Cosmopolitanism in Mexican Visual Culture

Introduction

1 Cosmopolitanism in Mexican visual culture appears here in a series of case studies taken in historical slices from the seventeenth century to the end of the twentieth century. Cosmopolitanism is understood here as an evolving complex of power relations with material, social, ideational, and affective manifestations , which unite the local and the global, the national and the international, the universal and the particular. To associate cosmopolitanism with power is to suggest its compatibility with violence. I propose that in Mexico, as in other colonized regions, colonization generated and structured power dynamics and forms of violence that persisted in the independent nation-state. In visual culture cosmopolitanism entails juxtapositions, amalgamations, and translations of visual materials from various cultural traditions, which have the purpose of bringing home aspects of the outside world and projecting elements of the vernacular outward. Patrons, artists, and publics assign to these products certain values, frequently linked with hierarchies of economic and political power, which often reify and perpetuate forms of knowledge that constitute the subaltern subject as Other or what Gayatri Spivak calls epistemic violence.1 Consequently cosmopolitanism must be theorized in the light of geopolitics. Literary theorist Walter Mignolo already recognized the need for the development of a “critical cosmopolitanism,” a reconception of cosmopolitanism from the perspective of coloniality—that is, cosmopolitanism understood historically from the sixteenth century until today.2 Inspired by Walter Benjamin’s and Jacques Derrida’s writings on translation , these case studies demonstrate that, as in the translation of literary and other cultural material, the adoption as well as the rejection of established visual forms and meanings in Mexican art can be understood not only as the products of naive imitation but also as the results of informed selection, for translation entails a double movement in the creation of a work that is simultaneously new and indebted to its predecessors. The inability of a visual object to fit within discrete temporal, geographic, and stylistic parameters because of a surplus of referents is linked to cosmopolitanism. Introduction F A 2 ■ Cosmopolitanism in Mexican Visual Culture Take a work of art that you think of as quintessentially Mexican, dating from the sixteenth century onward, and attempt to argue that the work is exclusively Mexican or Latin American. It could be a representation of a local icon such as the Virgin of Guadalupe or a portrait of a historical person (Fig. 1.2), one of Diego Rivera’s murals (Fig. 6.3), a pre-Hispanic revival building (Fig. 3.1), or the reconstruction of an archaeological site (Fig. 7.3). The difficulties that you might encounter demonstrate the impossibility of explaining many of these works within the framework of the nation-state or from the perspective of regional geography, models that have been influential in art-historical studies. Rather than exemplifying “non-Western art” as it is currently categorized in universities and professional associations, the history of Mexican art could be described as an ongoing process of negotiation between the local and the global. Mexican visual culture frequently involves invention, synthesis, and transformation of diverse discursive and artistic traditions; it reflects and informs desires, expectations, memories, and ways of being in the world. In short, visual culture and cosmopolitanism are fundamental to processes of subjectification and identity.3 This book focuses on Mexico not only because of the country’s long history and former role as the seat of a viceroyalty, but especially because in scholarly literature it is best known for its nationalism and its vernacular forms of expression . Several essays in this volume demonstrate that nationalism need not preclude cosmopolitanism; rather, it frequently presupposes it. My investigation centers on art and architecture produced in response to government commissions in order to challenge the widespread assumption that modern nationalistic projects are exclusively involved in nostalgic recuperation of the vernacular . I demonstrate that the categories of the local and the cosmopolitan are mutually constitutive through time. The definition and validation of the local inevitably conjures the cosmopolitan. I show that in Mexico the production of the local through reconstructions of antiquity and the exaltation of vernacular traditions predates the modern nation-state and was never divorced from other world artistic and intellectual traditions. A secondary but related theme in the book is the rationale for the classification and evaluation of works of art in areas categorized as “marginal” in relation to the traditionally acknowledged centers of artistic development. The first two chapters of this volume concern Mexican cosmopolitanisms that emerged during the colonial period...