I was reading the literature that accompanies the Enrique Chagoya retrospective Borderlandia at the Berkeley Art Museum. Hmmm, I said, I wonder.
In his most recent work, Chagoya is playing with "reverse anthropology or reverse Western art history."
Instead of a European artist appropriating artistic expressions by cultures from former colonies (i.e., Picasso 'appropriating' African sculptural forms to develop his cubist style like in the Demoiselles d'Avignon, or Henry Moore 'borrowing' from Aztec sculpture to develop many of his pieces, or Frank Lloyd Wright 'inspired' by Mayan architecture in some of his designs, to give just a few famous examples, and not to mention 'high' art inspired by 'popular' art), I ask the question: What kind of art would have been created if the opposite had happened? This is what I am just beginning to explore.
Seems to me, there's a lot of that reverse appropriation around. It occurs whenever cultures collide—or overlap or meet at the border. There's examples of it in the sculpture of India after the "visit" of Alexander's army; the Egyptians picked up things, like realism in portraiture, from the Romans; and back to India in the last century, there's Bollywood taking up styles of cinema Hollywood left behind in the forties.
The difference, I'm supposing, is that it is the colonized emulating the colonizers, or those of lower rank picking up some of the gold dust shaken off the the dominant culture, or, some might say, being infected by the disease of the invaders.
Reverse anthropology would have to allow the culture in question some measure of self-centeredness, confidence, self-assurance to be the appropriator—to be the lead actor in the story. Anthropology, like history, is written from the point of view of the "one," not the "other."
Chagoya is somebody, named, author of his own destiny, and so when he borrows or is inspired by other galaxies (space, the final frontier, to borrow from Star Trek) he writes it, as it were, into history. To reverse history we might need to give name and voice to all the unknowns.
The collection of "Fabiola" portraits exhibited by Francis Alÿs comes to mind: hundreds of remarkably similar portraits of a 4th century female christian saint painted by unknown hands working in diverse places and different times. Without their names and stories, the artists are a phenomenon, like prehistoric cave paintings. Pre-history=no history or anthropology.
To reverse history might be to back up and pick up the untold stories left by the wayside. This is how feminism has affected history writing. Art history textbooks now (sometimes) include women artists. Didn't know there were so many back then, huh?
Seems to me, the beef really is with the history writers, the codifiers of a point of view, one perspective. (Who are they working for, I wonder? Now that's a good question.)
I don't know exactly how Henry Moore felt about the Mayans—for all I know he may have held their culture on a pedestal and his work inspired by theirs was an homage. But I do know how the Mayans and Aztecs and other "others" have been described in American textbooks, and how the ruling corporate class in almost every country continues to see the working class as disposable.
Appropriating the language of the dominator to subvert his plans—now that might be something to aim for.
But I want to get back to the idea of infection. If we hold to the notion that there is something like a pure culture, then it follows that new influences, violent or benign, adulterate, besmirch, infect. The pure culture has also been called "primitive," "simple," "elemental," "primal" to use old-fashioned anthropological terms.
It is the other side of the coin. The dominant culture steals from the other; the edenic culture is infected, innocence lost, degraded. But this is just another form of ideological construct based on the notion of purity. How far back do you go to get genuine, unmixed? How tribal? Do we begin to trace blood lines?
That's what I love about Chagoya's work: the mixing. His codexes and prints and paintings have many possible storylines, reflecting diverse sources from pre-Columbian mythology to comics to Teletubbies. He's mixing it up and telling a new, nuanced, ironic, interesting story. Superman, for instance, was a pilgrim. And remember, the pilgrims were Puritans.
*Chagoya courtesy of Lisa Sette Gallery.
**Fabiola courtesy of Dia Art Foundation.
