Random Readings Redux: Mexico mod

Rubén Gallo is a sharp and original academic observer of current developments in Mexican art and literature. This review of his book "Mexican Modernity" appeared in The Herald Mexico in 2006.

Mexican Modernity:
The Avant Garde and the Technological Revolution
By Rubén Gallo
The MIT Press (2005)


BY KELLY ARTHUR GARRETT
Mexico can do something most countries cannot, which is date its passage into modernity to a specific year. By 1920, the civil war had calmed and the new revolutionary leaders were eager to justify their existence by moving the nation into the 20th century — a few decades behind schedule, to be sure, but with dispatch and considerable success.

“Whereas Mexico City in 1920 was a sleepy town pockmarked by the repeated assaults of rifle-wielding caudillos,” Princeton Latin American literature professor Rubén Gallo reminds us, “by 1940 it had become a bustling metropolis full of contrasts.”

But the noun in the title of Gallo’s engrossing and eye-opening “Mexican Modernity” has little to do with government programs or population growth. It refers to the artistic revolutions and social shifts that marked the first half of the last century in much of the world. It is the modernity of James Joyce and Henry Ford, Walter Benjamin and Pablo Picasso.

Gallo’s thesis is that this modernity grabbed ahold of Mexico in the 1920s, and changed the way Mexicans saw the world around them. The rise of avant-garde sensibilities took place not just in conjunction with the belated arrival of machine-age technology, but because of it. It wasn’t an abstraction or a leisurely evolution, but a revolution carried out with the aid of five specific and surprising (to the uninitiated reader) technological advances.

How surprising? Consider:

The conditioned response to a requested list of factors influencing the Mexican character usually might include the corn plant, the mask, the Conquest, the Virgin and the family. But according to Gallo, those folkloric standbys were modified, if not replaced, by the circa 1920 advent of the camera, the typewriter, the radio, the large stadium, and ... cement. Yes, cement.

The towering art world figure in the first half of the 20th century was, of course, Diego Rivera. His role in Mexican Modernity is as an early and prominent advocate of technology as liberation, both artistic and social. In Gallo’s book, we meet up with Rivera not in Coyoacán or the Alameda, but in Detroit, where he impressed the entire industry there with his knowledge of auto mechanics and production.

Rivera’s work was the mirror image of the government’s simultaneous commitment to a forward-looking physical progress and a backward-looking makeover of the national identity. His murals celebrated new machines, but the tools he used to create them — fresco painting, for the most part — were no different than the previous century’s.

The camera, however, offered an entirely new way of representing the world. Photography was hardly novel in 1920, just more widely available to the masses. As an artistic medium it was still largely unexploited.

True, there were prominent “artistic” photographers in Mexico City during the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz and the Revolution that followed. Many of them, such as transplanted Germans Hugo Brehme and Wilhelm Kahlo, were widely admired (though the latter’s place in art history would be eclipsed by his painter daughter, Frida). But these photographers, who specialized in portraiture, used the camera to produce works that looked like paintings, and paintings from the previous century at that.

This was intentional. Mexican portrait painters were almost ashamed of the camera’s automatic reproduction of whatever it was pointed at. They chose instead to manipulate the photographic image to resemble painting. The muralist David Álfaro Siqueiros scoffed at these pictorialist photos as “falsifications of primitive Italians.”

It took two foreigners to open up photography’s modernist possibilities in Mexico. The first, U.S. photographer Edward Weston, was already a legend when he arrived in Mexico City in 1923. He brought with him a commitment to exploiting the camera’s mechanical nature rather than concealing it. Weston and his camera let Mexico see itself with new eyes, so to speak.

Still, Weston was the opposite of Rivera in that he used a modern medium (the camera) to depict pre-modern Mexican themes (the rural and the traditional). Technology, in Weston’s view, was “spoiling” Mexico. He was neither the first nor last American who would prefer to deny Mexicans their modernity in the interest of his own aesthetic preferences.

It fell to another transplanted foreigner — the Italian-born Tina Modotti, a disciple of Weston — to marry the modern artistic medium with modern subject matter. Essentially, Modotti spent the 1920s wandering around Mexico City taking pictures of the technological wonders of the age, including telephone lines and industrial complexes, typewriters and radios, stadiums and concrete government buildings.

Gallo makes a case for Modotti as the mother of Mexican modernism. She was certainly the first to follow the Soviet critic Aleksandr Rodchenko’s dictum that “only the camera is capable of reflecting contemporary life.” Modotti and her camera could show us unexpected beauty in a mesh of telephone wires shot from below, injecting the scene with a sense of possibility.

Gallo takes us through his line-up of the tools of Mexican modernism chapter by chapter. The typewriter, like the camera, was not new in 1920, but still mostly limited to the office workplace. Authors and poets were slow to adopt the Oliver, Remington or Underwood as a tool of the trade. As late as the 1970s, Carlos Fuentes could tell an interviewer that he wrote standing up in front of a drafting table, putting pen to paper.

Still, Gallo assures us that the advent of mechanical writing changed Mexican writing permanently, without offering much in the way of example. He does deliver an anecdote exposing the inevitability of typewritten manuscripts. Mariano Azuela, an anti-modernist, had written into his great novel of the Revolution, “Los de abajo” (The Underdogs), a scene in which a band of revolutionaries literally, as well as symbolically, smash a looted Oliver to pieces. But to finish his novel on time, Azuela had to cross to El Paso and type it out on a borrowed Oliver.

Commercial radio came to Mexico in the 1920s with much fanfare, and plenty of direct involvement by modernist artists. Indeed, the first Mexico City radio station was launched by a literary magazine called “El Universal Ilustrado,” which published work by experimental writers and artists, including Modotti.

The first words spoken on the inaugural program were by the avant-garde poet Manuel Maples Arce. From that moment on, texts abounded that were either about radio, meant to be read on the radio, or influenced by radio.

And then there's cement. Cement, a known adhesive since antiquity, is simply rock mixed with water. But cement in its modern form of reinforced concrete not only changed Mexico physically but also provided it with a new architectural language. And unlike cameras, typewriters and radios, cement was everywhere to be seen in the 1920s, its endless forms duly recorded by Modotti.

Today we see the excesses and ill use of concrete as a visual blight. But as it flourished in 1920s Mexico City, the shape-shifting possibilities of this “magic powder” turned Mexico City into a mecca of functionalism — the form-follows-function school of architecture.

The post-Modotti camera loved cement as well. A young lensman named Manuel Álvarez Bravo, later considered Mexico’s greatest photographer, made his name with studies of cement, including the now-famous “Tríptico cemento” that juxtaposes a pile of loose cement with a concrete wall.

Reinforced concrete also made possible the large stadiums that the revolutionary government began to build in the 1920s. Bullrings had been around, but they were nothing like the massive new complexes designed to hold tens of thousands of people.

As he does throughout the book, Gallo helps us think about familiar objects in new ways, a modernist undertaking if there ever was one. “The monumental stadium gave rise to a most unusual form of representation,” he writes, “(which were) mass spectacles performed by thousands of bodies lined up in geometrical formations.” As always, Modotti was there to record these geometrical formations for us, though without the bodies.

One of the “mass spectacles” that took place in concrete arenas was the inauguration of new presidents. Four of them (Calles, Portes Gil, Ortíz Rubio and Cárdenas) received the presidential sash in the National Stadium between its completion in 1924 and the year 1934. The stadium held 60,000 souls, a sixth of Mexico City’s population when it was conceived by Education Secretary José Vasconcelos in 1921.

It was demolished in 1950. “Today all that remains of Vasconcelos’s National Stadium is a statue of a javelin thrower that stands, alone and out of context, on a corner across from the Multifamiliar Juárez,” Gallo tells us. “Almost no one remembers the stadium, and Colonia Roma’s residents often wonder why the streets around the housing complex are shaped like a giant horseshoe.”

"Mexican Modernity" is an unexpected pleasure to read (and to look at, with its generous collection of photographs and illustrations). Gallo necessarily writes in the language of the art critic, but his prose is snoot-free, friendly, and never tedious.

For many, Gallo’s book will be a salutary corrective to their exclusively folkloric view of Mexican art and society. For everybody, it will be a memorable tour through territory at once familiar and unknown, led by an able and knowledgeable guide.