The catalog of this very fruitful exhibition has 630 entries and weighs about five kilos; In the three and a half rooms of the March there is no room for a pin: there are textiles, ceramics, paintings, theater posters, magazines, models of buildings, stained glass windows, comics, sketches and teapots; and they cover centuries, from the mid-18th century to 2023. It is nothing more nor less than showing the thousand and one glorious, ridiculous, noble, shabby, erudite, archaeological, avant-garde, commercial, popular or highly sophisticated reincarnations with which they have emerged in the Americas and in Europe, since the Enlightenment and independence, the repertoire of forms and motifs of the great mosaic of precolonial cultures.
They form an atlas that Aby Warburg would have liked. There is room for him kitschthe most disheveled eclecticism, the art deco more stylized, revivals of all furs. There are The Mayan Theater and the Aztec Hotel in Los Angeles, absolutely delirious, between Lynchians and Hollywoodians, in a country that meanwhile was exterminating its native peoples. There is a tremendous armchair from 1929, made of solid wood and black leather, a mix of Neo-Aztec and Spanish Remorse, which adorned the Mexican pavilion of the Ibero-American Exposition in Seville in 1929 and is preserved in the National Museum of History in Mexico City: its History alone would deserve a book, an entire exhibition, because a single piece of furniture precipitates and crystallizes the thousand nationalist ghosts, Creole anxieties, repressed or unleashed desires and Christian guilts that run through the very complex history of pre- and post-Hispanic America.
Neo-exotic styles, of course, were all the rage in the universal, colonial and commercial exhibitions of the second half of the 19th century, and here we see crazy and almost hysterical examples of vaguely Inca or Olmec or Marajoara temples, colonnades and theaters that emerged like mushrooms in Chicago, in Paris or London. They inspired the refined Frank Lloyd Wright just as much as the brutal skyscrapers of delirious New York, impossible to understand without their kinship with those expos and amusement parks that made money next to him.
Also remembered here are the fairs and monuments of the style that in Mexico or Buenos Aires cemented the insecure national identity of the Creoles. They proclaimed themselves heirs of ancestors, civilizations and legendary and very pre-Columbian deeds. And, in the process, they gave a veneer of ancestry borrowed from their perpetuation of the colonial extractive system. Apart from the armchair, there is no shortage of memorabilia from the Sevillian exhibition itself in 1929. It is next to the María Luisa park and tourists do not go there. There the pastiche pavilions of Argentina, Guatemala or Peru sleep in dilapidated condition, precious protuberances of the problematic dialogue between the elites of the former metropolis and those of the former colonies. This cultural blind spot is very revealing, and in reality there is something psychoanalytic and almost Freudian in the entire proposal by Rodrigo Gutiérrez Viñuales and Manuel Fontán.
Because although we also see here naive and dignified Neo-Inca facades of small shops in Cuzco and self-built houses in the Bolivian highlands, and popular editions of pre-Hispanic and graceful types and design, the exhibition emphasizes reminding us that rediscovery, elucubration and the cyclical deformation of the indigenous art of the Americas was carried out for centuries outside of those same indigenous people, the silent and silenced majority, literally guests of stone, a repressed element that always returns to haunt the repressor from their carpets, their vessels and their living rooms. fashionable dance For some reason, as Juan Manuel Bonet recalls in his text, Breton and his most savvy surrealists found in Mexico or Peru a land of promise, with the unconscious on the surface and ready-to-wear back to Europe.
On the other hand, Daniel Schávelzon recalls in his article that almost all pre-Hispanic peoples played similar games and used the past to affirm their identity and dominance: the Aztecs declared themselves successors of the Toltecs, and in America there were Neo-Olmec and Neo-Teotihuacan buildings before for Europe to debut its neo-Indian or its neo-Egyptian. Anglo-Saxon decolonial theory is unsatisfactory and falls short when imported and applied with rudimentary Manichaeism to the devilish cultural history of America. The exhibition encourages us to rethink these issues with more juicy ideas and carries the embryo of many other possible ones.
‘Before America’. Juan March Foundation. Madrid. Until March 10, 2024.
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