[Marxism] 2 NY art shows of interest

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

NY Times, April 22, 2005
PHOTOGRAPHY REVIEW
From Every Angle, a Rising Revolution
By HOLLAND COTTER

HOW this load of centuries wants to knock me down," wrote the Puerto 
Rican-born poet Julia de Burgos. Seeing her candid, youthful-looking face 
in a 1940's photograph of Latino writers in New York, you would not think 
that history - her own - would lead to her death on the streets of 
Manhattan a few years later, in her late 30's.

A small framed photograph of her, a studio head shot, sits on a table in 
the lobby of the Julia de Burgos Cultural Center at Lexington Avenue and 
106th Street in East Harlem - Spanish Harlem, El Barrio - where she lived. 
And hers is just one portrait in a neighborhood full of them: pop stars on 
posters in Mexican and Puerto Rican music shops; political heroes on 
murals; blank-faced saints, known by the symbols they carry, in churches 
and botánicas.

There's yet another kind of portrait over on Fifth Avenue at the Museum of 
the City of New York: a historical snapshot of El Barrio itself, as seen 
through pictures taken at a revolutionary moment in the 1960's. And, next 
door, El Museo del Barrio is following up its recent survey of Latin 
American portraiture with a photo-documentary likeness of a single time and 
place, Mexico in the early 20th century.

"Mexico: The Revolution and Beyond, Photographs by Casasola 1900-1940" is 
in every way extraordinary. It has the span of a Greek epic, and the nested 
themes and subplots of a picaresque novel. The protagonists, alternately 
visionary and delusional, often dangerous, are Olympian in scale. Its bit 
parts are vividly drawn. Its chorus - a curtain of faces, a sea of heads, a 
blur of bodies - says much by saying almost nothing, by simply being there 
through everything, something surging into action, mostly observing and 
absorbing.

As complex stories often are, this one is the product of many hands, the 
first belonging to Agustin Victor Casasola. Born in Mexico City in 1874, he 
began his career as a typographer, then turned to reporting, and around 
1900 began to take pictures. Photography was coming into its own as a news 
medium. It was big, and he decided to make it his business.

Enlisting the help of his gifted younger brother, Miguel, and other 
professionals, he set up a photo agency that, over four decades, generated 
hundreds of thousands of pictures. Agustin Casasola put his own name on 
most of them, whether he had taken them or not. We don't know his reason 
for doing so. Was it professional egotism, or a practical effort to 
consolidate a brand name? We do know that he understood the value of 
photography as a form of history, which led him to preserve nearly every 
image handled by the firm.

Some 500,000 prints and negatives survive as the Casasola Archive in the 
National Institute of Anthropology and History in Mexico. The 92 recently 
reprinted pictures in the show here, organized by the photographer Pablo 
Ortiz Monasterio, are culled from it.

History, in its turn, gave Casasola a grand subject: an era of hair-raising 
political and social upheaval that had photographers dashing from 
presidential festivities, to firing squads, to guerrilla camps, to night 
courts and jazz cafes. Mexican culture, already an explosive hybrid, was in 
acute transition. A capitalist economy was making the rich impossibly rich, 
the poor starvingly poor. A nation that had joined the larger world was 
simultaneously looking back to what it fantasized it once had been.

The exhibition touches on all of this. Among the earliest pictures is a 
1910 photograph of Gen. Porfirio Díaz, president of the country for more 
than 30 years. He introduced technology, encouraged international trade and 
enforced a civic peace. He also stripped peasants of land and basically 
made them slaves to foreign investors.

By 1910, popular anger was volcanic. Charismatic figures like Emiliano 
Zapata and Francisco Villa, known as Pancho Villa, amassed provincial 
armies so huge and vengeful that the government could not resist them. Díaz 
fled to France in 1911; Casasola photographed his ship pulling out. A new 
president, Francisco I. Madero, took power but was a washout. He was 
killed, someone else took over, and a pattern was set: revolution was 
literally that, a revolving wheel of disruption that carried some forward, 
crushed others.

full: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/22/arts/design/22cott.html (includes 
slide show)

---

NY Times, April 22, 2005
ART REVIEW | 'GEORGE CATLIN AND HIS INDIAN GALLERY'
Witness to a Dying Way of Tribal Life
By GRACE GLUECK

George Catlin (1796-1872) may not have been the most refined of painterly 
talents. But he had a mission. And that was to record American Indian life 
and culture before it was obliterated by the country's territorial expansion.

In five trips during the 1830's, this ambitious artist-showman visited 50 
tribes living west of the Mississippi River, from present-day North Dakota 
to Oklahoma. He made more than 500 paintings of the Plains Indians, the 
first to record them in their own environment.

He wanted, he wrote, "by the aid of my brush and my pen, to rescue from 
oblivion so much of their primitive looks and customs as the industry and 
ardent enthusiasm of one lifetime could accomplish, and set them up in a 
gallery unique and imperishable for the use of future ages."

The purity of Catlin's motives, however, has always been challenged, in 
light of his ambitions to further his career with an attention-getting 
project and his later exploitation of Indians in the Wild West 
extravaganzas he staged abroad.

"Catlin can be seen today as a cultural P. T. Barnum, a crass huckster 
trading on other people's lives and lifeways," writes W. Richard West, 
director of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of the American 
Indian.

Mr. West, a Southern Cheyenne and member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes 
of Oklahoma, makes his remarks in the catalog for the current show, "George 
Catlin and His Indian Gallery," organized by the Smithsonian and now at the 
New York branch of the museum, the George Gustav Heye Center.

"A native person is challenged, I think, not to feel on some level a 
profound resentment toward Catlin; his obsession with depicting Indians has 
an extremely invasive undertone to it," Mr. West says.

Still, he acknowledges the artist's "impressive output," noting that "he 
placed great value on Indians and their cultures, revealing genuine concern 
at how they were being systematically stressed and destroyed by non-Indians."

Despite the negative feelings Catlin has aroused, his project was an 
amazing feat. The more than 100 portraits, landscapes and scenes of tribal 
life selected for display give an account of Plains Indians life in 
wonderful and sometimes harrowing detail.

There are masterly portraits of Indian braves in full regalia, like the 
tender and beautiful study of Osceola (the Black Drink), the distinguished 
Seminole chief who led his tribe in its war against the government's Indian 
Removal Act of 1830; and the handsome Hee-oh'ks-te-kin (Rabbit's Skin 
Leggings), a regal-looking Nez Perce tribesman in an embroidered buckskin 
shirt.

And there are sad portraits, like that of the blind, alcoholic 
Shin-gos-se-moon (Big Sail), a chief of the Ottawa tribe introduced to 
whiskey, Catlin said, by the "white man's cupidity."

Catlin painted not only peaceful tribal scenes like the Dog Feast staged by 
Western Sioux at their encampment near Fort Pierre, in which dog meat was 
offered to placate offended spirits (Catlin said it didn't come up to 
buffalo or venison), but also a grisly series depicting the O-kee-pa 
ceremony of the Mandans. This was an excruciating initiation rite in which 
promising young warriors, weighed down by buffalo skulls, weapons and 
medicine bags, were suspended from the roof of the medicine lodge by cords 
anchored in their chests and shoulder muscles until they tore free or lost 
consciousness.

(Few if any Mandans lived to substantiate or refute the sometimes disputed 
truth of these paintings; after Catlin made them, the tribe was all but 
wiped out by a smallpox epidemic in 1837.)

Buffalo, essential to Indian sustenance, also figure in the Catlin 
iconography. In one scene Catlin depicts the dying agony of a buffalo, shot 
with an arrow and streaming blood. In another he depicts Indians disguised 
in wolf skins creeping up on buffalo herds. The beasts, used to wolves 
removing the carcasses of their dead calves, paid no attention and were 
easily shot down at close range.

full: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/22/arts/design/22catlin.html

---
Louis Proyect
Marxism list: www.marxmail.org


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