. When he relocated from Ohio to California in 1884, he walked across the continent rather than taking the train, in what became a highly successful and widely publicized media event. In turn of the century Los Angeles, he always dressed a frontiersman, and used flint and steel rather than matches to light his cigarettes. It is difficult to imagine how Lummis, who suffered from partial paralysis and a myriad of other health problems for much of his life, managed to transport the forty pound large-format view camera with him in what were often extrememly rugged conditions, but he wrote that even if a lightweight 35mm camera been available when he started photography, he “wouldn’t have used one anyhow.”3
Among the Lummis photographs in the Museum's collection are those from his 1896 journey to Mexico. Lummis traveled through Chihuahua, Guanajuato, Leon, Zacatecas to Mexico City, and then onward to Puebla and Oaxaca. His writings from these travels were published in three installments in the popular Harper's Magazine. These were later gathered along with additional writings on Mexico in a book entitled The Awakening of a Nation. The added materials include some minimal elaborations on his travelogue, though he as much as apologizes in the volume’s introduction for not having done more of this. There are some new chapters as well, such as one devoted to an extended meditation, at once Victorian and lustful, on the charms of Latin American women. Lummis, a notorious 'mujeriego,' writes that the Latinas’ “perfect brown is so transparent, so fine, so soft, so richly warmed with the very dawn of a flush, as no other cheek that is worn of woman.”4 Other additions to the book include his observations from an early trip by boat along the Pacific Coast of Mexico, and a section on Spanish words that have entered the English language.
Both the Harper’s articles and "The Awakening of a Nation"5 are generously illustrated with engravings derived from Lummis’ photographs. Additional texts based on these travels appeared in periodicals including The Outlook, the New York Evening Post, and Harper's Round Table.6 The Harper's and Post articles as well as the later book are, to a great extent, at heart both paeans to Porfirio Díaz, who is depicted as the most benevolent and forward-thinking of rulers. The Braun Research Library also holds one of Lummis' scrapbooks, identified as “Studies Further South,” containing materials related to Mexican travels--clippings, more cyanotypes, a pair of albumen carte-de-visite portraits of Maximilian and Carlota that he must have purchased on his trip, and so on—which adds some further glimpses into his relationship with Díaz. Included in this scrapbook is a letter from Díaz to Lummis, thanking him for the Harper's clippings which the latter sent after their publication. The dictator points out three minor errors in his own biography, as reported by Lummis, but graciously praises the text.
Chihuahua in the 1890s, as Lummis portrays it, was the bastion of enlightened development. All around the visitor saw signs of the “swift uprising of Chihuahua by the pasts of progress.” The schools he visited are characterized as “cheerful, commodious, well-ventilated” and populated with students “so alert” that they “were fit to make the blood tingle.”7 Likewise he reports that the alamedas, parks, and paseos “are being improved handsomely,” that a “first-class” water system had been recently completed, and that hospitals and public buildings were similarly newly improved. All of this remarkable progress in Chihuahua, like that witnessed elsewhere in Mexico, is taken as a reflection of the vision of Díaz, “the creator of a new factor in American destiny.”8 Lummis predicted erroneously that the issue of presidential succession not a cause for concern, for Díaz had “set the feet of his people in the paths of progress. He has given them to know, after fever, how good is the draught of peace. He has bound them not more to himself than to one another.”9
The Chihuahua photos themselves are only of moderate interest: a few views of the cathedral and of a monument to Hidalgo, shots of the aqueduct and the boy's school he describes in his writings, and images of soldiers in uniform. They confirm that his is in the end a minor photographic talent, eclipsed by his superhuman force of personality, gift of gab and indefatigable energy. Little evidence of the progressive new Chihuahua that Lummis describes is visible in these images. The great distances, usually more than eight meters, which separate the camera from the closest human subjects suggest his interactions with the local residents may have perhaps been limited. Nor are there, aside from Díaz, any individuals singled out for description in the text. Could Lummis’ irrepressible charm and exceptional interpersonal skills have failed him here? Nothing in the scrapbooks suggests an answer to this puzzle, and his diaries from his Mexican trip are missing from the Braun Research Library. Perhaps these are the volumes his second wife took as evidence during their acrimonious divorce; in his diaries Lummis had indiscreetly annotated some twenty to fifty extramarital affairs. Without this supplemental information, we have little record of Lummis’ Mexican travels other than his published accounts and his photographs.
A few short blocks from the Southwest Museum's decaying and neglected acropolis, through a working-class neighborhood peppered with pupuserias and taco trucks, sits Lummis' home and gardens, the latter significantly reduced in size by the 110 Freeway, which runs along the property’s eastern edge. Lummis built the house himself, and dubbed El Alisal. The living room features a large picture window, which looks out onto the native and drought resistant plants and the courtyard, scene of innumerable banquets and festivities. Set in the smaller frames that surround the three main windows, Lummis placed glass plate positives, contact prints of the photographic negatives from his travels, to function as windowpanes. One window is surrounded by views of Peru, another with views of the North American Southwest, and the center window features Lummis' best photographs of Mexico. This unusual display format allows the visitor to view at the out of doors through the transparencies of landscape and architectural photographs. It is an apt metaphor for Lummis’ project of regional promotion. In his mind’s eye, California and, more generally, the North American West always looked more picturesque, more folkloric and more romantic when filtered through his peculiar vision of Latin American history and culture.

1 Mark Thompson, American Character: The Curious Life of Charles Fletcher Lummis and the Rediscovery of the Southwest, (New York: Arcade, 2001), p. 178.

2 Turbesé Lummis Fiske and Keith Lummis, Charles F. Lummis: The Man and his West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1975), p. 43.

3 ibid., p. 43.

4 These articles appeared in Harper’s Magazine (Vol. XCIV, nos. DLXI-DLXIII) and subsequently in Charles F. Lummis, The Awakening of a Nation, (New York: Harper, 1898).

5 ibid., p 117.

6 Two of these are also works of non-fiction: another celebration of Díaz, "The Man of Mexico" The Outlook, 2 November 1901, pp. 537-545, and a celebration of Mexico's triumphant entry into modernity, "The Transformation of Mexico," New York Evening Post, 12 January 1901, Section 3, p. 1. The other is a work of short fiction, set in Guanajuato, "The Silver Omelet," Harper's Round Table, vol. XVIII, no. 97 (21 September 1897), pp. 1129-1132.

7 Charles F. Lummis, The Awakening of a Nation, (New York: Harper, 1898), p. 18, 15, 16.

8 ibid., p. 104.

9 ibid., p. 134-35.

DR. ATL

THE ARTIST AS VOLCANO: DR. ATL

In February 1943, the events in a remote cornfield in Western Mexico attracted the attention of a war-weary world, which welcomed the distraction offered by this dramatic and completely unexpected phenomenon. A peasant farmer tending his crops near San Juan Parangaricutiro, Michoacán, discovered a heretofore nonexistent lava outcropping in his fields. From these modest beginnings the smoking outcropping of molten matter grew in size in a matter of days to the height of an average adult, then to that of a mature tree, until an entirely new, active volcanic mountain had appeared, seemingly out of nowhere. Of the many eyewitnesses to the birth of the volcano Paricutín, none was more enthusiastic than Dr. Atl, a man whose tireless activities as a landscape painter, political commentator, statesman, novelist, poet, chef, cultural promoter, polemicist and utopian philosopher all take the back seat to his lifelong obsession with volcanoes. In the biography of Dr. Atl, the eruption of Paricutín has another significance; it pulled the painter away from his pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic activities in Mexico, one of several extremist positions he embraced over the course of his life, diverting his attention from politics to volcanology.
Atl was born with the considerably more prosaic name of Gerardo Murillo, but at an early age he renamed himself, pairing the honorific from a self-conferred graduate degree with the Nahuatl word for water. His self-christening was a declaration of independence, severing ties with family and past, as he wrote:

I am the one who abandoned his home because of family disagreements, not that other one (Gerardo Murillo); I am the
one who took part in the civil strife in Italy, Greece and Paris, not the other; I am the one who formed a part of the first
Red Battalions in Mexico, before those of the Russians, and not the other; I am the one who started the artistic revolution
in this country, and not the other; the one that was to be put before the firing squad in Puerto Mexico in June of 1914,
and later that year in Xochimilco, and again after the disaster in Algibes was Dr. Atl and not that illustrious unknown
whose name some amuse themselves by exhuming from the family burial plot … Why should I not search for my own
name, given that I am in agreement neither with my kinfolk nor with the male saint under whose patronage they have
placed me? The name I carry today is a direct emanation of circumstances, of my way of life and my independent spirit. I
am Dr. Atl because I am Dr. Atl and all the good or bad that I have done, all that has any value, was done by me, Dr Atl,
self-baptized in the pagan manner with the marvelous water of my joy of living …

[El que abandonó su casa por inconformidad familiar fui yo y no el otro (Gerardo Murillo); el que tomó participación en las
revueltas de Italia, de Grecia y París fui yo y no el otro; el que formó los primeros batallones rojos en México antes de que
en Rusia fui yo y no el otro; el que inició la revolución artística en el país fui yo y no el otro; el que iban a fusilar en Puerto
México en junio de 1914, en Xochimilco ese mismo año y después del desastre de Algibes, era el Dr. Atl y no el ilustre
desconocideo cuyo nombre algunos se divierten en exhumar del panteón familiar… ¿Por qué no habría yo de buscarme un
nombre yo mismo, puesto que no estaba de acuerdo con mis gentes, ni con el santo varón bajo cuyo patrocinio me
pusieron? El que ahora llevo es una emanación directa de las circunstancias, de mi modo de vivir y de mi espíritu
independiente. Yo soy el Dr. Atl porque soy el Dr. Atl y todo lo bueno o malo que que he hecho y que tenga cierto valor,
lo hice yo, el Dr. Atl, autobautizado paganamente con el agua maravillosa de mi alegría de vivir…1]

Surveying the life and writings of Dr. Atl, a special challenge presents itself to any would-be biographer. Atl is a man so intent on creating and perpetuating a series of myths about himself that it is no easy matter distinguishing facts of his nearly ninety years of seemingly ceaseless activity and his larger-than-life personality from his not so private fantasies. Even given the axiom that all autobiography is self-serving fiction, Atl’s accounts of his own life make for an extreme, exceptional case. He writes, for example, that while in Europe in 1900 he walked from Rome to Paris in order to visit the Universal Exposition (and to exhibit a self-portrait at the Parisian Salon, where he was awarded a silver medal), and then later that same year made "very brief visits" to Russia, England, Egypt, India and China. Given the modes of transportation that would have been available at the time, not to mention the anti-imperial upheaval that had overtaken China at that time, one is compelled to dismiss at least some of this account as fiction. Nonetheless, through both the review of his artworks and the skeptical scrutiny of his writings, it is possible to outline his accomplishments and to distinguish these from his self-aggrandizing inventions. Making sense of the multiple contradictions of Atl's life is more challenging; how is it that the same author is responsible for the careful empiricism of his volcanological texts and the considerably more speculative—not to say frivolous--writings like Un grito en la Atlántida, which advances the thesis that the inhabitants of Atlantis spoke Nahuatl? How does one reconcile his leadership role in the “Red Battalions” and the Wobbly-influenced House of the International Worker during the Mexican Revolution with his rabid anti-communist and pro-Nazi writings from the Second World War? The answers are at best partial ones. At least part of Atl’s support for Hitler seems to be based, improbably enough, on their shared interest in painting. He wrote:

I have read in various English and French periodicals some writers’ mocking criticisms of Hitler’s background in art. They
know not of what they speak. The painter has, above other social types, the enormous superiority of his clear vision of
things … Painters are the ones most qualified to govern and to create a society completely different from which those that
have previously existed. Hitler is the confirmation of this theory.

[He leído en varios periódicos ingleses y franceses las críticas burlones de lagunos escritores sobre los antecedentes
pictótricos de Hitler. No saben lo que dicen. El pintor tiene, sobre los otros tipos de la civilización la enorme superioridad
de su clara visión sobre las cosas … Los pintores son eran los mejores dotados para gobernar a los pueblos y para crear
una sociedad totalmente diferente de las que han tenido que sufrir el dominio de la política. Hitler es la confirmación de
esta teoría.”2]

In the light of these thoughts, Atl’s unrealized designs for the utopian city called Olinka, centered on an inconceivably tall cylindrical skyscraper populated by artists and scientists, reveals itself as an elitist retreat for the would-be Übermensch rather than egalitarian paradise reflecting the leftist activities of his youth.3 Dr. Atl’s is a life of contradictions and passions, of epic journeys undertaken on foot (even after the amputation of his right leg) and explosive personal relationships.
Within the history of Mexican art, Atl deserves a place as much for his pedagogical service as for his volcanic landscapes, portraits and other paintings. At the beginning of the Twentieth Century, on the eve of the Mexican Revolution, education at the venerable San Carlos Academy, the school of the arts in Mexico City, remained mired in academicism and insolated from the innovations of modern art. While the various -isms of modern painting transformed the arts of Paris and elsewhere, students at San Carlos continued to diligently copy plaster casts of Classical sculptures and old master prints, much as they had been doing for over a century. Frustration with this rigid academicism, a growing desire for reform and unfulfilled promises for change all contributed to the student unrest.4 One section of this opposition to the dominant academicism was lead by the symbolists, but Atl's dissenting voice was a distinctive one, championing postimpressionism and vividly evoking his impressions of Europe to the art students. Among these students was José Clemente Orozco, who writes in his autobiography:

Not long after this I met Atl in the Academy. He had a studio there, and he used to visit with us in the painting rooms and
the night classes. While we were copying he would entertain us, speaking in his easy, insinuating enthusiastic tone of his
travels in Europe and his stay in Rome. When he spoke of the Sistine Chapel and of Leonardo his voice took fire. The
great mural paintings!5

Orozco credits Atl’s with the role of a catalyst for the Mexican muralist movement:

In these night watches of apprentice painters the first signs of revolution appeared in Mexican art. The Mexican had been
a poor colonial servant, incapable of creating or thinking for himself; everything had to be imported readymade from
European centers, for we were an inferior and degenerate race. They let us paint, but we had to paint the way they did in
Paris, and it was the Parisian critic who would pass upon the result and pronounce the final verdict … In the nightly
sessions in the Academy, as we listened to the fervent voice of that agitator Dr. Atl, we began to suspect that the whole
colonial situation was nothing but a swindle foisted upon us by international traders. We too had a character, which was
quite the equal of any other. We would learn what the ancients and the foreigners could teach us, but we could do as
much as they, or more. It was not pride but self-confidence that moved us to this belief, a sense of our own being and
our destiny.6

Several years later, with the country now deep in the throws of the Revolution, Atl returned from a second European visit and briefly served as director of the San Carlos Academy. His tumultuous term was marked efforts to enlist the students' talents and energies in the revolutionary project, efforts interrupted when Constitutionalist government of General Venustiano Carranza had to abandon the capital city to the troops of Villa and Zapata and take temporary refuge in Veracruz.
Atl’s contributions to Mexican visual arts went beyond his administrative and promotional roles. As a champion of Mexican handicrafts, he led the post-Revolutionary, nationalist campaign for greater recognition of popular styles and a local, folk aesthetic. He invented a new drawing medium, a kind of pastel-like crayon still manufactured today, which he named after himself: Atlcolors. He also proposed what he identified as a new genre of painting, which he dubbed with the neologism aerolandscape [or in Spanish: aeropaisaje]. As early as 1922 he had sketched the volcano of Popocatépetl from above while traveling in an airplane. In 1958, at the age of 83, follow a period of work done in helicopters and airplanes lent by friendly politicians, he wrote a manifesto entitled A New Genre of Painting: The Aerolandscape [Un nuevo genero de pintura: el aeropaisaje], which declares, in the spirit of a latter-day Futurist, that “the aerolandscape is the tumult of the skies and of the land converted into a rhythmic beauty in the conscience of man.”7 In these paintings, the horizon distorts at the canvases edges as if viewed a fish-eye lens, suggesting the curvature of the planet itself had come into view. Months before his death he drafted a proposal for an exhibition of aerolandscapes from entire American hemisphere, but he passed away before completing this project.
Atl’s volcanic landscapes were derived from extended periods of fieldwork and observation. A passionate hiker, he would spend periods of weeks or months on these rocky peaks, sketching, writing and painting. The process at times involved considerable dangers, as he describes in his book on Paricutín:

Returning to my little camp, step by stem, admiring the volcano’s solemn southern side, the earth shook, and amid
detonations the base of the cone, next to the great dark lump, sprouted bouquets of fire wrapped in clouds of dust. A
river of lava ran down towards me. The heat suffocated me. I wanted to flee, but my legs refused to move. Clinging to a
little trunk of an oak I felt myself burn. There was nothing left to do but to look before dying. The wide river of lava
hurled down a cascade, while from the igneous fountain surged an enormous whirlpool of thick red flames, as other
whirlpools of dust accompanied it in a fantastic dance. The burning column extended its high point into the shape of a
cloud. I thought vaguely of running, but I could not move. My arms were slipping the trunk of the little tree, and I should
have fallen onto the ground. Unexpectedly the west wind pushed the dust, flames and heat along the base of the base of
the cone. I could breath and recover my senses, but I remained stuck to the ground. I waited a long while, and a bit
recovered, I got up; slowly I approached the edge of the lava, which had stopped a few meters from my camp.

[Al volver a mi pequeño campamento, paso a paso, admirando el volcán que por el lado sur es solemne, la tierra tembló y
de la base del cono, junto al gran chichón, oscuro, brotó entre detonaciones, un ramillete de fuego envuelto en nubes de
polvo. Un río de lava corría hacia donde yo estaba. El calor me sofocó. Quise huir, pero mis piernas se negaron a
moverse. Cogido al pequeño tronco de un encino sentí quemarme. No había otra cosa que hacer que mirar antes de
morir. El ancho río de lava se precipitaba en cascada, mientras de la fuente ígnea surgía un enorme remolino de fuego
rojizo y espeso, y otros remolinos de polvo lo aconañaban en su fantástica danza. La columna ardiente extendió su cima
en forma de nube. Vagamente pensé que debía correr, pero no pude moverme. Mis brazos fueron resbalando por el
tronco del arbolito, y debo haberme caído al suelo. Inesperadamente el viento del oeste empujó polvaredas, llamas y
calor a lo largo de la base del cono. Pude respirar y recuperar los sentidos, pero permanecía clavo en el suelo. Esperé un
largo rato, y un poco repuesto, me levanté; y despacio, me fui acercando hacia el límite de la lava, que se había detenido a
pocos metros de mi campamento.8]

Atl’s literary output reflects the wide range of his interests. A preliminary review of his publications reveals four volumes of short stories, an autobiographic novel, a collection of prose poems about Mexican volcanoes, an unclassifiable philosophical science-fiction novel, a book on petroleum and another on gold, an eccentric, rabidly anticlerical novel populated with an eclectic mélange of historical characters, the aforementioned speculative tract on Atlantis, two studies of volcanoes, catalog essays on popular Mexican arts and colonial architecture, an essay on landscape painting and numerous political writings. But further research in the National Library’s Atl archive tells of an even broader scope of pursuits. His plans for an open-air museum in Mexico City’s Chapultepec Park would have surely made a welcome addition to the city. Not one to shy away from embarking on large-scale projects in disciplines where he had no training or experience, he proposed an even more ambitious redesign of Central Mexico City, an enormous exercise in urban planning that, like the open-air museum, remained on the drawing board. Evoking the support Baron Hausmann received from Napoleon III, Atl lamented the absence of a strong, autocratic leader who could make these dreams a reality: “The first thing needed to solve the multiple and complicated problems of the capital is a dictator.” [“Lo primero que se necesita para solucionar los multiples y complicados problems de la capital es un dicatador.”9] Though the ends sought do not justify the desired means, Atl’s arguments for urban planning are all the more relevant in a city as chaotic and dysfunctional as today’s Mexico City. As problematic as some of Atl’s proposals may be, Diego Rivera was undoubtedly right when he pronounced that “Dr. Art is one of the most curious personalities born to the modern New World—his story is the most picturesque of all the painters, impossible to recount in fewer than several volumes.” [“Dr. Atl es uno de los personajes más curiosos que ha nacido en la modernidad del Continente Americano—tiene la historia más pintoresca de todos los pintores, imposible ensayar la relación sin emplear varios tomos.”10]

1 Reprinted in Homenaje del pueblo y del gobierno de Jalisco al pintor Gerardo Murillo, “Dr. Atl,” en el primer aniversario de su fallecimiento (Guadalajara: Gobierno del Estado de Jalisco, Instituto Jalissciense de Bellas Artes, 1965), 7-8.

2 Dr, Atl, Quiénes ganarán la Guerra? (Mexico, 1940), 4-5.

3 For more on Olinka, see Mario Brant, “Dr. Atl,” Américas 17, 9 (1965), 37; as well as Cuauhtémoc Medina, “El espejo celeste” Mandorla 2 (Spring 1992), 197-219.

4 This history is summarized in Jean Charlot, Mexican Art and the Academy of San Carlos, 1785-1915 (Austin, University of Texas Press, 1962).

5 José Clemente Orozco, An Autobiography trans. By Robert C. Stephenson (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1962), p. 16.

6 ibid., p. 19-20.

7 A copy of this manifesto, Un nuevo genero de pintura: el aeropaisaje, is found in the Fondo Atl in Mexico City’s Biblioteca Nacional.

8 Dr. Atl, ¿Cómo nace y crece un vocan? El Paricutín (Mexico: Editorial Stylo, 1950), 59-60.

9 From an unpublished manuscript in the Atl archive, Planificación urbana, un antecedente importante y una proposición lógica.

10 Homenaje del pueblo y del gobierno de Jalisco al pintor Gerardo Murillo, “Dr. Atl,” en el primer aniversario de su fallecimiento (Guadalajara: Gobierno del Estado de Jalisco, Instituto Jalissciense de Bellas Artes, 1965), 19.

Hugo Brehme

LA EXPORTACION DE LO MEXICANO:
HUGO BREHME EN CASA Y EN EL EXTRANJERO

por Jesse Lerner

Cuando el historiador de la fotografía Ian Jeffries escribió sobre los pictorialistas, observaba que “mucho de lo que se hizo entre 1890 y 1910 es difícil de diferenciar. Una muestra representativa de este periodo hubriera sido un paisaje brumoso, apuntalado por una puesta de sol y una finla rítmica de árboles, quizá reflejados como manchones sobre el agua.” Algunas imágenes de Hugo Brehme como aquellas fotografías tan conocidas de Xochimilco, la segunda y la tercera de las inágenes de aquel lugar incluidas en México Pintoresco, o su fotografía de Ocotlán, cada una con una puesta de sol detrás de de las nubes de rigor y la linea de árboles reflejadas en el agua, encajan perfectamente con la irónica descripción de Jeffries.
Brehme, admirado y atractivo como sus fotografias, no fue un innovador. Sin embargo, con esos tropos, gastado ya para su tiempo, logró algo notable: una colaboración significativa en el desarrollo de la difusión de masiva—tanto en el ámbito nacional como internacional—de un vocabulario visual mexicanista que floreció con el renacimiento cultural que siguió a la Revolución. Cómo Brehme, un expatriota alemán, logró esta colaboración tan nacionalista a la cultura visual revela cuán importante resultó el juego entre talentos, instituciones, mercados u necesidades ideológicas nacionales y extranjera para la invención de un imaginario de lo mexicano.
El catálogo y exposición de James Oles, South of the Border, presenta al México posrevolucionario como un punto de encuentro fértil para peregrinos culturales del norte (y de toas partes) en busca de inspiración, tanto en las tradiciones indigeneas como en los nuevos brotes de creatividad artística asociados especialmente con los muralistas. De modo parecido, las estancias de artistas mexicanos en el exterior—algunas breves, otras largas—ofrecieron oportunidades para dar a conocer su trabajo aún más y recibir nuevos estímulos. Estos múltiples encuentros crearon una atmósfera en la que ideas y estilos se intercambiaban, adaptaban, prestaban y en ocasiones se malinterpretaban. Por muchas razones, la carrera de Brehme debe ser ubicada en este cruce de caminos internacionalistas. Cuando los peregrinos amantes del arte, turistas de izqierda y gringos que querían ser muralistas, (más unos buscadores de aventuras y vagos en general) visitaban México, tenían que hacer un número de paradas obligatorias como Teotihuacan, Chapultepec, Xochimilco y los murales de Diego Rivera en la Secretaría de Educación Pública y Cuernavaca. Otro atractivo era la figura de Hugo Brehme, cuyo estudio en la calle Madero prometía a los visitantes “la colección más extensa y variada de vistas mexicanas,” asi como toda una variedad de accesorioos para fotografía. Anuncios comunes que se podian ver en el periódico en inglés Mexican Life, y en Terry’s Guide to Mexico, llevaron a estos clientes potenciales al estudio. Las “vistas” que vendía Brehme se ofrecian en varios tamaños y formatos, asi como en postales baratas y en reproducciones autorizadas para su publicación. Aquí queremos enfocarnos en estas últimas, las cuales circularon ampliamente y resultaron ser más susceptibles de nuevos significados.
Muchos de los pictorialistas compañeros de Brehme, empecinados en “elevar” el medio de la fotografía, tan menudo vilipendiado, al estatus de “arte,” recurrieron a la alquimia del cuarto oscuro y a difíciles prácticas artesenales como la producción de impresiones en platino, la preparación de la emulsión de goma de bicromato, entre otras, para distanciar su trabajo de la foto mecánica y las connotaciones de baja cultura de lo producido en masa. Brehme también practicó todas estas laboriosos técnicas de cuatro oscuro, de hecho, fue él quien introdujo algunos de estos procedimientos a México. Pero es muy probable que hayan sido situaciones económicas las que llevaron a Brehme al terreno de la cultura de masas, dictando más las técnicas de reproducción, técnicas antitéticas a las elevadas pretensiones adoptadas por algunos de los pictorialistas en su lucha por ganar legitimación artística. La mayoria del público supo de su trabajo mediante las postales que distribuia, o a través de las reproducciones de sus imágenes aparecidas en revistas como Nacional Geografic o en guías de turistas y en los recuentos publicados por viajeros. Aunque parte de las actividades profesionales de Brehme estaban dirigidas al público nacional (por ejemplo, su participación en la Exposición de fotógrafos mexicano, también conocida como Exposición de Arte Fotográfico Nacional de 1926, junto a Antonio Garduño, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Tina Modotti, entre otros ), estas postales y publicaciones populares extranjeras nunca llegaron al público mexicano. Éste era la esencia del trabajo de Brehme, la faceta menos prestigiosa de su carrera que, más que cualquier otra cosa, llevó sus fotografías a un gran público.
La primera aparición de Brehme en las páginas de National Geographic data de febrero de 1917, fechas en la que la revista tenía una circulación de alrededor de 650 mil copias. Esta primera contribución de Brehme es atipica, ya que trae a luz un aspecto de la vida de lo que hoy se llama el “mundo en vías de desarrollo” y que rara vez era tratado en las páginas de la revista. En el estudio que hacen Catherine A. Lutz y Jane I. Collins de esta publicación, se reporta una aversión editorial a reproducir imágenes de pobreza y hambre, esta omisión consciente puede ser confirmada con una revisión casual de la revista misma. La imágen de Brehme de un niño campesino descalzo bajo la sombra de un agave enorme, en el número de febrero de 1917, no está dentro de México pintoresco. En espíritu está mucho más cerca de Lewis Hine que de las vistas dolorosamente bellas de volcanes u montañas detrás de pueblos coloniales con las que asociamos a Brehme. El pie de la foto aclara que debe entenderse que se trata de una imagen de pobreza, y en los términos más apoliticos habla de necesidades insatisfechas: “Sin una comida completa, una cama suave o un traje limpio, ¿cómo no dejar de sorprenderse que el sol brillante de las tierras altas de México y los pájaros y flores multicolores no puedan disipar la oscuridad del sufrimiento, o liberar el ojo de este niño campesino de su mirada de profunda tristeza?” Consistentes con la política editorial de la revista, los pies de foto y el articulo que las acompañaban evitan cualquier referencia a la Revolución desarrollanda en esos momentos, y que prometía eliminar tales privaciones o patrones de explotación que pudiesen perpetuarles. En cambio, el artículo pfrece la anécdota, y, típicamente, una dosis generosa de sentimentalismo victoriano tardio.
Las colaboraciones subsecuentes de Brehme a la revista fueron más del tipo de imágenes que la publicación favorecía, y contribuyeron a la construcción de México como un país colorido por mucho tiempo fuera del progreso de la historia. Algunos escritores de National Geographic entregaban fotografias con sus textos, ya sea de su autoría, o de fotógrafos de alguna institución, como el de Sylvanus G. Morley y sus populares recuentos de las excavaciones de la Carnegie Institution of Washington en Chichén Itzá y los logros de los antiguos mayas.
Para los articulos de los escritores que no entregaban fotos, la revista solía comprar imágenes de agencias fotográficas—por ejemplo, Underwood and Underwood—y de personajes como Brehme. Se trataba normalmente de fotografías que captaban vistas generales del lugar, relacionadas de manera indirecta con el contenido especifico del texto.
Las fotografías que Brehme para la revista eran principalmente paisajes del tipo que apareció en México pintoresco. A pesar de que como regla la revista favorecía claramente un estilo más tradicional, en lugar del estilo pictorialista para entonces ya tan debilitado, los paisajes de Brehme—encajando en el molde descrito por Jeffries—sugieron una tardia búsqueda romántica por lo sublime en la naturaleza, con ecos de la creencia de Friedrich Schiller de que “todo lo que logra la naturaleza es divino.”
Los seres humanos, o signos de ocupación humana, están en gran medida limitados a unos cuantos campesinos vestidos con traje tradicional a la distancia, o quizá un edificio colonial en el paisaje. El México moderno es invisible en gran medida, y la naturaleza sigue siendo la protagonista.
Los retratos de “tipos mexicanos” fueron la excepción a la regla. Los retratos de Brehme fueron más discretos en su artificio teatral que aquellos “tipos mexicanos” tempranos de Antioco Cruces y Luis Campa, o François Aubert. Mientras que las imágenes de Brehme hacen poco por ilustrar la imaginación estereotípica del gringo mirando al sur, la manera en que fueron enmaradas textualmente cuando se publicaron, comúnmente reforzaron (o ayudaron a inventar) estos clichés. ¿Dónde termina la definición de la identidad nacional y compienza el estereotipo cliché y degradante? Parte de la imagineria de Brehme se funda en esa pequeña línea que separa a ambos; se trata de la linea que divide, por ejemplo, El pensamiento de Romulo Rozo (1931) de los discursos racistas (también articulados por mexicanos) sobre la supuesta pereza inherente del mexicano. En el contexto en que estas imágenes fueron publicados, es el texto acompañante el que comúnmente empuja a la imagen más allá de la linea hacia el terreno del estereotipo. Una fotografía de Brehme que muestra a un hombre maduro en un perfil de tres cuartos con un sombrero y sarape, pero sin burro o botella de tequila a la vista, fue usado por el periódico en inglés de la Ciudad de México, Mexican Life, para ilustrar un poema banal, escrito por una tal Berenice M. Goetz: “Sus cerdos, sus pollos, su burro dormían,/ El fuego de su tequila apagado ya,/ Pedro regresó al día …” Mientras el National Geographic se mantenía libre de este tipo de cosas, tambi´n usaban textos y las imágenes de Brehme para crear construcciones míticas que representaban la mexicanidad.
Si una búsqueda especificamente alemana de lo sublime en la naturaleza nos hace pensar en David Caspar Friedrich, en el contexto mexicano la fotografía de paisaje de Brehme resuena con artistas tan diferentes como José María Velasco, quien de igual manera incorporó “tipos mexicanos” al frente de sus estudios meticulosos de la luz cambiante del valle de México, —o, en vena muy distinta, las obsesiones vulcanológicas del Dr. Atl—quien usó una imagen de Brehme para ilustrar su obra Volcanes de México, Vol. 1: La actividad del Popocatépetl. Brehme, Murillo y Velasco encontraron la esencia de lo mexicano en el paisaje del valle central.
Entre los fotógrafos que anticiparon las representaciones de Brehme del paisaje mexicano está William Henry Jackson, mejor conocido por sus fotografías del oeste noreteamericano. Fue contratado por el Ferrocarril Central Mexicano en 1882 para tomar fotografías de la ruta de tren de la Ciudad de México al pueblo fronterizo de Laredo, y luego regresó a México en 1884 para continuar su trabajo fotográfico.
Al igual que el Puente curvo del Ferrocarril Mexicano en la Cañada de Metlac (1881) o la Cañada de Citlaltépetl (1897) de Velasco, o las litografías ferroviarias de Casimiro Castro, estas imágenes combinan la admiración inspirada por la dramática naturaleza con una celebración de la promesa de la modernidad, hecha visible por la rugiente máquina de vapor que penetra en la suntuosa vegetación y el terreno accidentado con velocidad feroz. Los signos de la modernidad son mucho menos frecuentes en los paisajes de Brehme para National Geographic, como si el México industrial fuera demasiado prosaico para capturar la imaginación del lector estadounidense. La excepción es una imagen usada para ilustrar “Modern Progress and Age-Old Glamour in Mexico” (“Progreso moderno y glamour antiguo en México”). Este texto sigue una fórmula favorita sugerida por el título mismo del articulo: la coexistencia de lo tradicional con lo contemporáneo. La fotografía de Brehme de los puestos de flores enfrente del rascacielos de la Nacional encierra la tesis de que México tiene una “mexcla encantadora de los viejo y lo nuevo.”
La exportación de la visión lírica del campo mexicano de Brehme durante la segunda y tercera décadas del siglo XX—un México atemporal asilado de la historia y el cambio social—, no podía haber contrastado más dramáticamente con las imágenes violentas de la Revolución y de la rebelión cristera que viajaron al norte en forma de postales y reportajes fotoperiodisticos, o con aquellas imágenes inventadas en Hollywood por quienes hacian películas de greasers.
A pesar de que Brehme pudo haber creado algunas de laas imágenes arquetípicas de la Revolución, como su muy celebrado retrato de Emiliano Zapata vestiado en todo su esplendor de charro, el México pintoresco de Brehme—listo para su exportación—, carecia de conflictos civiles, era una tierra hermosa rica en tradiciones. A pesar de que muchas de las técnicas visuales utilizada por Brehme rayaban en lo trillado, y que en manos de talentos menores (Manuel Ramos Sánchez, por ejemplo) rápidamente cayeron en la trampa del cliché, sus imágenes eran distintivas y casi inconfundibles. Es el tema y las cualidades particulares del paisaje mexicano los que hacen su trabajo tan reconocible. Al crear y distrubuir por todo el mundo imágenes de este otro México—uno más notable por sus paisajes grandilocuentes, puestas brumosas de sol y cimas dramáticas, que por el caos y el torbellino social—, Brehme satisfizo necesidades imperantes, aunque divergentes, de públicos tanto en casa como en el extranjero.


1 Ian Jeffries, Photography, (London: Thames and Hudson, 1981), p. 94.

2 Hugo Brehme, Picturesque Mexico, (Berlin: Ernst Wastmuth A.G., 1925), pp. 88, 89, 183.

3 James Oles, South of the Border, (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993) Una investigación sobre el rol de la fotografía en este proceso, mucho más amplia en su marco histórico y geográfico, la ofrecen Carole Naggar y Fred Richin, eds., en Mexico Through Foreign Eyes, (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1993).

4 Véase, por ejemplo, Laurence P. Hurlburt, Mexican Muralists in the United States, (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989). Además de los muralistas, otros artistas mexicanos que tuvieron un papel importante en la difusión del renacimiento cultural en el extranjero fueron Miguel Covarrubias, Adolfo Best Maugard y Alfredo Ramos Martínez.

5 Los murales de Isamu Noguchi (1936) y de las hermanas Greenwood (1934) en el mercado Abelardo Rodríguez, así como los murales influenciados por Diego Rivera en la Coit Tower de San Francisco, son recordatorios ejemplares de tal intercambio.

6 Anuncio, Mexican Life, vol. XVI, no. 1 (enero de 1938), p. 62.

7 Los anuncios de Brehme aparecieron regularmente en Mexican Life durante la década de los años treinta. Véase también Terry’s Guide to Mexico, (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1927).

8 Olivier Debroise, Fuga Mexicana, (México, D.F.: CONACULTA, 1998), p. 88.

9 Susan Toomey Frost, “El México pintoresco de Hugo Brehme,” en Artes de México, núm. 48 (1999), p. 19. Algunos de los recuentos de viaje que incluyeron las imágenes de Brehme a modo de ilustración fueron “El Gringo” [George F. Weeks], en Seen in a Mexican Plaza, A Summer’s Idyll of an Idle Summer, (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1918); Alfred Louis Deverdon, The True Mexico: Mexico-Tenochtitlan, (México, D.F.: publicación privada, 1938).

10 “La exposición de fotógrafos mexicanos, en Revista de Revistas, año XVIII, núm. 956 (26 de agosto de 1928), pp. 26-27. Debroise habla de esta exposición en op.cit., p. 73.

11 Catherine A. Lutz y Jane I. Collins, Reading National Geographic, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 105.

12 “16 Pages of Photogravure,” en National Geographic, vol. XXI, núm. 2 (febrero de 1917), p. 148.

13 Berenice M. Goetz, “The Mexican,” en Mexican Life, vol. XV, núm. 12 (diciembre de 1939), p. 27.

14 “Modern Progress and Age-Old Glamour in Mexico,” en National Geographic, vol. LXVI, núm. 6 (diciembre de 1934), p. 749.

15 Término despectivo utilizado en los Estados Unidos para referirse a los mexicanos.