Viva Mexico! at Zacheta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw.

Viva Mexico! es una exposición de arte contemporaneo mexicano organizada por Magda Kardasz para la Galería Nacional de Arte Zacheta de Varsovia en Polonia. A diferencia de otras exposiciones similares sobre el mismo tema esta no solo incluye artistas de la ciudad de México. De hecho problematiza la idea de nación o de una exposición nacional al presentar artistas de mas allá de las fronteras geográficas actuales. Así pues la exposición se anuncia como una exposición de México D.F., Tijuana/San Diego, Guadalajara, Monterrey y Los Ángeles.

Mientras Silverio se desgañitaba y la polka posmoderna de Nortec sonaba en Polonia tuve la oportunidad de beber vodka con salsa Tabasco y jugo de arándano. A este experimento globalizado le llaman "mad dog" y estaba bueno. Ojalá hubiera podido brindar con Ludwik Margules y Marcos Kurtycz para olvidar las penas de la trágica historia que en estos lares ha sido aún peor. A estos padres del teatro y el performance en México les dedico al menos mi parte de la exposición.

September 11.

In commemoration of September 11 I would like to post a letter I sent to the Los Angeles Times after Augusto Pinochet died. It was on this tragic date in 1973 when a military coup backed by the CIA toppled democracy in Chile. Elected president Salvador Allende was assassinated and general Pinochet became a dictator.

My note was a response to a text by Jonah Goldberg and it was not published. Like a stubborn communist that justifies Stalinism as the only way to stop capitalism and Nazism, he justified Pinochet in relation to Fidel Castro and in order to stop communism.



December 19th, 2006.

My father's friend Victor Jara had his hands chopped and was forced to play his guitar until he bled to death in a packed Santiago stadium. My first drawing teacher Eugenia had to spit her teeth in a class in front of me and other kids in Mexico City. She got them weak after electrical shocks in her gums and her genitals in Chile. She was arrested for being a teacher in the University. Pregnant women were tortured, forced to abort and often killed. Soldiers would adopt the sons of the parents they murdered. Like in Germany books were burned. In fact Nazi Germans assisted the Chilean, Bolivian and Paraguayan armies.

The Cuban revolution certainly has not led to a "socialist paradise" and has not been the solution as you point out. However the problems are the extreme inequalities, corruption and other humiliations from colonialism and U.S. intervention. The Batista dictatorship was not "destined for First World Status" as you preposterously claim (where the hell did you get that?). People in Latin America have tried social change through democratic means. Unfortunately the U.S. has constantly undermined these efforts and supported military coups, dictators and electoral fraud in Guatemala, Mexico, Chile, Bolivia, Uruguay, Argentina, Brasil, Paraguay, Nicaragua, etc. It was the impossibility of democracy what led to armed struggle. Allende strongly differ with Castro in his belief in democracy and died as a consequence. You do not seem to see the difference.

I have also Cuban friends that came to Mexico on their way to the U.S.A. Most of them artists that want to earn hard currency and are critical of the Castro regime. However they were not tortured, had the best art education in Latin America and the possibility to migrate to the U.S. You mention that a lot of people die crossing the ocean in their way to Miami escaping the failures of communism. More people died every year in the deserts of the U.S. Mexico border escaping the failures of capitalism and free trade. The Cubans are given residence and are martyrs of freedom. Poor Mexicans are prosecuted and considered criminals in their former land. Is this a Castro achievement?

One thing is to criticize Castro, another thing is to justify fascism. You should be more careful if you do not want to end as a bar of soap.

Maria Elena Torres de Ortiz 1941-1987

My mother died twenty years ago of polycystic kidney disease in Mexico City. I made a drawing from a photograph of her smiling and wearing a huipil. She used to wear these indigenous dresses as a singer of a Latin American folk band called Los Folkloristas. The other panels of the artwork include zempazuchil flowers and arrangements of skulls as in pre Columbian shrines.

My friend Adolfo Patiño insisted on showing this Day of the Dead memento in his gallery La Agencia. Since I wanted to keep it, we overvalued the artwork at eight hundred dollars (a lot for the gallery and myself in those days). I believe a Texan collector bought it. I would greatly appreciate any help in finding this piece.

Hace veinte años murió mi madre de insuficiencia renal. Hice unos retratos de ella sobre papel con hoja de oro, pastel, gouache, acrílico, y pigmento dorado. La pieza incluía dibujos de ella enferma en su cama y otro a partir de una fotografía en la que sonreía vistiendo un huipil como cuando cantaba con Los Folkloristas.

Adolfo Patiño insistió en exponerlos en la galería La Agencia. Como la obra era muy personal y yo no quería venderla la sobrevaluamos en ochocientos dólares (una cantidad exagerada para la época y para mis dibujos). La pieza fue comprada por una coleccionista tejana según recuerdo. Si alguién sabe el paradero de la misma les agradecería mucho hacérmelo saber.

Una flor se seca y en primavera vuelve a nacer.
Nace y se corta y vuelve a morir.

Spanish Caprice.

UCLA is releasing in DVD the experimental documentary feature film Frontierland/Fronterilandia I did in collaboration with Jesse Lerner. Jesse is a filmmaker and has a blog called the American Egypt with his essays about film, photography and art. The next essay is an adaptation of the narration from the second chapter of Frontierland/Fronterilandia that was featured in Art Issues magazine. The film was funded by I.T.V.S. and originally aired on KCET in June 1995.

ORTIZ TORRES, Rubén, Jesse Lerner: "Spanish Caprice": Art Issues, no 41, January/February, Los Angeles, 1996, pp. 23-25.



Soon may the Papagos gather
Beneath the sacred shade
Where their fathers knelt 'round the Black-Robe
Listened, believed and prayed.

Soon may the Black-Robe's labor
The treasures of faith unfold.
And this mission bloom in the valley
As once it bloomed of old.

May its arches again re-echo
The sound of the vesper hymn,
And fervent souls to worship
Kneel in the shadow dim.
Brushed from each shrine and altar
The gathering dust and mold,
May the daily oblation be offered
Which the prophet hath foretold,
May its broken cross be uplifted,
And its bell more sweetly chime,
And its glory remain untarnished
Until the eve of time.

-Ildefonsus describing the mission San Xavier del Bac, ca, 1919

For the North Americans who came to California during the second half of the nineteenth century, the Franciscan Missions were nagging reminders that the West had not always been theirs. Ever since the liberal Mexican governments instituted policies of secularization, these distant outposts of a defeated empire had fallen toward ruin. But out from under these ruins grew an industry propagating the romance of old Spain --a fanciful vision of these buildings as picturesque relics from a noble past.

Where there is a noble past, or even the illusion of one, entrepreneurs, promoters and clientele are on their way. Thus while the origins of the late nineteenth-century “mission fever” were literary, the missions later inspired fiestas, parades, real state developments and tourism. The missions also attracted the attention of architects and their employers. Rather than transplanting alien and often inappropriate architectural forms from elsewhere, they hoped to develop a distinctly Californian style of building, appropriate to the climate and evocative of their particular understanding of the region's history.

While the original missions were designed as religious communities, the mission revival buildings had other uses. Given this alteration of function, architects relied on the quotation of a series of evocative elements.

Details which characterize the architecture of the missions, and which were paraphrased by builders in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, include: massive walls of adobe, (for which concrete and drywall were later substituted), the red tile roof, arcaded corridors, terraced bell towers, and the patio with fountain and garden.

Within a few years, the mission style had become the semi-official architecture of California. Architects built train stations, post offices, schools, airplane hangers, department stores, apartment buildings, bungalows, gas stations, presidential libraries, automobile clubs and fast food restaurants in this style. Endless permutations blended Mission style with-craftsman, Queen Anne, Federal and other diverse architectural styles. Mission elements were often mixed with or referred to as Spanish, Moorish, Romanesque, Oriental, Islamic, Latin and Mediterranean styles.

California's mission revival proved to be only the first of a series of architectural styles which migrated across the border from south to north.The architect Bertram Goodhue instigated a vogue for the more ornamental Mexican churrigueresco style with his designs for the 1915 International Exposition in San Diego. Architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright blended Aztec and Mayan elements with modernist forms, while others took these same pre-Columbian references in more flamboyant directions. While many of these fads proved to be short-lived, the Mission Revival has remained the most lasting and characteristic architectural style of the California landscape. Spreading from California, the taste for Mission Revival reached from New England to Tijuana to Vancouver's Chinatown and to Mexico City, where there emerge a Mexican reinterpretation of a North American copy of a colonial Mexican architectural style.

In Mexico, The Mission Revival or Colonial Californiano, as it became known there, referred less to the original missions than to the Hollywood dream. The buildings became more ornate, incorporating stained glass windows, elaborately carved stonework, and baroque elements. While modern Mexican architects disparaged the style as kitschy, phony affectation of the nouveau riche, a revolutionary revisionism later came to advocate a style that was called Neocolonial Nationalism. The resulting buildings looked much like those of the Colonial Californiano. The early work of Carlos Obregón Santacilia, the leading architect of the Revolution, includes Neocolonial Nationalist housing for the workers, though in his writings he dismissed the style as “pocho” (a slang word for someone that who speaks neither Spanish nor English properly). Ultimately, then, in reappropriating colonial architecture both Neocolonial Nationalism and Colonial Californiano emerged as something new. By the time a Mexican architect built a church in the Mission Revival style, it no longer looked like a mission. Mission Revival buildings, while they were always copies of something else, have subsequently been recognized as landmarks of architectural significance, both in Mexico and the United States. Today, ironically, some of these buildings have been declared historical monuments, a status which they had aimed for at the beginning.

Throughout the twentieth century, the Mission Revival style influenced many important modernist architects working in California, specially Secessionists like Irving Gill and Frances Underhill. But the Mission Revival and Modernism always made strange bedfellows. Anticipating later debates within postmodernism, the Mission Revival foreshadowed an interest in regional history as opposed to the development of a universal language --or international style--in architecture. Like the old Spanish Fiesta still celebrated today in Santa Barbara, the Mission Revival instigated a dialogue with the past that resonates in the present.