Found in Translation: Design in California and Mexico, 1915–1985, Pacific Standard Time Festival: Live Art LA/LA (review)

During this iteration of the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time Festival: LA/LA (PST LA/LA) initiative, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) undertook a massive survey of objects and ephemera that charted transnational exchanges in architecture and design between Mexico and the Golden State. However, Found in Translation: Design in California and Mexico, 1915–1985 leads its viewer to wonder what exactly has been “found” in its dizzying trek across seven decades of US-Mexico cultural relations. The exhibition begins in the nineteenth century (as do so many twentieth-century narratives) with photographs of California missions by Carleton Watkins. Other items on display are as predictable as ephemera from the 1915 Panama–California Exposition in San Diego and as bizarre as a montage—Raquel! (1970) features the Hollywood icon Raquel Welch singing and dancing up the steps of the Pyramid of the Moon at Teotihuacán to “Age of Aquarius” with an armada of what look like chintzy extras from a Jodorowsky film.

The exhibition has a number of successes. Its catalog features essays by a score of esteemed Latin Americanists, including James Oles, Jesse Lerner, and Keith Eggener. The show’s curators also did an admirable job of evading a dull chronology or historical tendencies to (only) track aesthetic movements from margin to center. Found in Translation does, however, have a thematic problem. It is organized according to four themes: folk art and craft, modernism, and both pre-Hispanic and Spanish revival. Thematic curation suggests that objects can be categorized one way or the other— in this case, for example, that “modernism” is somehow distinct from the other themes like oil from water. The reality is far more nuanced, however, especially concerning the recuperation of pre-Hispanic folk and craft traditions and aesthetics in the making of both US and Mexican modernisms.

Such a dilemma is made obvious by a brief case study of Frank Lloyd Wright’s ornamented neo-Mayan California residences. Under its pre-Hispanic revival theme, the exhibition includes such items as a cast concrete finial from Wright’s Hollyhock House, completed in 1921, and a short film shot at the Ennis House (1923–1924) by the most prolific Mayan revivalist, Robert Stacy-Judd. From a time period when many “exotic,” “archaic,”¹ or marginalized aesthetics were used interchangeably or in otherwise troubling ways, Mayan revivalism is indeed a cog in a narrative that included, as Shelly Errington describes, a notion of the indigene as “part of a timeless ‘national heritage’ whose living exemplars have disappeared or are in the process of disappearing through ‘modernizing.’”² Yet Indigenous revivals are not so categorically distinct in all cases from modern architecture and design. The fortress-like Ennis House is defensibly “high” American modern architecture in its fledgling state as Wright turned away from the prairie style and toward the works of his later career. Indeed, Wright’s innovation with reinforced concrete to create the graduated, cantilevered patios of Fallingwater (1935)—one of the architect’s most iconic and internationally recognized works of twentieth-century American architecture—is a technique the architect developed in a structural renovation of the Ennis House for its second owner.

The intersection between pre-Hispanic revival and modernism can be problematized even further. Wright forged a novel path with his modern Mayan revival projects, but the residences began their steep ascent into deterioration almost immediately, plagued by material fragility and major oversights regarding the various site conditions of Greater Los Angeles. As such, they remain somewhat insufficient regional expressions of Wright’s trademark organic modernity. The famed muralist Diego Rivera and a Mexican architect whose work is also featured in the exhibition, Juan O’Gorman, were nevertheless drawn to the “ideological potential”³ of Wright’s organic architecture. O’Gorman contended that “many of [Wright’s] buildings, definitely influenced...