Patricia Lagarde. Insecto 003 . Ciudad de MĂŠxico, 2000.
Viviana Leija. De la seri e: Historias de pavimento. México, 1999 .
"Pero si el ojo humano pu ede engañarse, si la fantasía pu ede ser exasperada y desviada hasta el ex tremo de crear fantasmas, si la fe ciega puede dar vida a las sombra s, todo es to no ocurre para el frío e impasible objetivo de la máquina fotográfica. Y del Himalaya co mienza n a llega r las primeras imágenes de desconce rtantes huellas impresas en la nieve, grabadas en el hielo o modeladas en la arena de los torrentes. Ya no es posible la duda: un ser desconocido y fantástico se pasea por las grandes montañas, recorre los pasos más desolados, se adentra en los va lles más perdidos." Cario Graffigna . Yeti. Storia e mito dell'uomo delle nevi. Trad.: Andrés Lupo. Feltrinelli Editore, Milán, 1962.
Eric Shipton . Las huellas del Yeti fotog rafiadas por el expedicionario en busca de la ruta sur al Everest, 1936.
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. . rontas de una pelea de gallos. Fontcuberta. fl~~1 ~: I~~~:ntas extraĂdas del fondo y silueteadas. Joancompuesta por Aspecto una suceslon "Escritura"
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LA POÉTICA DE LAS ALAS
[... ] De todos los seres voladores, sólo el pájaro continúa y reaÜza la imagen que, desde el punto de vista humano, puede llamarse imagen primaria, la que vivimos en los sueños profundos de nuestra feliz juventud. El mundo visible ha sido hecho para ilustrar las bellezas del sueño.
Gaston Bachelard. El aire y los sueños. Ensayos sobre la imaginación del movimiento.
México: FCE, 1958. Traducción: Ernestina de Champourcin.
An贸nimo. Fotograf铆a publicitaria . la Haba na, ca. 1910.
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Isabel Flores. Cigüeña. De la serie: Notas fotográficas de un aficionado en sus viajes (viaje segundo). 27.5 x 14.5 cm. Papel salado.
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Isabel Flores. PelĂcanos. De la serie: Notas fotogrĂĄficas de un aficionado en sus viajes (viaje primero). 28.5 x 13.5 cm. Goma bicromatada sobre zinc.
21
Isabel Flores. La Bienvenida. De la serie: Noticias de un marinero náufrago. 30 x 40 cm. Gelatinobromuro de plata virado al té.
Isabel Flores. Primer día en la Isla de los Pájaros. De la serie: Noticias de un marinero náufrago. 30 x 40 cm. Gelatinobromuro de plata virado al té.
Isabel Flores. El hombre·pájaro. De la serie: Noticias de un marinero náufrago. 30 x 40 cm . Gelatinobromuro de plata virado al té.
Los intervalos. jean-Luc Mylayne (Amiens, Francia, 1946), fotógrafo nómada, ha ido en busca de sus pájaros -petirrojos, grajos, golondrinas y gorriones- durante semanas y meses. A lo largo de su vida ha producido menos de 150 fotografías. Cada imagen, aunque captada en una fracción de segundo, es el fruto de una paciente observación . Mylayne no persigue su presa con un telefoto; no le interesa lo exótico ni lo inusual. Como un director de cine, diseña cuidadosamente cada aspecto de la escena: la calidad de la luz -a menudo artificial-, la hora del día, la estación, los elementos del paisaje, en espera de su actor. Quizás un año después de haber sido concebida, la foto es finalmente completada cuando el pájaro vuela y ocupa el lugar que se le tiene asignado dentro del encuadre . La intensa proximidad de Mylayne con sus modelos es evidente cuando, en algunas fotografías, es posible captar su imagen reflejada en los ojos del pájaro. En ocasiones, el ave es parcialmente oscurecida por el follaje, captada en pleno vuelo, o bien aparece, diminuta, dentro de la composición . Hay incluso que esforzarse por encontrarla oculta en su hábitat natural. Sus pájaros son tomados desde una perspectiva distorsionada, en virtud del uso de un lente bifocal, que resulta en dos profundidades de campo distintas. El arte de jean-Luc
Jean-Luc Mylayne. No. 52 Abril 1980. Cortesía de la Gale ría Barbara Gladstone.
Mylayne es esencialmente conceptual. Tiene que ver con la "disciplina de experimentar los intervalos", en contraste con los momentos decisivos tan propios del medio fotográfico . De su obra ha escrito Mark Dion : "Estas vívidas imágenes parecen ser, en un principio; casi documentales, pero en realidad son una combinación de los intereses de toda una vida en la ornitología y el arte. Cada foto es la culminación de meses de preparación y estudio meticuloso. En la elección de sus títulos (No. 113, Marzo Abril Mayo 1992), Mylayne contradice la inmediatez de la fotografía, al fechar la búsqueda nómada de estos pájaros. Las dimensiones de sus impresiones, por lo general, cuadradas, a veces aluden a horas del día, días del año, etc. El énfasis del artista en la originalidad de sus impresiones se opone explícitamente al concepto de reproducción masiva, inherente al proceso fotográfico. Cada una de sus fotografías, únicas, representa no sólo la milésima de segundo de la toma fotográfica, sino también los días, semanas y meses de devoción y paciencia que lleva construir un vínculo de confianza con el sujeto. Lo crucial de su trabajo es el momento en que el pájaro le regresa la mirada al fotógrafo. Es una mirada no de hostilidad o desconfianza sino de reconocimiento."
jean-Luc Mylayne. No. 121 Agosto Septiembre 1992. Cortesía de la Galería Barbara Gladstone .
26
Herke Csaba. Buenos Aires, 1999.
Graciela Iturbide. Alemania, 1984.
laureana Toledo. De la serie: Patrones migratorios, 1999.
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31
Eisa Medina. El Grande, Coatepec, Veracruz, 1989.
Alfredo Carrillo. Deja-vĂş. La orilla de la madrugada. Ciudad )uĂĄrez, Chihuahua, 1999.
Lizet escuchó mi explicación sobre el "instante decisivo" de Cartier-Bresson . Convencida de que en su pueblo, Guelatao, nunca pasaría nada extraordinario o sorprendente, decidió crear su propio "instante ...": le pidió a un amigo que aventara unos cachorros al aire para que ella los atrapara al vuelo con su cámara . Mariana Rosenberg
38
lizet Hernández Arreortúa. Taller de fotografía de Guelatao, Oaxaca, 1999.
Pavka Segura. Ciudad de MĂŠxico, 1997.
Mariana Yampolsky. MĂŠxico, D.F. , 1999.
Mariana Yampolsky. Pato Dona/d. Estado de Puebla, 2000.
Robalo plateado . Ampliamente distribuido, vora z predador de larvas, se alimenta en el fond o y en la superficie. Utilizado en Vera cruz con magníficos resultados. Tiene la ventaja de que en vez de desovar da a luz directa mente a las crías. Rápida propagación. Brinca cuand o se asusta y puede sa lirse de los recipi entes. Se recomi enda para aljibes, pozos y vasijas de cuello estrecho. No alcanza su tamaño máx imo hasta que entra en contacto con el ag ua dulce. Se utilizó por primera vez en Culiacán en septiembre de 1922, pero todos los ejemplares muri eron al tercer día . La experiencia en Maza tl án demuestra que es muy delicado y qu e no se adapta fá cilmente a ambientes nuevos. Se le ha identificado en los siguientes ríos: Mocori to, Hum aya, Presidio, Rosa ri o, Acaponeta y Sa ntiag o. Foto: McKenna, Mazatlán, ca. 192 3.
6S
Chalaco, Dormitator latifrons. Según el doctor Eigenmann, de la Universidad de Indiana, se encuentra en la plataforma continental desde el norte de Perú hasta California. Se alimenta en el fondo y es un voraz predador de larvas. Este pez fue utilizado por Connor en Guayaquil, y lo consideró el más satisfactorio para consumir larvas y huevecillos de mosquito en recipientes pequeños. Muestra la mayor resistencia al manejo y los cambios de ambiente de todos los peces de la costa sinaloense. Se le encuentra en todos los ríos y pequeños arroyos, desde el Mocorito al Santiago. Ha sido utilizado con sobrado éxito y de manera muy económica en Culiacán y Mazatlán. Foto: McKenn a, Mazatlán, ca. 1923.
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Mojarra verde. Distribución relativamente amplia. Se alimenta en el fondo y en la superficie. Voraz predador de larvas y de comportamiento agresivo. Más delicado que el chalaco. Debe estudia rse más a fondo. Se le encuentra en los ríos Presidio y
Rosario. Foto: MeKenna, Mazatlán, ca. 1923.
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Sebastián Rodríguez. Arca de Noé. Ciudad de México, 1998.
Víctor Mendiola. De la seri e: Chapultepec. México, 1998. Página s 70- 79
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Los zoos: una tradición antigua en China, América Tenochtitlan y Roma; y moderna por la parte europea, donde se creó e l concepto de jardín biológico, es una preocupación por lograr ecosistemas en parques que recorremos a pie mirando hocicos, picos, cuernos, anima les trepadores y reptiles, animales del agua y verlos envueltos de pestilentes humores que convierten el entorno en algo punitivo y patético: los hipopótamos en sus falsas charcas. Su institucionalizada cultura de preservación nos conglomera para ver a los reclutas del mundo animal, del que nos hemos alejado en las barcas de la industrialización tecnificada . Para john Berger, las jaulas configuran un marco al igual que aquellos que enmarcan los cuadros de una galería: ¿obras de qué artista son estos seres enjaulados? La variada diversidad de las especies no nos traslada a los respectivos hábitats de esos cuadrúpedos o alados, reptiles, carnívoros u ovíparos sino a las imágenes que hemos visto de ellos en escenarios silvestres, en los programas de jacques-Yves Cousteau, los de Discovery Channel y otros documentales que se divulgan en la televisión donde vemos a escala electrizada los tamaños imponentes, las fabulosas formas y las vistosas pieles. Programas: teatralidad visual para devolver cierto sentido de la aventura indómita a nuestros civilizados instintos. Zoológicos: centros donde no vemos salir al toro y al hombre que lo enfrenta; safaris seguros donde la danza se sustituye por el lento paseo de la fascinación caída y es una procesión sin significaciones precisas. Ver a los animales no nos rel iga a nuestra animalidad suspendida, no hay una identificación visible más que en la vanidad de compararnos con ellos mirándonos en sus ojos a nosotros mismos. Decimos entonces que estamos 74
hechos de la misma sustancia. Pero, ¿dónde se pervierte esa susta ncia sino en nuestra voluntad de poder? Con ellos compartimos el sentido de territori o propicio, las migraciones, mas a ellos los dirige un in stinto que no habla, ell os g raznan, ru gen, silban y bufa n, lleva n la rosa de los vientos en el pecho, y a nosotros la vo luntad de pod er y el principio de propiedad nos guía. ¿Qué hacer sino imitarl os? Poe dijo con un cuervo never more un a noche tó rrida de sentimientos tormentosos. El joven fotóg rafo descubre en close up partes de los cuerpos de los animales; Borges mezcla las partes co mo en un foto montaje surrea l de Josep Renau. El escritor argentino los crea al recrea r las fantasías mitológicas de dife rentes culturas: mandrágoras, centa uros, rémoras, quim eras de un jardín literario e infinito. A Mendiola, no le in teresa la co muni ón con los animales a través de la imagen ni evoca r las latitudes fa ntásticas de la imag inación. Ni comulga con la fa lsa identidad ni con el gratuito comenta rio altruista. Con sus fotos comenta, sí, pero su co mentario es una crítica y una emocionada presentación de lo visible, un gozo po r ver en la image n un recuerdo anticipado: el largo cuell o de la jirafa, sus manchas arm ón icas, sus belfos y sus aterciopelados cuern os desde un a vista panorámica ún ica. Mendiola no ha perd ido el interés del niño, el gozo, ni niega su intención de fotóg rafo: mostrar su impresión de las cosas: el para lelismo entre el cuello de la jirafa co n el de los ed ificios que bordean Chapul tepec por los rum bos de Polanco; de cosas g randes hab la. Entre 1998 y 1999 Víctor Mendiola rea lizó varios recorridos por el Zoológ ico de Chapultepec y African Safari. En una de aquellas caminatas zootécn icas, tomó la fotografía en la que vemos den75
tro de una botella de plástico tres peces, un pescador urbano que no vemos alza su trofeo . Al fondo, en perspectiva oblicua, esa negación de horizonte que es la ciudad, es otra enorme bolsa donde los peces somos nosotros. No fue su intensión ser exhaustivo ni agradar ni denunciar sino comentar lo que vio . Sin buscar resaltar caracteres o emancipar a los animales de su cautiverio, por medio de la imagen directa o de la mira del gran angular, Mendiola plasma el concepto de la parte separada del todo, hace metáfora del lago dentro de la botella de plástico. ¿Devolverá a los peces al agua? Mendiola intuyó decidiendo captar esta imagen con gran angular. Ojo de pescado, lente de visión oblicua, parece decirnos que somos peces . Y es que somos peces . Veo y no evito la analogía. La mirada funda en la comparación su certeza y su metáfora. Por ello el encierro es cárcel, y ésta algo más que negación de la libertad: es la estancia anterior al manicomio. A César Vallejo, el poeta peruano, estar detrás de los barrotes le provocó el rompimiento con la sintaxis convencional y discursiva del mundo, y no su reincorporación al mismo. En una de las fotos de Mendiola vemos a un grupo de canguros ciegos, enfermos de encierro y cataratas; ya no son parte de una exhibición sino de una obnubilación que los asemeja con los condenados a recorrer una y otra vez los metros cuadrados de un cuarto hostil. Noria sin molino, espacio de carácter aflictivo en el que estos animales cumplen la pena de no ser. Pero del Cerro del Chapulín ya no sale agua, ni son enormes los pabellones auditivos de los elefantes amaestrados, ni sus defensas incisivas son largas. Mendiola recupera sus proporciones imponentes con el acercamiento; hace click, se divierte, se trepa a las jaulas, goza el privilegio de realizar 78
un reportaje tras bambalinas, y más allá, todavía más allá, capta el reflejo afantasmado de los espectadores en la vitrina de dos osos panda disecados . Especie carnívora en extinción. En ese vidrio translúcido, para mí se ratifica nuestra terca humanidad frente a un mundo animal que se pierde. Insisto: es una figura de la devoción perdida. Al centro del cerco negro del animal expuesto no vemos un ojo sino una canica. Qué extraño gozo sentirme desolado en medio de la multitud. Me detengo donde me place ver a un animal : su fatiga es el encierro. Abdico a la fascinación aunque implique la negación del otro: en esto radica lo patético de la condición de espectador en un zoo. Y sé que todas estas cosas son menos definidas en las imágenes que vemos y en las condiciones escenográficas que el animal enfrenta. Pero qué se puede hacer frente a una imagen como la del refrigerador retacado de partes de animales que alguna vez posaron en los espacios simula dos, sino dejarse ir irremediablemente en la parálisis de la fascinación: el vértigo. La verdad es que estas fotografías de Víctor Mendiola, como las de Robert Frank y las del italiano Ernesto Bazan tienen una fuerza de atracción porque parece que la situación captada no tuviera otro fin más que la de ser imagen.
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Verónica Macías . Elefantas. Ciudad de M éx ico, 1999 .
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BARRUNTOS
Justo cuando estaba sacando estas fotografías, se fue la luz. Frente a mí tenía cinco elefantas y detrás una jaula con leonas. "iQuédate quieta!" gritó el entrenador, "no te muevas porque los animales se ponen nerviosos y te puede pasar algo" . En la oscuridad total -mientras se escuchaban los gritos de la gente asustada en la función del circo- sentí la respiración y las trompas húmedas de las elefantas olfateándome. Verónica Madas
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JUNGLA DE ASFALTO
Pía Elizondo
Pía Elizondo. De la serie: Jung/a de asfalto. Ciudad de México, 1996-1998.
Alessandra Sanguinetti. Comadreja y ni単a, 1997.
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Alessandra Sanguinetti. Avestruz, 1997.
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Alessandra Sanguinetti. Cabritas atadas para poder mamar, 1996.
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Alessandra Sanguinetti. La caza y Cuero, 1997.
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ROAD KILL Martin Langfield
"¿Somos todavía parte de la naturaleza o estamos destinados a ser sus eternos observadores? ¿Aún seguimos luchando por encontrar un espacio propio dentro del paisaje?" En torno a estas preguntas gira Road Kili, la serie que el fotógrafo inglés Martin Langfield realizó durante tres meses en tierras australianas. Los caminos recorridos por su camioneta camper eran asimismo la fosa común de las especies que antes habían sido las dueñas de ese entorno. Con los ojos puestos no en la línea del horizonte sino en el asfalto de la carretera, las imágenes de Langfield son el saldo rojo de una difícil convivencia.
Martin Langfield . De la serie: Rood Kili, Australia .
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Franci s AIYs. Insta laci贸n con jab贸n verde y aprox . 1000 caracoles. Bruselas, 1992 .
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, Alys expuso ahí en compañía de la escultora anglo-mexicana Melanie Smith, en noviembre de 1992. Hicieron una obra a dúo,
Corredor, y cada quien por su parte exhibió obras separadas. Aprovecho para agradecer a Olivier Debroise las utilísimas observaciones que hizo a las primeras versiones de este texto. 2
En su exposición en la Galería de Arte Contemporáneo de 1992, Alys presentó una serie de obras que descomponían y recom-
ponían los elementos limítrofes de los cuadros. Así, el marco quedaba frecuentemente dislocado con respecto a la pintura, los lienzos eran intervenidos escultórica mente para romper su condición plana, y una serie de hules y "plásticos burbuja" desprendían del objeto la idea renacentista de "a ventana" artística. Vid . Cuauhtémoc Medina: " Casi cuadros. Casi objetos", en el catálogo de la muestra. l
En enero y febrero de 1995, Alys rehizo la pieza para su exposición en Opus Operandi en Gante. Entonces los caracoles fueron
alimentados con el periódico del día, en parte para señalar el paso del tiempo, y trazar un nivel más de lectura, al igualar el sustento de estos caracoles atrapados en su prisión de higiene, con nuestro consumo mañanero de los diarios . • Problema clásico: no es la violencia continua la que sostiene la dominación, sino la creación de una regla que amenaza con la coerción si se la infringe. l
Como, por ejemplo en la frontera entre México y Estados Unidos en Tijuana, el muro divisorio tiene, cada tanto, interrupciones
dejadas "al azar". 6
Las alusiones que desarrollo a partir de la pieza, y en especial su lectura político-histórica, son parte de la consistencia de la
obra de Alys: suscitar reflexiones, más que entender lo "escu ltórico" como concreción de una conceptualización cerrada de antemano. Yo creería que, en esta clase de obras, la hermenéutica (suponer un significado "encerrado" en la obra) resulta menos pertinente que la disposición a producir un cuerpo de reflexión "a partir" de ella, una "eficacia". Aquí se trata de no preguntarse " qué quiso decir," sino "qué podemos pensar y hacer" con / gracias/ a partir de esa experiencia. ' ¿Cómo podría ocurrir la igualdad de las especies? ¿Eliminando la violencia incluso entre los animales mismos? ¿Bajo un programa franciscano de convencimiento del hermano lobo? En una de sus primeras exhibiciones, Alys citaba a Wittgenstein: "Si
un león pudiera hoblor, no seríomos copoces de entenderlo ".
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Petul Hern ánd ez, escrito r y fotóg rafo tzeltal, traba ja desde hace alg unos años en el Archivo Fo tog ráfico Ind ígena q ue coord ina Ca rlota Du arte en Sa n Cri stó bal de las Casas, Chiapas. El materi al qu e aqu í publica mos fo rm a pa rte de un libro, qu e aparecerá próximamente y que esta rá integ rado po r ce rca de un centenar de fotografías y textos en torn o a los pre parativos y posteri o r festejo del Ca rn ava l en Tenejapa.
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11 5
11 6
Fabrizio le贸n. La hiel, 1991 .
Fabrizio l e贸n. Panzas, bofes y pulmones, 1992.
Acuario.
Son esos retazos los que fotografía Valeria Bellusci en En la vereda del corazón quieto. Animales muertos que llevan puesta la máscara de la vida en una absurda postal fija que muchas veces remeda el instante en que se miró directamente en los ojos de la muerte . Los animales embalsamados suelen estar en posición de ataque y quietos como están ahora, sujetos a representar siempre el mismo instante, los ojos de vidrio devuelven un destello de espejos ciegos en los que se pierde cualquier ilusión animada . En las imágenes que Bellusci tomó en el Museo de Ciencias Naturales Bernardino Rivadavia, de Buenos Aires, acecha, a la vez, lo que es y lo que ha sido, porciones de vidas pasadas y de muertes
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Reo . Antigua colecci贸n del Museo de Historia Natural. Ciudad de M茅xico, 2000.
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Carmen Loyola . Pulgas vestidos. Fotomicrografía (X-370) tomada con un obj etivo macro de 50 mm. La X significa el número de veces que aumenta el sujeto observado a través del microscopio. Dirección Genera l de Patrim on io, UNAM .
Carmen loyola. Pulgas vestidas. Fotomicrograf铆as tomadas con un microscopio estere贸scopico Zeissl Stemi SV 1 1, con equ ipo de fo tograf铆a Me 80. la de arribaes un acercamiento 35X y la de la derecha 165X. Junio de 2000. Direcci贸n General de Patrim oni o, UNAM.
Javier Ramírez Limón . Extracto del Diaria de Quitavac. Desierto de Alta r, 2000.
Diario de Quitovac
Desierto de Altar
Recuerdo que un martes me enteré que el diablo vivía en Toluca . También me dijeron que no vivía solo, y que, a su manera, era feliz . Me empecé a rascar, pues "algo" empezó a hacerme cosquillas en la cabeza. Desde ese martes me rasqué durante veintitantos días, y cometí además todas las pendejadas imaginables .. . Esa misma noche le envié un mail a uno de los mejores amigos del diablo, pidiéndole o exigiéndole -no lo recuerdo bien- que le avisara que debía regresar lo que se
152
había robado de mi casa . Si ese hijo de puta no entregaba lo que se había llevado, lo acusaría ante la policía . Muy a su pesar, supongo, el diablito me entregó mi cámara fotográfica, aunque lo hizo veintitantos días después ... Cuando tuve la cámara en mis manos, empecé a sentir rasquera otra vez, y temí que un chingo de animalitos utilizaran mi cabeza como su morada . Por una casualidad que difícilmente podría descifrar, Valí y Sarita, dos niñas del albergue de Quitovac, me mostraron la forma de conjurar al demonio . Tomé algunas fotografías con la cámara endiablada; tenía la intención de ensayar la forma de atrapar para siempre a esos putos piojos. No sé si lo logré, pero quedé convencido que para vencer al demonio debes utilizar sus propias armas. Javier Ramírez Limón
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MIKKI, EL PIONERO Cuauhtémoc Medina
Mikki en colaboración con Komar & Melamid. Nuestro Moscú a través de 105 ojos de Mikki, 1998 .
... this new bloom of photography olso belongs lorgely to the field [ .. .] of misjudged history of general non-prafessionol productivity. Fran z Roh (1929)
1. Como Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, Gary Winogrand o Boris Mikhailov, Mikki explora lo urbano como un yacimiento inagotable de escenas barrocas y seres infernales. Una vez que Mikki pone el pie fuera de su jaula, Moscú se le revela como sitio trepidante, asediado por los monumentos de una historia incomprensible, y habitado por monstruos que por sus actitudes parecieran a punto de arrojarse bárbaramente sobre el fotógrafo. Retratos de seres ante los cuales la cámara se desempeña con impasible indiferencia. No sólo es que Mikki carece por completo de los remilgos, pudores y escrúpulos emocionales que suelen entorpecer a la mayoría de los fotógrafos. Su lente no está en absoluto empañada por la cursilería humanitaria que vuelve tan empalagosas a la mayoría de las fotografías documentales. Es más, pudiera decirse que ese rechazo a las tentaciones sentimentaloides del género es instintivo en Mikki.
Komar & Melamid. Mikki, el chimpan cé fotógrafo. M oscú, 1998.
El elefante Rene traba jand o en colaboración con Ko mar &: M elamid, 1995 .
Esta frialdad de mirada pudiera a más de uno parecer un rasgo de inhumanidad . Qué más da: Mikki pertenece a una rara casta, la del fotógrafo ve rdugo . Sus fotos distorsionadas, móviles, impetuosas y cortantes son apenas las apropiadas para un mundo igualmente contorsionado y falto de centro. El encuadre oblicuo, la acción súbita, el punto de vista decididamente bajo, los colores barriéndose en el movimiento de una mano libre de prejuicios visocentristas, la decisión de dejar la producción de la imagen en su mayor parte bajo el control mecánico del dispositivo, todo esto muestra a las claras que Mikki es un contemporáneo. 2 . Ya desde los años setenta, en tiempos de sus series de pinturas kitsch/ comunistas agrupadas en la serie de sor art (la versión soviética del pop), Komar & Melamid llevaron a cabo sus primeros experimentos de "colaboraciones" con animales. En tanto Komar & Melamid pintaban sus cuadros más famosos (Stalin recibiendo al ángel alado de la inspiración en El origen del realismo socialista, pintado a la manera de Poussin pero bajo el espíritu de Gerasimov), también trabajaron con el perro Tranda para componer dibujos, a partir de las huellas de sus patas. Quince años más tarde retomaron el experimento, con la creación de varias academias de arte para elefantes en el sudeste asiático . Los e lefantes entrenados por Komar & Melamid usan su trompa para embarrar grandes cuadros de pigmento, hasta obtener obras más o menos tachistas . La inspiración de esos proyectos es fundamentalmente política . Según declararon en el catálogo de la Bienal de Venecia de 1999, trabajar con animales permitía demostrar que el principio creativo no es exclusivo de nuestra especie: 156
Pintura rea lizada por el elefante Rene, Kom ar & M elamid, 1995.
Hemos llamado nuestro trabajo con animales ecolaboración, la combinación de las palabras 'ecologia' y 'colaboración'. [ ...] Al parecer, no sólo los animales, sino las plantas y el conjunto de los elementos del mundo tienen impulsos creativos. Nos proponemos expandir esta idea creando estructuras arquitectónicas con castores y termitas [ ...] pintando cuadros con el viento y las ramas. Esas ironías apelaban al principio de la "igualdad entre las especies" de los ultra-ecologistas y los grupos semiclandestinos de "derechos animales". Tal es, por lo general, el mecanismo que Komar & Melamid echan a andar: demoler una idea pretensiosa, con tan sólo aplicarla en toda su literalidad . 3. Mikki, claro, no es el primer artista de su especie. Curiosamente, fue en la Rusia zarista donde se tiene noticia ocurrieron los primeros experimentos de arte producido por monos. "Una científica rusa, Nadjeta Kohts, al estudiar el desarrollo psicológico de los primates, incitó al chimpancé Joni a dibujar patrones elementales sobre el papel. Aunque el tema fue retomado en la época de entreguerras, el arte primate tuvo su apogeo en los años cincuenta. Algunos monos-pintores prácticamente se convirtieron en estrellas de televisión, gracias a mezclar sabiamente el divertimento zoológico con el desafío al arte moderno. Congo, el famoso chimpancé del zoológico de Londres, colaboró con el antropólogo Desmond Morris en crear gouaches y pasteles de una notable fuerza expansiva. Simultáneamente, hacia 1954, Bernhard Rensch trabajó cerca de Pablo, un mono capuchino del zoológico de Munster, que era un notable dibujante. El entusiasmo científico y mediático de investigadores como Morris, indujo a decenas de investigadores a encauzar a chimpancés, gorilas y toda clase de primates a desarrollar estilos pictóricos personales. Pero si artistas 157
Yoshua Okon. Chocorrol. Videogramas, 1998.
Chocorrol es un proyecto porno canino que documenta, en video y en fotografía, el encuentro
entre un Xoloizcuintle y una French Poodle. Fue un encuentro planeado y, debido a la imposibilidad de encontrar a algún propietario de una Poodle hembra con la disposición de cruza rla con mi perro, la perra tuvo que ser rentada . Una vez rentada, fue debidamente llevada al salón de belleza en donde recibió un corte estilo parisino . Ya que al propietario de la perra se le informó que se rentaría para una película (no porno), la intención era únicamente que el video documentara al perro pretendiéndola y ella rechazándolo . Sin embargo, y casualmente, ésta resultó estar en celo por lo que fue inevitable que en cuestión de segundos se cruzaran . Al percatarme de lo que sucedía, intenté separarlos (es por esto que al final de la secuencia la cámara cae) pero fue inútil, los perros estaban ya pegados . Al notificarle lo sucedido al dueño, un criador de Poodles "raza 164
pura", se puso furioso, quería matarme. En un inicio creí que se trataba de una cuestión monetaria, por lo que ofrecí comprarle cada uno de los cachorros al precio de un French Poodle ifino!, argumentando que su perra no corría ningún peligro. Éste continuó insultándome, diciendo que lo que yo había hecho era una monstruosidad, que era antinatural. Entonces comprendí que no se trataba de una cuestión monetaria sino más bien racial y moral. Intenté argumentar que los French Poodle son una mezcla de distintos tipos de perros, que hace doscientos años no existían como tales y que de "puros" no tienen nada, pero fue inútil. Finalmente, me informó que iba a poner una inyección a su perra (poniendo su vida en peligro ya que con este tipo de inyecciones hay un alto riesgo de que se desarrolle una infección mortal) para que ésta abortara . Yoshua Okon 165
Jan Saudek. S贸lo dos rostros de mi omada, 1995.
166
Descubrir las imágenes ocultas en las imágenes, intuir lo que sobra y lo que falta para enmendarlo, con afán libidinoso o juguetón, son prácticas antiguas y recurrentes, constata bies en las muchas revistas retocadas que llegaron a los mercados de viejo. Pero mientras que por lo general el interventor silvestre restituye las partes pudendas previamente veladas por la censura, Francisco Toledo metamorfosea los estereotipos genitales de la fotopornografía contemporánea, transformando vaginas desalentadoramente convencionales en hocicos rubicundos, púdicas sonrisas, largas lenguas prensiles de batracio, bocas de pescado o naricillas respingonas. Si ya teníamos zapatos, iguanas, cangrejos, lagartos, garzas, chapulines, tlacuaches, elefantes, asnos, sapos y culebras, ahora los coños se suman al bestiario. Verijas protagónicas y autosuficientes que, salvo cuando éstos ya retozaban en la foto original, no convocan nuevos falos toledanos sino situaciones ligeras y juguetonas. Realizada en el cruce de milenios, la serie Sombra del deseo es también el homenaje póstumo de un presunto oficiante a las cálidas texturas de la cachondería de papel, especie en peligro de extinción por obra del vidrio caliente: videos XXX, páginas web para navegar con una sola mano, sexo virtual interactivo y lo que (se) venga . Armando Bartra Frag mento del catálogo para la ex posición Sombra del deseo, presentada en la Galería Jua n Martín.
Francisco Toledo. Salam Bombay. Collage, acuarela sobre im agen impresa, 2000. Cortesía : Ga lería Ju an Martín.
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Fl RST AMERICAN MON KEY COlONY 1 STARTS ON PUERTO RICO ISlH
EL ARCA DE RENAU Alfonso Morales
En un edificio donde hacían esquina la Avenida Coyoacán con la calle Torres Adalid, en la ciudad de México, tenía su domicilio el Estudio Imagen Publicidad Plástica . Bajo ese título y el logotipo de un ojo insomne se albergaba un taller familiar dedicado al diseño, la ilustración y la gráfica publicitaria. Su fundador, Josep Renau Berenguer, nacido en Valencia el año de 1907, era parte del grupo de españoles que tuvo que abandonar su país al triunfo de las huestes comandadas por Francisco Franco. tv1ilitante del Partido Comunista, miembro de la Unión de Escritores y Artistas Proletarios, y director de Bellas Artes en la España republicana, Renau llegó a México, acompañado por su familia, en 1939, luego de renunciar a la posibilidad de establecerse en Estados Unidos, donde una compañía disquera le había ofrecido el puesto de director artístico .' En la elección de nuestro país como refugio de su exilio pesó el deseo de trabajar con el pintor y muralista David Alfaro Siqueiros, a quien le unían las posiciones ideológicas y el ánimo exploratorio de técnicas y lenguajes plásticos. El mismo año de su arribo, el cartelista y el teórico de la poliangularidad trabajaron juntos en la realización de Retrato de la burguesía, un mural pintado en el local del Sindicato Mexicano de Electricistas que denuncia los horrores de la industria bélica. En 1942 con la obra La patria mexicana defendida por sus hijos ganó el primer premio de un concurso organizado por la Secretaría de Educación Pública. La manutención de la familia que había formado con la pintora Manuela Ballester y la realidad de la sobrevivencia en un país extranjero, obligaron a Josep Renau a aceptar compromisos laborales que estaban por debajo de sus ambiciones artísticas. El talento que en España había estado al servicio de las causas republicanas, en México tuvo que negociar con el gusto de los múltiples clientes que lo contrataban para el diseño de etiquetas, portadas de libros y discos, cabezales para publicaciones periódicas, anuncios, rótulos, imágenes para calendarios y, sobre todo, carteles. En el taller de Renau, del que formaban parte parientes cercanos y amigos necesitados de un ingreso, se realizaron una parte considerable de los carteles que anunciaron las obras que la cinematografía mexicana produjo en los años cuarenta y cincuenta, la época dorada de sus idilios rancheros, melodramas lacrimosos y exuberantes comedias musicales . A través de estos impresos de gran formato, cuyas composiciones giraban en torno a los títulos decididos por las casas productoras y los rostros risueños o compungidos de sus estrellas protagónicas, el público recibía un adelanto de las alegrías y sufrimientos que los próximos estrenos o las segundas corridas les tenía señaladas a Miroslava, Jorge Negrete o Arturo de Córdova . Proyectados e imaginados a partir de las fotos fijas que se habían tomado durante las filmaciones, estas obras de la "plástica cinematográfica" que itineraron por todos los cines de la república fueron, asimismo, un campo de prueba de las técnicas del fotomontaje y el aerógrafo, que tanto Josep Renau como s hermano Juan impulsaron como modernos recursos del arte y la propaganda.2 Según los recuerdos de su sobrino Jordi Ballester, el estudio que Renau tuvo en la colonia del Valle era, además de un lugar de trabajo, un compacto muestrario de lo que el mundo había construido a lo largo de sus eras. La recámara grande era el área común en la gue trabajaban sus colaboradores y se atendían los encargos solicitados por la clientela; Página 168-182.
ateriales gráficos del cartapacio ('ni males que formaron parte del banco de imágenes del fotomontaji ta catalán Josep Renau Berenguer.
o
ahí se hallaba el compresor que alimentaba a su brocha de aire y, junto al ventanal, el gran caballete donde una cartulina blanca se iba convirtiendo en un "rompecabezas arisco y angulado en varios colores".' En una recámara más pequeña que la anterior Renau trabajaba su obra más personal y daba satifacción a su desbordada pasión por las imágenes. En ella, evoca su sobrino, "se encerraba y dibujaba y escribía y bocetaba y pintaba y recortaba revistas, y pensaba y pegaba papeles y coloreaba fotos y grababa y leía y estudiaba y analizaba y miraba estampas y anotaba y subrayaba y tomaba café y fumaba y fumaba y fumaba". Tras del empedernido fumador estaban los estantes de su bibliohemeroteca, principalmente formada por publicaciones dedicadas a las oellas artes, la publicidad y las artes gráficas, que de tanto en tanto se enriquecía con compras hecha~ en La Lagunilla y en otras librerías de viejo. A ese acervo pertenecían una recopilación de escenas eróticas, un viejo libro que contaba la historia del arca de Noé -quizá el Epítome de la edad del mundo-, los anuarios ingleses Penrose, las ediciones de Gebrauchs Graphik y Graphis, y números recientes y atrasados de las revistas National Geographic, Look y Life. A la decoración de aquel taller y vivero de imágenes contribuían, con sus hermosas o aterradoras formas, unas caracolas de mar, la dentadura de un tiburón, el apéndice de un pez sierra, el cuerpo de un pez globo, otros animales disecados y un cráneo humano adornado con flores de papel. En la habitación en la que el artista publicitario se afilaba como fotomontajista estaban un archivero y la mesa sobre la que Renau trabajó la serie que tituló originalmente Fata Morgana USA (1967), publicada diez años después como The American Way of Life" - una acerva crítica a la orgía consumista que el imperio de las barras y las estrellas había impuesto como única forma de la felicidad. Los cajones del primero de estos muebles eran su arca mundana y personalizada contra el diluvio de las imágenes. Al recorte y clasificación de éstas -grabados, litografías, cromos, fotografías, láminas arrancadas a libros y revistas sobre cualquier tema- dedicaba al menos una hora cada día . Con "paciencia de reo perpetuo", en palabras de Jordi Ballester, Renau fue haciendo un banco visual que, además de servirle en lo inmediato como documentación para sus trabajos publicitarios, le nutría a largo plazo de materiales para sus fotomontajes . Los contenidos de ese archivero en el que la búsqueda de una imagen tan específica como "pies izquierdos de negro corriendo" podía ser satisfecha, no pudo ser ajeno al proyecto de su Ehciclopedia de la Imagen, con la que sólo alcanzó a rozar la letra A en su antología titulada El Amor. Estampas galantes del siglo XVI/U En 1958 Josep Renau dio por terminada su residencia mexicana. Viajó primero a la Unión Soviética y después se estableció en Berlín, la capital de la entonces conocida como República Democrática Alemana, donde murió en 1982. En 1976 pudo regresar a su ciudad natal, donde existe, desde 1978, una Fundación que conserva el mayor acervo documental sobre su vida y su obra. El archivero con su banco de recortes no lo pudo acompañar en ese recorrido . Quedó a resguardo de la familia formada por Ángel Gaos y Rosa Ballester -cuñada del fotomontajista-, quienes habían sido sus vecinos y compañeros de exilio. Aquel pesado mueble de tres cajoneras se incorporó a la mudanza cuando los Gaos Ballester cambiaron su domicilio a la calle de Amores. Una de sus hijas, Guadalupe, lo hizo parte de su vida desde que tenía siete años. Instalado en su habitación le sirvió como juego, material de apoyo en la realización de las tareas escolares y filtro amoroso - los cortejantes que no mostraran interés por sus contenidos estaban automáticamente descalificados. Convertida en pintora y establecida en el puerto de Ensenada, Baja California, el archivo le siguió prestando el servicio que en otros días le había brindado a su primer colector y navegante. El archivo gráfico que Josep Renau formó -con la valiosa ayuda de su hijo Ruy- durante su 171
AN ALBINO GIRAFFE IS SEEN BY MAN FOR THE FIRST TIME AND PHOTOGRAPHED IN COLOR L IFE 1
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estancia en México no fue sólo una herramienta de trabajo y la materia bruta sobre la que se construyeron algunas de sus obras. Esa tentativa de catalogar las imágenes del universo a su disposición en una decena de apartados, subdivididos en infinita categorías, podría considerarse un proyecto conceptual, es una obra en sí, como en realidad lo puede ser cualquier ejercicio de selección o curaduría. Es sin duda un registro de los ríos de imágenes que pasaron por los ojos y las manos de un autor que claramente entendió el valor de su reciclaje y las posibilidades de su relectura . A diferencia de la de Noé, el arca de Renau no clasificó sus especies por pares, con el fin de preservar su descendencia y salvarla del castigo de las grandes aguas. En ese catálogo donde la clave O le corresponde a los materiales relacionados con el Cosmos, la 23 a los Mamíferos y la 10-A a las Catástrofes, los seres y cosas de la creación se alejaron de su origen para sobrevivir en los trazos, tintas e imaginarios volúmenes de sus reproducciones. La tijera que las ha recortado no ha tomado en cuenta su pedigree ni su genealogía, sólo sus formas, la futura metamorfosis de sus formas . En ese ámbito bidimensional y silencioso, promiscuo por más que compartimentado, la cacería no consistió en arrebatarle la vida a una preciada presa, sino en perseguirla a través de las imágenes que también son su piel y llevan su nombre. NOTAS: , Bartra, Armando, Sueños de papel (inédito) . ' Renau , Ju an, Técnica a er ográfica, Ed . Centau ro, M éxi co, 1946 . , Renau. Cartefls de cinema (Mexic). Fu ndació Ca ixa de
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Le Chat qui lombe. Chronophotogrophies da M. Morey. (Profil eL fuce). -
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más tarde, la volví a hacer -me pasé otro período de vida fascinante, sin techo . Pasé un tiempo en la última pensión de mala muerte que quedaba en la ciudad, y en el vasto depósito de la 168 Street donde miles de hombres dormían cada noche, y en un infinito tren A que corría hacia Rockaway, un dormitorio móvil para docenas de hombres y mujeres . Y sin embargo, cuando llegó el tiempo de redactar la pieza, la escribí al último momento, como salida de una vaga sen sació n de que esto, lejos de ayudar, lastimaría; que era parte del torrente de los medios de comunicación, el impacto total de lo que supuestamente normalizaría esa crisis, para hacerla parecer no una crisis en absoluto, sino un hecho inevitable de la vida urbana, como las palomas. A medida que me he interesado más y más en los asuntos relativos al medio ambiente, he pensado mucho sobre estas cuestiones de restricciones, cuando la propia curiosidad o el impulso creativo puede ser arruinado o bien favorecido. He pensado si existen lugares donde los tabúes, una vez más, tienen sentido. Es más fácil de percibir cuando tiene que ver con las cosas y no con las ideas. Es claro, por ejemplo, que estaríamos mejor desde el punto de vista del medio ambiente si, como cultura, desaprobáramos los automóviles; si consideráramos que la libertad que ellos nos consiguieron no valió la pena dado el costo en términos de calentamiento global, extensión suburbana, etc. Y un tabú en contra de la próxima versión, aún más grande, del Ford Explorer, incluso si se desarrollara, no parecería una amenaza real al espíritu humano. Pero hay otras cuestiones, aún más duras, unas que se enfocan más claramente en las ideas. Tomemos la ingeniería genética como ejemplo, el mayor esfuerzo creativo que domina a la comunidad científica. Se ha invertido probablemente más imaginación humana en este propósito que 19 1
Yu Hirai. "Los caballos son lindos pero muerden ". Exposici贸n equ ina. Estado de Nueva York, 1999 .
CAMBIO DE PIEL
Ernesto RĂos. Mujeres inglesas. N ueva York.
200
Anónimo . Tomada de la revista Caballero, "Zooeroteca: Las bellas bestias", año 4, núm . 30, agosto de 1969.
203
Dolores del Rio en Revenge (1928), pel铆cula dirigida por Edwin Ca rewe. Colecci贸n Aureli o de los Reyes.
Dolores del Rio con una de sus mascotas, ca. 19 32. Colección Jaime Chávez . Cortesía Ed itorial Clío.
206
Dolores del Rio en su casa de Hollywood, California, ca . 1930. Colección Jaime Chávez. Cortesía Editorial Clío.
207
Anónimo . Retrato con te lón pintado. España, ca . 1920.
Página izq .: Fernando García Aguinaco. Coimbra, Portugal, 1998.
Juan GuzmĂĄn. Chamulas cargando sillas de camino, San Juan Cham ula, Chiapas, ca.,1955. CortesĂa: Teresa Mi randa .
213
Anónimo. Pez diablo. "Exhibición en las playas veracruzanas . lo y Coss núm. 17, Veracruz, Ver." Laboratorio fotográfico Turia, SA Centro Integral de Fotografía de Puebla, Pue.
Still de la película El vampiro de Fernando Méndez, 1958. Filmoteca de la UNAM . Cortesía: Archivo Fotog ráfico Zªna, Pilares, Nicolás Romero.
218
Aaron Ram írez. Zoológico Miguel Álvarez del Toro. Tuxtla Gutiérrez, Ch iapas, 2000.
224
Los grabados que ilustran esta sección proceden del cartapacio "Animales", que formó parte del archivo gráfico de Josep Renau Berenguer (Valencia, España, 1907- Berlín, República Democrática Alemana, 19B2). Procedentes de publicaciones periódicas, libros especializados, ediciones populares y de lujo, las imágenes de aquella enciclopedia visual, formada mientras Renau vivió su exilio en México (1939-1958), le sirvieron a su trabajo como cartelista y fotomontajista. Este acervo de recortes y estampas fue conservado por su sobrina Guadalupe Gaos Ballester. El cartapacio dedicado a la fauna les fue regalado, por ella, a los ecólogos marinos Marina Robles y Cuauhtémoc León, quienes, gentilmente, lo proporcionaron para esta entrega de Luna Córnea.
The engravings that ilustrate this section come from the portfolio "Animals", part of the graphic archives of Josep Renau Berenguer (born in Valencia, Spain, 1907-, died in the Democratic Republic of Germany, 1982). Collected from magazines and newspapers, specialized books, paperbacks and fancy hard-cover editions, the images of that visual encyclopaedia, put together while Renau lived in exile in Mexico (1939-1958) were very useful for his work as a photomontage specialist and poster designer. This collection of cutouts and prints was conserved by his niece Guadalupe Gaos Ballester. The portfolio comprising fauna was given to marine ecologists Marina Robles and Cuauhtémoc León, who generously lent it to Luna Córnea for this number.
THE DOUBLE SAVAGE Roger Bartra
228
HUELLAS: TRACKS, TRACES AND MARKS Patricia Mendoza
228
THE BRAWL Joan Fontcuberta
229
SHOWING UP LATE FOR THE APPOINTMENT
229
LIVING OBJECTS * Michele Faguet
230
THE SECOND CONQUEST
Juan Manuel Aurrecoechea
230
LARVA-EATING FlSH Mauricio Ortiz
232
THE ZOOLOGIST'S BATH * Mick Imlah
233
THE POSE OF ANIMALS Josué RamÍrez
233
THE STARE * Sujata Bhatt
235
ON THE SIXTH DAY * Alessandra Sanguinetti
236
DINING ON ESCARGOTS * Cuauhtémoc Medina
236
THE CARNIVAL BULLS OF TENEJAPA Petul Hernández
238
MEAT IS MURDER Mauricio Molina
238
ON THE PATH OF THE QUIET HEART Marta DilIon
240
THE SILENCE OF THE SPECIES Ricardo Espinosa and Jorge Aguinaco
242
QUITOVAC DIARY Javier RamÍrez Limón
242
MIKKI THE PIONEER Cuauhtémoc Medina
242
A CANINE PHOTOGRAPHER? Bola de la Can and Enrique Villaseñor
244
THE PROBLEM WITH WILDLIFE PHOTOGRAPHY * Bill McKibben
245
HOMO HOMINIS EQUUS EST Armando Bartra
251
THE DEVIL FlSH Cuauhtémoc León
255
Translated by: Richard
1f\. and Jen Hofer • Originals in English
to the other side of the mirror. Don't the past, present and future come together in each huella we see, in each huella we leave? People without scars, on their souls or on their bodies, are incomplete. What completes us, however painful, leaves its huella on usoI'Il conelude: our features are often described as distinguishing traits. We leave huellas behind wherever we go, and, in this lifeas the old saying goes-we're just passing through. AlI we can do is move on. 'The Spanish word huella can mean at once track, trace, mark and footprint. Since no word in English adequately reflects these resonances, l have chosen to use the Spanish throughout this texto(Ir. note). , Huella de v,"ado means deer tracks.
had already used this procedure with other animal s, and had suggested it be called "zoographs"). The result is an amalgam of spots, an apparently "abstract" composition. Beyond the randomness, however, in this case the process brings us elose to an eidetic visionoAH the calligraphy of the fighting dance, of the violence, the confrontation of powers, the contenders' strategies, can be found beneath this surface impression. The image does not describe the squabble, so much as write its history, Its physical record, in its own tracks. Is this not precisely what we call a "document"? In the XVIIth century, one of
THE BRAWL Joan Fontcuberta On February 10th, 1994,1 was traveling from Munich to Salonika. The airline magazine indicated that the aerial corridor we were f1ying through passed precisely over Sarajevo. The captain made an announcement over the loudspeaker system as we f1ew over the city. 1 looked through the window: just a placid sea of elouds, oblivious to the savagery taking place below. This paradox moved me to create work that would address the fragility of experience and the necessity of exploring beyond appearances. The Canary Islands is the Spanish region where the tradition of cock fighting is still alive. On a trip to Las Palmas 1 set up a mock fight. The coop would be situated on unexposed Iight-sensitive paperoOne cock would have its feet dipped in photographic developer, the other in fixer. As they moved about on the paper, they created images in tones of Iight (1
the great Ukiyoye Japanese masters, called Hokusai, was summoned by the emperor to paint at the palace. First he rinsed the feet of a chicken in blue ink and threw it gently on a roll of rice paper; later he did the same with another chicken, this time using vermilion ink and letting it walk freely on the papero Having done this, he bowed down respectfuHy before his master and showed him the painting, which he titled "Autumn Leaves Falling on the Yangtze River." The Miljacka is a tributary of the Bosna, a river which passes through Sarajevo.
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SHOWING UP LATE FOR THE APPOINTMENT When he is in the darkroom, Alfredo Carrillo delves into the playful side of image reproduction, in which an accident, even a mistake or a defect, can tum into a discovery. Thus his work shifted from documentary photography to photography as fiction. He feels that documentary work presupposes a sequential, linear discourse, while his current work represents a negation oí this logic. As a way of engaging with the image, fictive photography is a more emotionalIy loaded process. The work of Duane Michals, Joel-Peter Witkin and Robert Frank has helped him face this risk. With the intention of taking the expressive capacities of the photographic image to their extreme, Carrillo dislocates and distorts his images, subjecting them to various other processes until his photographic language approaches that of the graphic and visual arts. His studies at the José Guadalupe Posada Workshop in Aguascalientes led him to apply printmaking techniques to the delicate surface of the photographic negative. To create his own image of a cat, he appropriated a negative taken by a young girl, who took her image in tum from a television screen, and reworked it as an etching: Carrillo sanded the surface of the film and his final print ineludes the negative's sprocket holes and brand name. Carrillo uses an Agfa camera and a Czech-made Opemus enlarger from the early 1970s. With these tools-today considered relics, collector's items or curiosities-the young photographer seeks to prove that innovative results can be achieved with antique equipment. Bom in Ciudad Juárez in 1975, Alfredo Carrillo began his career as
a press photographer for newspapers in northern Mexico. In 1997, sorne of his work was featured in the book Juárez: The Laboratory of our Future (published by Aperture). Philologist Naom Chomsky wrote the preface, and in the lengthy essay accompanying the images, American critic Charles Bowden recounts, among other things, his conversation with Carrillo. Bowden was surprised to hear Carrillo question the discourse of aman considered to be one of Mexico's greatest photographers: Manuel Álvarez Bravo. Carrillo's work has appeared in several magazines and newspapers in Mexico and abroad: Aperture, The New York Times, Harper's Magazine, Proceso and El Norte. He defines his work as follows: "In my images, the poetics, the background, the aural or verbal always shows up late for the appointmento I first appropriate symbols to interpret or recognize forms which do not yet have a name. In the time of Oaguerre, the word 'photography' had not yet been uttered, though by then images could airead y be captured upon a surface. There's always a delay in the time-line-everything el se is merely the eye's bedazzlement."
LIVING OBJECTS Michele Faguet In Adriana Miranda's photographic series entitled "Objetos vivientes," ["Living objects"]-a colIection of elegantly captured images of animals-it is the photographer's proclaimed desire to represent her objects of study as subjects; and it is to this that can be ascribed the use of photographic techniques that one would more typically encounter in portraits of people-the use of artificial lighting (unnecessary given
that many of these pictures are taken outdoors) which adds a staged quality to the scene, closeups that reveal subtle facial expressions, and aboye all, that sense of compassion or even empathy without which the subject can never fulIy be known. But lest we blunt our critical capacity to loo k at these images by reveling in a certain redemptive naiveté with which we identify with these (domesticated) images of animals, constructing fantasies about the primordial goodness present in each and every one of us, it is necessary to recognize, as is betrayed by the work's title, that animals do function, in our everyday lives, as mere objects. In his devastating critique of
as welI." In our everyday lives we, too, function as objects. lt is my argument, then, that Adriana Miranda's work reveals that thé violence that we inflict upon nature is a violence that we inevitably inflict upon ourselves. Is it not surprising, then, that the human subject has all but disappeared from these images? And yet the subject is always presentbehind the controlling, framing mechanism of the photographic lens. The medium of photography is particularly apt here because it is a medium that has, from its inception, been bound up with practices of identification, classification and possession. Adriana Miranda's images are beautiful, engaging, ironic, melancholic, disturbing but aboye alI critical-<:ritical of the processes and products of visual representation. THE SECONO CONQUEST Juan Manuel Aurrecoechea
the enlightenment and its inevitable transformation into 20'" century totalitarianism, Theodor Adorno situated the roots of this degradation in the domination of nature, prescribed within a certain Western epistemological tradition: "What men want to learn from nature is how to use it in order to wholIy dominate it and other men ." Or as Martin Jay, an Adorno scholar, articulates the problem: "Insofar as the natural world was reduced to a field of fungible entities, whose qualitative differences were lost in the na me of scientific control, subjective domination of objects paved the way for the comparable domination of subjects through reification. Oomination of the external natural world led to control of man's internal nature and ultimately to the social world 230
Mariana Yampolsky was born in Chicago in 1925 and carne to Mexico in 1944 to join the Taller de Gráfica Popular, a printmakers' association formed in 1937 by Leopoldo Méndez, Pablo O'Higgins and Luis Arenal, who were convinced that art should have social resonance and serve "the progressive, democratic interests of the Mexican people." Elena Poniatowska recounts that "when (Yampolsky) opened the window on her first day in Mexico City and saw a bougainvillea burst into bloom on the wall facing her she said: 'this is my country.'" Walter Elias Disney was also born in Chicago, though twentyone years before Mariana. In 1928, collaborating with Ub Iwerks, he created Mortimer Mouse, who soon afterwards would be rechristened Mickey Mouse. Ouring the next few years, in the midst of the
Great Depression, Disney would design the extensive anthropomorphic gallery that would come to represent, perhaps more than any other cultural product, the spirit of the powerful country to the North. In 1935, "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?", the theme song of Three Little Pigs, one of Disney's most successful cartoons, would become the anthem of American optimism as the nation finally recovered from years of crisis. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Pluto, Donald, Mickey, Clarabelle and almost all the other characters born at the legendary Burbank studiosinduding the seven dwarvesenlisted in the allied forces and became the protagonists of antiFascist cartoons such as The New Spirit (1942), The Fuhrer's Face (1942) and Victory Through Air Power (1943). In the same spirit of propaganda, Disney contributed to the pan-American strategy his government promoted with the movies ¡Saludos Amigos!(l942) and The Three caballeros (1943), both of which were set in Latin America and featured the rooster Pancho Pistolas- Squadron 201 of the Mexican air force later adopted the rooster as their mascot. Disney traveled to Mexico in 1941. The project he began there culminated in the release of two feature-Iength movies with plots set in Latin America. They received the back·ing of the U.S. State Department's Office of Inter-American Affairs, directed at the time by Nelson Rockefeller. It was an attempt at "using film as a medium to develop commerce and cultural relations between Latin American republics and the United States, " a plan which contemplated the establishment of animation studios in Argentina, Mexico and Brazil. Walt Disney also did his best to convince Miguel "El
Chamaco" Covarrubias to take part in the project. By then, Disney was already the first vicepresident of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. A few years later, at the height of the of the cold war, the U.S. Sta te Department funded the ereation of the first truly professional animation studio to be established in Mexico: Dibujos Animados S.A., which opened on December 1st, 1952 under the direction of Richard K. Tomkins, who at the time also managed Estudios Churubusco. The studio released eight openly anti-Communist shorts, each of them eight minutes long, whose protagonists were the rooster Gallito Manotín, the don-
key Burrito Bonifacio and the perverse, treacherous crow Armando Líos, a character who represented Soviet ideology (his name, translated IiteraIly, means "stirring up trouble"). The project's creative director was animator Ernie Terrazas, the man responsible for creating the rooster Pancho Pistolas. This forceful cadre of virtual fauna was not only backed by the powerful American film industry as well as the U.S. government; it possessed, moreover, unquestionable creative value. Sergei Eisenstein opined that Walt Disney's work was "the American people's greatest contribution to art," a statement which made the Russian filmmaker the target of countless critiques that nonetheless did nothing to mitigate his admiration for the animator. 231
"Disney's films," he remarked, "are a revolt against everything that divides and cheapens, against spiritual stagnation and uniformity. But this revolt is Iyrical. It is a waking dream, vain and without consequence. It is not that kind of dream which, by force of accumulation, gives rise to action or actuaIly comes true. These are 'golden dreams ' to which we might escape, leading us to other worlds where everything is different, where we can be totaIly free and unhindered, where we can act the clown, like nature itself seems to have done at the happy time of its birth, when fittingly Disneyesque eccentricities were invented: the ridiculous ostrich next to the logical hen, the absurd giraffe beside the real cat, the kangaroo making fun of the Madonna." In the 1950s, when movies, comic books and TV series by Disney and colleagues WaIter Lantz, William Hanna and Joe Barbera won over "minds and hearts," Mariana Yampolsky began to combine her work as a printmaker at the Taller de Gráfica Popular with photography. Commissioned by Hannes Mayer, the association's manager and one-time director of the Bauhaus, she took the series of photographs which iIIustrate the book TGP México, El Taller de Gráfica Popular, doce alios de obra artística colectiva (TGP Mexico, The Popular Graphics Workshop: Twelve Years of Collective Art Work), published in 1952.
Gradually, the artist began to leave drawing and printmaking behind in favor of photography. In 1960, after a sixteen-year collaboration with the collective, Yampolsky left the Workshop to devote herself, on the one hand, to an emotionalIy-invested photographic documentation of her adoptive country, and on the other, to researching popular cultures and making
their manifestations known to a wider audience. In the 1970s, Mariana Yampolsky joined Leopoldo Méndez, Manuel Álvarez Bravo and Rafael Carrillo to work on a book about the arts and crafts of the Mexican people. "Not only did I help Méndez collect the objects," sta tes the photographer, "but 1 also looked for material in collections, and I was able to travel to small towns to take photos. During three years of in tense work, we photographed dances, ceremonies, costumes; people living their lives and showing their inexhaustible creativity in the making of their own objects and in the celebration of their fiestas ." The project culminated in the publication of Lo efímero y lo eterno del arte popular mexicano (The Ephemeral and the Eternal in Popular Mexican Art), published by the Fondo de la Plástica Mexicana in 1971. The book would prove fundamental in revalorizing the creativity of Mexican craftspeople from extremely diverse regions of the country, and was a profoundly significant experience for Mariana Yampolsky, who began to collect Mexican toys during that periodo Over the years, she would continue to document the plays of light and shadow on creations made by the people of Mexico. Little by little, strange and disconcerting icons, too, would begin to appear in her images: the Choco Milk can, being used as a flower vas e in her famous photograph "Última mirada" ("Last Glance"), the calligraphy that dominates the fa\ade of Casa Coca Cola, the blatantly perverse characters in WooW!!. In the last few years, she has seen not bougainvillea, but the marks of young graffiti artists burst into bloom outside her
window; she interprets these as the desperate cries of a culture under siege. Terrified by the possibility that the planet might become a global Disneyland-an immense theme park which has no place for any creature not created in the image and likeness of Mickey, Porky, Donald and Pluto-Mariana Yampolsky has gathered an immense series of photographs which document the recurring presence of American animation icons in our country's popular settings. The nightmare-or utopiadepicted in Yampolsky's images, which she herself has referred to as "the second conquest" and
which features a Disneyesque bestiary barely reconfigured by the Mexican imaginary, represents the country's transformation into a colorful kindergarten. Here, time has collapsed into a single endless afternoon of TV cartoons, part of a childhood recaptured-or expropriated-thanks to the magic of celluloid and the multiplication of its characters on waHs, towels, ties, T-shirts, sweatshirts, pens, lunchboxes, glasses, back-packs, candy wrappers, cereal boxes, merry-goround horses, hot-cake figurines, graveside flower vases, etc., etc., etc. LARVA-EATING FlSH Mauricio Ortiz Yellow fever is a very serious viral infection; it was eradicated in
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Mexico many years ago. Endemic to the Veracruz coast, the illness was also called yellow or American typhus, Siamese sickness, Western plague or black vomito The symptoms of the infection are well described by its names: infected people turned yellow, became feverish, vomited blackened blood and one out of three died within days. The virus is transmitted to humans by a mosquito of "inoffensive appearance, minuscule size, (and) gentle flight"-as Salvador Novo describes it, the Aedes Aegypti, al so referred to by biologists as Estegomia Fasciata, or simply Estegomia. When an outbreak occurred in Mérida in 1648, according to the Tizimín codex, it was the fourth time that the dreadful xekik had descended upon Mayan land. No one knew what caused it then, and all sorts of hypotheses were put forward. "For several days the sun seemed to be eclipsed," recounts historian Cogolludo, an expert witness to the epidemic, as he feH prey to the disease and yet survived. "The air was so thick it looked like fog or very dense smoke [... ) On certain days, especiaHy in the afternoon when the sea wind usuaHy blows inland, there carne with it a barely tolerable, all-pervasive stench. No one knew where it carne from, until a ship sailing in from Spain ran aground on a huge bar of dead fish ." Almost 300 years and countless victims later, from October 15-21, 1924, delegates from the national campaign against yellow fever assembled in Mexico City. The closing session was chaired by renowned physician Alfonso Pruneda who, in the na me of Dr. Malda, the head of the Health Department, officially declared that the illness had been eradicated in Mexico. Thus he announced
that the Special Commission of Mexican doctors and experts from Rockefeller University had fulfilled the task that Presiden t Álvaro Obregón had set before them sorne years earlier, when he caBed them together to battle the disease .. Among the different strategies the Commission implemented to eradicate the mosquito, one in particular stands out for its ingeniousness and simplicity, and may even seem quite unsophisticated if considered from the present-day perspective of high technology cures. Fish, the mythical origin of cures. the Yucatecan plague, later became invaluable allies in the medical crusade against the disease. Many different species were studied and the most suitable-the chalaco, the spiny loach, the silver bass and the smaB green mojarra-were chosen for this singular task: since the Aedes' preferred nesting grounds were the cal m, covered waters of weBs and cisterns, these new aquatic pets were brought to various different kinds of residential water tanks where they silently devoured the mosquitos' eggs and larvae. Voracious predators of the tiny game, the benevolent fish spread along the country's coasts. coasts. There is no praise great enough to fuBy express the importance of their role in the eradication of this gruesome disease. THE ZOOLOGIST'S BATH Mick Imlah What happened to the fish in Noah's F1ood? Had they no sin to choke for, that the world Became what might be caBed their oyster? Did two Of each variety (and Holder counts Five hundred thousand submarine divisions) Angle themselves? Did Noah's Iit-
tle boy Devise, one drizzly breakfast while his dad Was lecturing the Iions and the dados, A warm aquarium to sleep a milIion? He didn't. Germans have mapped the Bible's truth Meandering out of Science into Symbol; How could you justify a family Of eight to countless legions of mere pairs? We must assume that only two were human, Induding, I imagine, Shem. Discount
THE POSE OF ANIMALS Josué RamÍrez
The nagging Wife, a medieval shrew; And Ham, the pig that none of them could eat; Sore in the seed of the drowsy baby hummed The order laphetoptera (woodwasps); And the paragon, Old Noah, was a whale. Try proving it? You're in the Deluge, right, And someone says. l'U bet you drown, you're wicked; What would you splash to, an ancient ape with a hammer Or a huI k with a mouth the size of Crystal Palace? Of course you would. Remember when we read The Other Testament that its skull-
The f1y has stopped buzzing. lts glass wings folded over hard, corrugated textures are the sunreflected scales that the gaze blind to oracular rituals and sacrifices does not see, or ignores. The fragi1e insect is a high-pitched note in the massive elephant's lumbering cadence. Under the Iight of the sun, the mammal's pendulous movement to and fro infects us with its neurotic inertia; Borges caught a glimpse of it, in a dreadfuI menagerie. The boy points to it and the father daims it is dancing. A circular rhythm like the sand in the ring at a circus whose only spectade is the mere presence of animals. The beast's domestication contradicts the notion that we are standing before a f1esh and blood elephant. Though it might seem strange, this animal with its volatile, transient, buzzing mole pleases us-the boy, me, the photographer who takes its picture, and Borges, who perceives in the elephant the archetype of the elephant: memory which implies forgetfulness. If the archetype of the getfulness. elephant lies within the elephant, the elephant is in its image become archetype. When 1 was a child, aB elephants were named
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capped bards Had motives of their own, religious ones; No journalist wrote Genesis; no Jew Would think of other species. Noah's ark Was Noah, the chosen mammal. Evidence? La gelleraci6n del cordero. Alltología de la poesía actllal en las islas britállicas.
Selección, traducción y prólogo d e Carlos López Beltrán y Pedro Serrano. Trilce edl· ciones. México, 2000.
Maya, whether male or female, in natural-seienee books or magazines, in cireuses or at Chapultepee loo. Soon afterwards, 1 diseovered this was the name of the c10ak which bears on it representations of everything that exists in the world-something very difficult to comprehend. Now, pachyderms are an image, calling to mind wrinkles on thick skin; this phenomenon surely has a scientific name of its own, though 1 do not know it, here in the middle of Mexico City. As we continue our tour of the zoo, the heat of the sun, intensified by the smog, frustra tes our will to spontaneous action, a will we share with the captive animals. According to Víctor Mendiola, animals pose. But not because they know they're being watched. What consciousness do we ascribe to them but that of our own invention? Moral indiscretions, appraisals biased by a secret ethical codeo If 1 am certain of one thing, it is that the Iion is not what he is portrayed to be. 1 saw him from the bus that goes to the Villa de Guadalupe, poised on a rock which isn't a rock-a cruel archetypal artifice. His mane, for which we call him king, jutted out over the fence which fuses him with the Paseo de la Reforma in my memory. A crown of ochre fur; suddenly, it seemed his rage had been inexorably squelched, a volcano gone extinct. A feline fed by his female eonsorts; following Borges, I'd say that his golden figure on shields is the gilded path to a new symbol of power. Homer describes Ulysses in the banquet hall, stained with the blood of his wife's suitors and compares him to a Iion who has torn his prey to shreds. Meanwhile, at home, 1 stalk the cat that comes every night to piss in the flowerpots. loos: an ancient tradition in China, Mesoamerica and Rome,
and a modern one in Europe, where the concept of the zoological garden arose. Such Su eh "gardens" seek to create ecosystems in parks we might stroll through, looking at snouts, beaks, horns, c1imbing animal s, reptiles and sea creatures, seeing them shrouded in foul mists that make their environment a punishing and pathetic one indeed: hippopotami in their fake puddles. The institutionalized culture of conservation summons us to bear witness to these recruits from the animal kingdom, a kingdom which we left further and further behind as we boarded the ships of technified industrialization. According to John Berger, cages are frames, ¡ust just like those
around works of art displayed in a gallery; but whose works of art are these caged beings? The great diversity of species on display does not take us back to the respective habitats of these four-Iegged or winged creatures, reptiles, carnivorous or oviparous beings, but rather to images we have seen of them against natural backdropsnot in nature, but on Jacques Cousteau, the Discovery Channel and other documentary television programs, in which we observe their imposing size, incredible shapes and colorful hides on an . electrified scale. Programs: visual theatricality that reinvests our civiIized instincts with a certain sense of wild adventure. loos: forums where we do not see the bull gallop out and the man who faces him; risk-free safaris where the 234
dance is replaced by the slow gait of lost wonder-a procession devoid of precise meaning. Observing these creatures does not unite us onee again with our forgotten animal instinct¡ there is no visible identification beyond the vanity of comparing ourselves to them, looking at ourselves reflected in their eyes. We say, then, that we are made of the same stuff. But, how exactly is that stuff corrupted if not by our own will to power? We share with animals a sense of suitable stomping grounds and of migrations, but they are governed by an instinet that does not speak¡ they squawk, roar, hiss, snort, guided by an inner compass, while we are guided by the will to power and the notion of property. What to do except imitate them? Poe's crow said never more a torrid night of stormy feelings. The young photographer takes c1ose-ups of animals' body parts¡ Borges mixes those parts up like a surreal Josep Renau photomontage. The Argentinean writer creates animals by recreating diverse cultures' mythological fantasies: the mandragores, centaurs, chimera of a boundless Iiterary menagerie. Mendiola is not interested in communing with animals through his pictures of them, nor in evoking fantastic, imaginary territories. His work does not center on false identities nor is it a gratuitous, altruistic statement. His photos do make a statement, but it is a critique and an emotional presentation of the visible, the pleasure of seeing in the image a foretold memory: the giraffe's long neck, its orderly spots, its chops and velvety horns make up a unique, panoramic perspective. Mendiola has not lost his childlike curiosity, his delight, nor does he negate his intent as a photographer: to show his impression of things-the parallelism between the giraffe's neck and the buildings
that edge Chapultepec Park on the Po la neo neighborhood side. He speaks of big things. In 1998 and 1999, Mendiola paid several visits to Chapultepec loo and Africam Safari. On one of these zoological treks, he took the photograph which depicts three fish inside a plastic bottle, an unseen urban fisherman holding up his trophy. In the background, in an fish-eye perspective, that negation of a horizon which is the city is another enormous boat-bottle in which we are the fish . It was not Mendiola's intention to be exhaustive, nor to charm or condemn, but rather to comment on what he saw. Seeking neither to emphasize the animal s' characteristics nor to free them from captivity, Mendiola works within the concept of the part separated from the whole, using the lake inside the plastic bottle as a metaphor in his documentary photographs. Will WilI Mendiola put the fish back in the water? He intuitively too k this picture with a wide-angle lens. A fisheye lens, a fish-eye perspective, to tell us that we're fish. And the fact is we are fish. I see and the analogy is unavoidable. Both the certainty and the meta,phor of the gaze are based in comparisons. That is why confinement is a jail, and this jaH is something more than the denial of freedom: it's the anteroom to the insane asylum. Peruvian poet CĂŠsar Vallejo found that being behind bars severed his ties with the world's conventional, discursive syntax, rather than leading him to reintegrate himself within it. One of Mendiola's photographs shows a group of sick, blind kangaroos, suffering from captivity and cataracts; they are no longer part of an exhibit; instead, they partake of an obfuscation within which they resemble prisoners, condemned to pace the few square
feet of the same hostile ceU endlessly. A waterwheel without a mili, a troubling space in which these animals are condemned to longer being kangaroos. But the stream at the Cerro del ChapulĂn (Grasshopper HiIl) in Chapultepec Park has dried up, and the trained elephants' aural pavHions are no longer enormous, their defensive tusks no longer formidable. Mendiola recovers their imposing proportions in close-ups; c1ose-ups; he clicks c1icks the shutter, plays around, climbs cages, enjoying the privileges his behind-the-scenes reportage aUows him. And beyond that, much farther beyond that, he captures the ghostly image of the spectators reflected in the glass
case of two stuffed panda bears. An endangered omnivorous species. As I see it, that translucid pan e is where our stubborn humanity is confirmed in the face of a vanishing animal world. lI insist: it is a figure of lost devotion. In the center of the black cage where the animal is exhibited we don't see an eye but a marble. What a strange joy it is to feel this desolation in the midst of the bustling crowd. I stop when I feel Iike looking at an animal: its weariness is its confinement. I give in to fascination though it implies the negation of the other: this is what makes the spectator at the zoO pathetic. And I know that all these things are less defined still in the images we see, in the staged conditions the animal confronts. What to do before an image like Iike that of a refrigerator 235
filled with animal parts which once posed within simulated spaces, what to do but give in to the irremediable paralysis of fascination : vertigo. The truth is that Victor Mendiola's photographs, like those of Robert Frank and of Italian artist Ernesto Bazan, attract us so forcefully beca use it seems that each situation they capture on film has no goal other than to be an image.
THE STARE
Sujata Bhatt There is that moment when the young human child stares
at the young monkey child who stares back Innocence facing innocence in a space where the young monkey child is not in captivity. There is purity clarity c1arity there is a transparence in this stare which lasts a long time ... eyes of water eyes of sky the soul can stiU fall faU through because the monkey has yet to learn fear and the human has yet to learn fear let alone arrogance.
ON THE SIXTH DAY Alessandra Sanguinetti
"And God said: Let us make man !n our image, alter our likeness: and let him have dominion over the lish 01 the sea, and over the (owl of the air, and over
the eattle, and over all the earth, and over
every creeping thing th at ereepeth upon the earth ." Genes!s 1:26
The aim of this project is to further our journey into a space we have forgotten in our civiJized Iives, where the harsh rules of nature almost never intrude-and to do this before the time comes when animals are all confined as factory products, erasing the traditions and history of a land whose inhabitants take pride in providing for their own sustenance, from beginning to end. Ultimately, what we would eventually lose in such a scenario would be the very gaze of the animals that support this chain, and with that, our genuine understanding of our dependence on them, and our respect for the sacrifice of one Iife to sustain the Iives of others. Fito is 20 years old and Iives deep in the country with his famiIy. They have all kinds of animals: goats, sheep, pigs, skunks, many chickens, geese, horses, and cows. The family depends solely on their animals and has no other source of in come. They raise animals, eat them, heal them, sell them, and sometimes they hurt them. Last year, in a fit of exasperation, Fito beat his favorite horse, Tornado, to death. Other times he painstakingly cures a rabbit's paw. His mother, Juana, only finished first grade, but she keeps a diary in which she writes a detaiJed account of the day's
events: what each of her animals did, the color of the sky, and which way the wind blew. This project portrays the peopIe and animals inhabiting the Pampas, their relationship with each other and with the land. In the rural farmlands of Argentina, this relationship is a part of daily Iife. Small and open land farming, unlike intensive farming and factory farming, has resulted in a language of traditions that persist over the years, where the cycle of Iife and death is present every day, from dawn to dusk. The intimate relationship between animals and their owners, the domestication of creatures that beco me companions as well as a
source of food, crea tes over time a contradictory bond: breeding, caring for, curing, and ultimately killing them. To photograph this relationship is to transform it from myth and fable into a reality where nothing is c1ear-cut, and no one plays the hero. By exploring the fine line that separa tes us from the things over which we rule, we may reach a better understanding of our own nature. DINING ON ESCARGOTS Cuauht茅moc Medina Francis Alys (Belgium, 1959) arrived in Mexico in 1987 to avoid military service, completing "community service" in the Mixteca region of Oaxaca. Originally trained as an architect, he aban236
doned the profession after a coupie of years, convinced that it was difficult to avoid the authoritarianism of a position imposed from the outside on people's way of life. Disillionment with the liberal profession and its compromises made him, at thirty, want to become an artist. He involved himself in the revitalization of the contemporary Mexican art scene that was happening at the end of the 1980s, and since then has made Mexico the base of his projects. In 1992, Alys returned to Europe for six months. In the Galerie I'Escaut in Brussels, he presented an installation in one of the upper levels which synthesized his sculptural concerns with the construction of the artist's object and its relationship with the pubIie: 1 works that comprised several media-installations of found objects, paintings decomposed through sculptural interventions and walking performance pieces related to collecting street materials and discreetly parasiting the street. Alys extended a line of bright green soap along the walls of the gallery, similar to the black Iines that museums paint to keep the public at a distance from vulnerable works of arto This demarcation was repeated on all but one of the iron columns supporting the roof of what was once a barn. This frontier isolated a space which encirc1ed the entire roof and sorne of the walls, an area in which Alys placed hundreds of live snails of the type that Belgians eat cooked in garlic and butter, known in Mexico as "caracoles de pante贸n," Le. graveyard snails. The smell of the soap--the proud symbol of hygiene in industrial civilizations-was an unbreachable limit for the snails, effectively forcing them to keep their distance, just as elephants avoid the ditches that
separate them from visitors to the . zoo. This "boundary" reaffirmed the separateness of the art work, as in the differentiation between pedestal and sculpture or stage and theater. On one of the walls, where the soap line extended to the floor, Alys placed his preparatory sketches for the project as food for the hatchery. The gallery space was thus divided between the artistic microsystem of the snails devouring the drawings and the space of the visitors, who were as trapped in their own jurisdiction as the molluscs. Like zoos and aquariums, the primary communication between these two artificial worlds was the visual relation between humans and certain ani- â&#x20AC;˘ mals, which, in other circumstances perhaps, would have reached the table through the mediating art of the "cooked.''' The evanescent limit between animals and public reminded me of an article in a Mexican newspaper about an accident in Chapultepec Zoo. A tiger was on the point of devouring a little girl whom in one swipe it had pulled inside the cage because she had gone too c10se to the barrier in her desire to stroke the "little cat." In its fury, the animal had bent and almost completely opened the steel bars separating it from the public, and the keepers commented to the press that the cage is not capable of resisting the power of the tiger or other major camivores; they are he Id captive more by the appearance of the boundary than by its physical strength. The snails in Alys' installation were kept on the ceiling by the smell of soap; tigers respect their cages, moving from on side to the other because the bars betray their visionoIf they were as stupid as flies, banging with a1l their might on the window, in time, the animals would embark on the hunt
for the tasty bipeds who go visit them. Their cage is powerful in the same way as the symbolic boundaries of human society;' that they could overcome that visuallimit sounds as easy as humans uniting in a general strike. I believe that my association was one among many that this socio-artistic system might call to mind in those predisposed to think about it. 4 In the center of the room, a single column had remained unpainted with the soap boundary. The idea was to open a passage through which the snails could invade the space of the visitors if they were so inclined.S A ridiculous mediation, a minimal toleran ce, that "invited" the snails
to start th,e adventure of migration to the "brave new world" of the humans. In the three-month duration of the exhibition, only one snail descended to the floor. Separatism had been respected, and this single infraction, very carefully registered, was the greatest proof of the efficacy of prohibition, as historians of the right know well. The disjunction acquired tension given the imaginary possibility of its annulment. The segregation and communication between both spaces suggested the fantasy of their unification. But of course that utopian possibility was disturbing. Not far away was the disruption of civilized order by the invasion of the animals in BuĂąuel's Exterminating Angel, or Kubin's novel The Other Side, not to mention the plagues of Egypt 237
before the Israelite exodus. Without the division, what developments could occur? We can imagine various scenarios: a. global modemization: erasing "frontiers;" the snails' death, squashed by the visitors' shoes; b. cultural revolution: kili the spectators so that the snails could feed on them; C. reformist: keep the separation, allow the "sustainable" consumption of the snails as gastronomic capital, at the time of "cultural" contact, giving the snails a better, more nutritious enviro nment; d. neo-conservatism: keep the vivarium to supply restaurants with escargots, increasing their production with synthetic food more efficient in terms of "costbenefit" and without disturbing the preserved area of the "public" who would have to become real clients; e. artistic: keep the separation as a study of utopian possibility, memorializing isolation at the edge of the productive machine, with relative independence from politics. What 1 am interested in pulling out of this social synecdoche, is the form that permits these scenarios. That act of revealing the distance demarcating a division, piercing an imaginary center, and provoking the fantasy that this separation could be broken down. 6 The spectators directing the political destiny of the snails. The snails "mediating" their jail, devouring the penitentiary project that was imposed on them. As they did not in fact form a "society," a complete communion was forbidden to them. 7 AII these reflections were made possible by aesthetic autonomy, the state of suspension in which these molluscs were located, and the di sposition of the spectators to think
of their world through the lens of the installation, instead of seeing the installation from their world-with the condition of letting themselves fall into an identificatory trap that nevertheless was arrested an instant before anyone could "humanize" the animals. NOTES:
, Alys exhibited with the AngloMexican sculptor Melanie 5mith in November, 1992, with a collaborative work, "Corredor," as well as individual works. 2 In January and February of 1995, Alys remade the piece for his exhibition in Opus Operandi in Gante. There, the snails were fed on the daily newspaper, in part to indicate the passage of time, drawing a parallel between those snails trapped in their hygienic prison and our morning consumption of newspapers. J A classic problem: it is not continuous violence that sustains domination, but the creation of rules which threaten coercion if infringed. • In 1994 and 1995 Alys produced two small works derived from an old European postcard showing two elephants extending their trunks over a ditch towards sorne schoolchildren in a European zoo. In one, the children were reproduced on each side of the ditch. In the other, it is elephants who appear in this mirror image. The identification whieh happens between the two sides erases the difference between species, turning an innoeent and optimistic image into two pathetic encounters in the form of a narcissistic reflection. , Like, for example, the frontier between Mexico and the U.S. U.S. in Tijuana, where the dividing wall every so often has "random" interruptions. • The allusions the piece displays,
especially in its politico-historical reading, are part of the consistency with which Alys' work provokes reflections, rather than attentiveness to the "sculptura'" as a presentation of a prior conceptualization. The work does not try to ask "what do 1 want to say," but "what can we think and do" starting from that experience. 7 How could an equalization of species occur? By eliminating violence even between the same animals? Under a Franciscan program of persuasion by the wolf brother? In one of his first exhibitions, Alys cites Wittgenstein: "If a lion could talk, we would not be able to understand it."
played with a real bull. The bull is the biggest animal, and with his horns he can kili people, or at least scare them, and when people play with the bull the alfereces are always running along behind, shouting. So maybe they realized it was too complicated to play with a real bull and they began to build bulls out of petate. And that is why they eontinue to use petate bulls during Carnival even today. When the eelebrations end, on the last day, they kili the petate bulls as they would a real bul!. They also kili a real bull on the last day of the festivities; sometimes they kili two or even three, depending on how many alfereces there are, so each one can have one oc two kilos of meato Normally two bull costumes are made for the alfereces, beca use there are two neighborhoods: there's the upper neighborhood, and the lower neighborhood. That way, each group builds a bul!. Pera re is straw or palm f,ber, generally used to make sleeping mats, (tr. note)
THE CARNIVAL BULLS OF TENEJAPA, CHIAPAS Petul Hernández It has always been a custom to build a bull for the Tenejapa Carniva!. This is how the people of Tenejapa celebra te; this is how we Iike things to loo k, how we like to see things. Though the bull himself is not an alférez, he directs the actions of all the alfereces. An alférez is aman who has special responsibilities during the Carnival celebrations. During the festivities, the bull comes out first, and the aIfereces and the people then turn around and runo Each year people do things this way, building their petate' bulls. 1 think that when the first carnival was eelebrated, they might have 238
MEAT IS MURDER Mauricio Molina .. rHE ABATTOIR, The abattoir stems originally from religion in the sense that the
temples of ancient times served a IWofold purpose; they were used for both entreaties and killings, Without a doubt the result was a disturbing concurrence between
mythologieal mystenes and the eharacteris· tic, dismal grandeur of sites where blood is
shed. Today, however, the abattolr Is a eursed place, quarantined like a eholerabeanng ship, ship, elearly, the vietims of this curse are neither the butchers nor the ani-
mals, but rather the good people who can no longer stand anythmg but their Dwn
ugline", an ugliness whieh in faet responds to a sick nero toc cleanhness, for bitter narrow-rnmdedness and boredom;
the curse (whieh haunts only those who utter it) leads them to live as far as they can from abattoirs, abattoirs, to exlle themselves
prudishly fram this amorphaus world to ane where nothing horrible remains and where, suffering from a nagging obsession with abomination, they are reduced to eating cheese." -Georges Bataille
Blood tends to be the most difficult thing to wash off one's body. Cow and pig carcasses hang, slit open from top to bottom, like images from a grotesque snuff film in which victims are cut to pieces until they show palpitating, visceral, intimate secrets. You can smell the meat several blocks away. It is not the terrible aroma that the conquistadors smelled during the Aztecs' sacrificial ceremonies, nor is it Auschwitz, nor a Bosnian death campo Everything takes place nearby, in the heart of the city. Fabrizio León has immersed himself in these death camps to show us the dark si de of meato And what better place for such an illustration than the abattoir at Azcapotzalco, one of the biggest in Mexico City-Tenochtitlan. His images capture the life of the butchers, trapped amidst c10uds of flies in an abominable, end-of-theworld atmosphere. It is no accident that the slaughterhouse was established among ants ("Azeapotzalco," according to speakers of Náhuatl, means "anthill"): those chill-inducing insects that lay c1aim to the passing of the hours, the merciless consumption of time. On the fa~ade of the neighborhood chureh, aboye the doors (the atmosphere inevitably recalls the writings of Ramón López Velarde), on one of the bell-towers that call forth the faithful for Sunday mass, there is an image of a red ant. An ancient legend states that when this ant reaches the bell, the end of the world will be near. Elderly church-going ladies, with their eobweb-grey rebozos, scan the belltower, await.i ng the Final
judgment. But the Apocalypse, Revelation, never comes. The reason for this is simple: the end of the world is already among us, and has been for a long timeevery day, in fact. This apocalyptic context is the frame within which we must read Fabrizio León's images, which partake of both incurable cruelty and heartfelt sentiment, as the butchers work contentedly to feed uso We watch them bathe, glancing at the camera with a surprised look, surrounded by invisible posters of naked women whose presence is merely an intuition, their bodies covered by black c10uds of fli es, their f1esh swollen, reminiscent of pigs or cows. This is, lite rally, a visceral experience. White entrails,
deflated stomachs with heads lolling about nearby: images which capture the extreme rituals of our daily nourishment. In sorne cultures, it is priests who are given the task of killing animals for food . One must ask for forgiveness, give thanks and celebrate before proceeding with the sacrifice. Often the action is done in a state of trance. Even a cursory perusal is enough to highlight the glazed ~yes of the figures in Fabrizio León's photographs: vestiges of a remote, archaic kingdom where death and Iife commingle in a continuous dialectic. Opposites: sacrificial f1esh and daily life, ritualized time and the worker's Iife exchange their masks. It is no mere coinciden ce that the slaughterhouse has a strong kinship with sacred spaces, Iike ceme239
teries and churches. It is there we initiate our ritual contact with the Other, with the alterity of death, the sacred, the animal. In a certain way, as in churches and cemeteries, we approach a kind of reconciliation: this beast slit open from top to bottom, horribly erotic, reminds us of our own animal nature. As in Christian rituals, in which we consume the body and blood of the Savior to purify ourselves and re-establish our sacred nature, in the slaughterhouse we are witness to the epiphany of the living which reconciles us with the archaic, with our animal being. Fabrizio León has da red to cross that preearious terrain which separates us from the Other: looking at his butchers we come across the human, the aH-too-human from which we can never separate ourselves. Images: a child of indefinable age, an old infant, looks at the camera suspiciously; behind him, hang two out of focus cows, blood shining. A symmetrical tlompantli 1 composed not of skuHs, but of viscera positioned on the ground. A butcher's satisfied smile at a ¡ob well done recalls a smiling priest, pleased to have brought a ritual to its happy conc1usion. Aman cutting a calf's throat: his fierce gaze reminds us that we are descendants of Aztees. Primitive deities, the gods of blood answer nature's call, fulfill their needs, play among c10uds of vapor, naked, ready to purify themselves. A pensive man among a group of heads. A cow's crotch that recalls those biologieal ages when beasts confused consumption with reproduction. These images draw us away from the tidy meat counters of supermarkets, where bloody pieces of animal f1esh are exhibited on styrofoam trays. This postmodern asepsis seems to want to make us
forget our primitive nature. Magically placed before us on refrigerated shelves, we easily forget that this meat once walked on four legs, eating grass, looking at the violet sunset, fe~ling the burning chill of pre-dawn air, mating in the open field, while in the background the wind whispered through the trees. Fabrizio Le贸n's photographs remind us of our cruel, murderous nature. That nature which more genteel minds would rather have us forget. The visceral is always in very bad taste. Nothing is more horrendous than exposed organs. And nevertheless, the woman at the next table in a five-star restaurant, sinking her knife into the eye of the rib (her table manners impeccable) is also made of nerves and guts. You have merely to scratch beneath the surface to discover within her a throbbing animal: an edible entity that, considering her height and good shape, could easily feed a whole family. It is the eye-cannibalistic feast-which perceives these apparently horrible, yet deeply intimate images. Intimate: 2 that's the word. Entrails-{)ur intimate insides-are, and what doubt could there possibly be, what keep us alive: it is our guts that remind us of our dark, savage origins. In the seventeenth century, Rembrandt used meat as the theme for a series of memorable studies in abattoirs. The Dutch artist's painting of a slaughtered ox forms part of these studies on exposed flesh which culminated with The Anatomy Lesson. Four hundred years later, Francis Bacon took up the same subject matter with techniques proper to the twentieth century. Rembrandt lived during the time of the Inquisition, of public executions and the atrocities of the Conquest. Bacon Iived in the era of concen-
tration camps and other Nazi abominations. An obvious political discourse is implicit in the work of both artists. This is true of Fabrizio Le贸n's work as well: he reminds us of what we are, what we were. Our barbarity is nothing but the reflection of our animal being. His images reconcile us with our thirst for blood, our sacrificial calling. It is not cows and pigs but rather we ourselves who have been portrayed through the butchers who work Iike charitable deities to feed uso Vegetarians take on an aseptic struggle to prevent this massacre. The genteel among us might be scandalized. Sorne might even say: 1'11 never eat meat again. And they
will have their reasons for doing so: we often seek to forget what we really are-predators who feed off other living beings, breeding and fattening them to maintain our position in the food chain. But we al so thank and bless these cows and these pigs, cruelly fallen under our knives. Each sacrificed animal reminds us of what we are. These things form our sacred sustenance. , A wall made of human skulls outside Mesoamerican temples (tf. note).
, In the original text, the author uses the adjective entraflable, intimate, which has the same root in Spanish as entra帽as,
entrails (tr. note).
240
ON THE PATH OF THE QUIET HEART Marta DiUon Is there another world underwater? WiIl the blind reptiles crawl up through the sewer tunnels on their white bellies? How many lives will we bury in the catacombs of (un)memory before finding the snapshot with which each person presents his or her own history? Memory chooses what to display, what to keep hidden in time's darkest zones. And in spite of memory's stubborn selectivity, nothing is ever completely forgotten. In the midst of the darkness, in dreams or nightmares, hidden images reappear like will-o'-thewisps, giving life to that which we thought had be en buried forever. Irremediably dead. It is these vestiges that Valeria Bellusci photographs in En la Vereda del Coraz贸n Quieto (On the Path of the Quiet Heart). Dead animal s wear the mask of Iife in absurd, still postcards that often mimic the very experience of looking directly into the eyes of death. Animals that are stuffed are usually poised as if to attack, motionless now and forever, forced always to represent the same instant, their glass eyes reflecting glimmers of Iight, blind mirrors in which any ilIusion of liveliness is lost. In the pictures Bellusci took at the Bernardino Rivadavia Natural Science Museum in Buenos Aires, what is and what once was both Iie in wait, stalking. They are remnants of past lives, of deaths brought to a standstill by taxidermy to exist in a supposedly timeless interim. These beings, however, no longer able to transform themselves, cannot win the battle against decay and are subject to the actions of what comes after their life cyc1es: light, moths, rodents, nocturnal animals. "AH
that was, because it has been, is," sta tes the photographer, defying logic and her own certainty that what once "was" can only barely be reinvented by memory and its custodians: archives, museums, photographs. And it is this in tention-to reinvent what her memory has arbitrarily hidden-which leads her to scrutinize a natural science museum's arrogant impulse to "name every species:" to place every creature that swam, walked or crawled within the confines of the word, of what can be labeled, and therefore filed. And looked up again. "The museum attempts to reconstruct the evolutionary chain and thus open the folds of time"-to order living beings, to order chaos. There is, however, something terrifying about these artificial landscapes which the photographer unearthed during her descent into the half-Iight of the museum's basement, equipped with a small can dIe and her camera, being ca refuI never to breathe too deeply so that the funereal silence would not mingle with the air in her lungs. Something keeps beating, in spite of the fact that batting has replaced the blood of these animals which seem to be looking, with their blind eyes, at a parallel universe-built upon moments which survived from sorne other order and now seem to converse among themselves. Moreover, these animals sometimes assail us with an unexpected wink, creating the iIlusion that their actions, eternally frozen into a single, final, pose, could suddenly continue at any minute, now that their gaze crosses the abyss that separates the living from the dead. It was a memory that led Bellusci to enter the museum's galleries, which conserve tens of thousands of specimens in suspended animation, from the fos-
sils that the earth sorne times brings back to Iigh t to the most majestic birds, turned into nothing more than feather-covered carcasses. The memory of a shattered windowpane, at ground level, through which Bellusci tried to discern what lurked inside, made her return years later to inspect the cellars from the other side of the glass. The other side of things, the other si de of her memory which is also inhabited by fossilized scenes, cIosets locked from within, scenes that strive to remain living, though they are,
once again, irremediably dead. At first Bellusci's work focused on aquariums. "Because in the beginning there was also water," and it is underwater that the hum of everyday Iife can still be silenced, allowing us to sense what happens inside, the body's noises, the memory of events which cannot be remembered. At first she focused on living things, though still within institutions which order inanimate things-as the Rivadavia Museum al so houses an aquarium-the only things that can be preserved practically intacto Dreams stir within fish-worlds parallel to the ones we may glimpse without crossing any bor241
der other than the silence of consciousness. Fish, however, live where humans cannot survive unassisted. The environment in which they thrive is the same one in which we drown; thus, any translation of their gazes is bound to fail: aquatic beings always seem dead. Even alive, they seem as embalmed as their stuffed landdwelling counterparts, Iike those five-Iegged freaks that nature rej ects as unnatural. The memory of water is an impossible memory, that of our beginning. We have all be en there, though no one remembers. After the aquariums, Bellusci immersed herself in the inner hallways of this museum with "enormous windows where Iight enters as if through eyes, a Iight that does not quite iIIuminate the space, beca use from within the gaze cannot be returned ." Deeper yet, in the basements, she wande red around Iike a blind person until a door opened, until a cabinet revealed its secrets to her and until the jars of formaldehyde filled her with that quiet odor of creatures that attempt to preserve themselves: animals like mute witnesses, condemned to repeat their habits in a single scene, thousands of butterflies with Latin names impaled on pins, monstrous insects that lose their threatening power beneath the dust. AII of them motionless. Like the heart on the path of something that does not dare loo k because it knows, beyond any doubt, that it is impossible to save anything from change-except what is already dead. Because even memory cannot adequately retain what is gone. Its tricks constantly reinvent what was once real to bring us a different, parallel and disturbing reality, veiled by the will to construct a narrative capable of resisting the continuous present to
which life condemns uso Tricks like those Bellusci's photographs play, looking at the living with their dead eyes. THE SILENCE OF THE SPECIES Ricardo Espinosa and Jorge Aguinaco A few months ago, a painter friend of ours who works in a cultural and educational institution in Mexico City's historie downtown gave us a tour of three halls containing hundreds of scientific instruments from the late eighteenth century and the early twentieth century. He al so showed us a hall where a considerable number of animals-some stuffed, sorne preserved in formaldehyde-as well as a mummy and quite a few fetuses were stored. He told us that these items had all belonged to the Chopo Museum in the late 19705, when it housed the collec1970s, tion of the Natural History Museum. Those animals and scientific devices captivated us completely. The animal s moved us in particular, leading us to contemplate how humans tend to treat animal species, and the transformation these animals had undergone as they were turned into exhibition pieces. Their bodies, held up by wire structures and filled with sawdust, were positioned in attitudes of attack or repose, suggesting a supposed naturalness. The extended period of time during which these creatures had been exhibited and the neglect they later suffered left very visible marks. They are still covered in dust, even today; sorne have lost their glass eyes, and the bars that support their bodies have begun to poke out here and there. The very way the specimens are arranged in the space is itself terri-
fying. It reminded us of the Chopo Museum as it was years ago, with its Victorian-style exhibitions in old wood vitrinesmuch like those of nineteenthcentury naturalists-smelling of formaldehyde and mothballs. Our intention was to crea te a series of images that captured the almost schizophrenic attitudes of sorne of the specimens-their icy, bulging eyes, their broken ears, but also the strange beauty of their withered, dusty existence. This series consists of forty photographs taken on 6X6 negatives with a Hasselblad camera. We used natural light whenever possible, and created images using both color and black and white film.
from my house. If that son of a bitch didn't give me back what he had taken, I'd go to the police and charge him with robbery. Grudgingly, rI imagine, the little devil gave me back my camera, though he waited a few weeks to do it... When , finally had the camera in my hot little hands, , started feeling an itch again, and , was afraid that a shitload of little critters were using my head as their stomping grounds. By sorne coincidence that 1 fail to understand completely, Valí and Sarita, two girls from the Quitovac shelter, showed me how to ward off the devil. r took a few photographs with the possessed camera; 1 in tended to figure out once and for all how to capture those fucking Iice. , don't know if I did, but ,'m convinced that if you want to beat the devil, you have to use the devil's tools. MIKKI THE PIONEER Cuauhtémoc Medina " ... this new bloom of photography also belongs largely to the field ... of misjudged
QUITOVAC DIARY ALTAR DESERT Javier Ramírez Limón , remember it was a Tuesday when , found out that the devil lived in Toluca. They also told me he didn't live alone and that, in his own way, he was happy. , started scratching myself-"something" was starting Iike a tiekIe in my head. From that Tuesday forward, , scratched myself for sorne twenty-odd days, and on top of that 1 did every possible stupid thing imaginable ... That same night , sent one of the devil's best friends an e-mail asking him-<>r demanding, r don't exactly recall- to tell the devil to return what he had sto len 242
history ot general non.protesslonal productivity." Franz Roh (1929)
1. Like Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, Gary Winogrand or Boris Mikhailov, Mikki explores the urban landscape as if it were an inexhaustible source of baroque scenes and hellish beings. Once Mikki steps outside of his cage, Moscow unfolds before him as a vibrant place, populated by monuments of an incomprehensible history, inhabited by monsters which seem poi sed ¡ust at the point of hurling theImelves recklessly at the photographer. Portraits of beings in the face of whieh the camera carries out its task with impassive indifference. Not only
does Mikki completely lack any sense of the affectation, prudence and emotional scruples which hinder most photographers. His lens is utterly unclouded by the humanitarian tackiness which makes most documentary photographs so cloying. It could even be said, moreover, that Mikki's rejection of the genre's tempting schmaltziness is instinctual. Many might consider this frigidity of such a gaze to be patently inhuman. What difference does it make? Mikki belongs to arare caste-that of the photographer as executioner. His keen, distorted, mobile, impulsive photographs are merely appropriate to an equally warped and off-centered world. The off-kilter framing, the sud den action, the decidedly low-angle perspective, the color blurred by the movement of a hand untouched by visuocentric prejudices, the choice to leave most of the image-making up to the mecha ni cal device itself-all this clearly demonstrates that Mikki is a highly contemporary artist. 2. By the 1970s, when they were working on a series of kitsch/communist paintings grouped under the moniker of SOT Art (the Soviet version of Pop), Komar & Melamid were already carrying out their first experimental "collaborations" with animals. While these artists executed their most famous paintings (Stalin visited by the winged angel of inspiration in The Birth of Socialist Realism, painted in the style of Poussin but in the spirit of Gerasimov), they also worked with a dog named Tranda, making drawings based on its paw prints. Fifteen years later they repeated the experiment, founding several art academies for elephants in southeastern Asia.' The elephants trained by Komar & Melamid used their trunks to smear paint on large-format canvases, resulting in
tachiste-Iike work. The inspiration for these projects is fundamentally political. According to their artists' statement in the catalog of the 1999 Venice Biennial, working with animals allowed them to demonstrate that the creative impulse is not solely a human trait: "Ecollaboration, a combination of the words 'ecology' and 'collaboration,' is what we call our work with animals .. .It seems that not only animals but plants and aH the world elements possess creative impulses. We plan to further this idea by creating architectural structures with beavers and termites ... painting canvases together with tree branches and wind.'"
These ironies appealed to the principie of "equality of species" put forward by radical ecologists and radical animal rights organizations. Komar & Melamid's work thus tends to set the following mechanism in motion: to demolish a pretentious idea merely by applying it in the most literal way possible. 3. Clearly, Mikki i~ not the first artist of his species. Curiously, it was in Czarist Russia where the first documented experiments with monkeys making art took place.3 Nadjeta Kohts, a Russian scientist studying the psychological development of primates, encouraged a chimpanzee, ]oni, to draw simple patterns on papero Though sorne research on the subject occurred in the period 243
between the two World Wars, primate art reached its apogee in the 1950s. Sorne painting monkeys practically became television stars, thanks to the media's clever impulse to spice up the challenge to modern art with zoological entertainment. Congo, the famous ehimpanzee from the London Zoo, collaborated with anthropologist Desmond Morris to create strong, expressive gouache paintings and pastel drawings. At the same time, around 1954, Bernhard Renseh worked closely with Pablo, a capuchin monkey from the Munster Zoo who made remarkable drawings. The scientific and media-savvy enthusiasm of researchers like Morris led dozens of scientists to help ehimps, gorillas and other kinds of primates develop personal pietorial styles. But if artists like Congo beeame true eelebrities, it was in large part beeause they served to ridicule Abstraet Expressionists. In 1957, Desmond Morris organized the second segment of a show about "Primitivism" at London's Institute of Contemporary Art. This exhibit included work by Congo and Pablo; the first phase of the show had featured none other than the drawings of Aboriginal Australian children! Later, an exhibition titled Lost Image: Comparison in the Art of Higher Primates, whieh took place at the Royal Festival Hall in London, brought together the work of children under the age of three, paintings by Congo and other monkeys and the ereations of several abstraet painters. As had happened before, the image of the "monkey painter" suggested that modern painting was a fraud . Salvador DalĂ-who never wasted the opportunity to speak his mind--<leclared eestatically: "The hand of the ehimpanzee is quasihuman, the hand of ]ackson
Pollock is almost animal." To Desmond Morris, however, monkeys' artistic abilities were the tangible proaf of the need to crea te a "biology of art, " and he took great pride in the fact that Picasso had hung one of Congo's drawings, given to him by Roland Pemose, on the wall of his studio.· Komar & Melamid have helped the histo ry of primate art progress far beyond its m ere manual phase, allowing it to en ter the era of technical reproducibility and conceptualism. Proof of its modernity (if not also of a certain impatience) is the fact that Mikki works with a Polaroid camera. 4. Mikki's capacity to take photographs depends primarily on his ability to move his fingers. As Philippe Dubois and Roland Barthes tirelessly argued, the photographic process rests more on the sudden action of a moving index finger than on the eye's analytical function. On the one hand, because photography belongs to that class of signs which Charles Pierce calls indexes (physical traces, material signs, the effects of events).' But it is aboye all beca use the photographer's real relation to the camera occurs through his or her index finger: "The photographer's organ, " writes Barthes, "is not the eye (which terrifies me), but the finger: that which is tied to the lens's shutter Ielease mechanism."· The surplise that the photoglapher feels in the face of the images he OI she produces, the "optic unconscious" which expands out of the photographed image, issues from the mechanical omnipresence of an automatic eye which articula tes the camera's image. Or such were the ideas put forward by Dziga Vertov, glorified in movies like Film-Eye (Kinoglaz, 1924) and The Man ofthe Camera (1929): the fact that the camera's way of seeing has little to do with
our own. Mikki demonstrates how very available the image has become to anyone who has fingers and has be en born into the empire of mechanical modernity. S. Komar & Melamid's "ecolIaborations" with Mikki are, it goes without saying, the last link in the chain of aesthetic experiments which these former Soviet dissidents have undertaken in the theater of fictions of Western democracies. Since 1994, the two artists have be en doing professional polls which they use as a basis to formulate each country's "Most Wanted Paintings" and "Least Wanted Paintings." Their intention is to test the precarious rela-
Part of what is so remarkable about Komar & Melamid's projects is the way their humo r uncovers black holes in the ideological systemo In the case of Mikki, they have demonstrated how democracy can easily succumb to its own . principie of universality. Once the notion of equality prevails among human beings, the question immediately arises as to the rights and freedom of other beings within nature. And once we challenge the fairness of a system of political representation, we must necessariIy investigate the right to images and their representation. Today, then, "politics" consists in the right to represent or be represented by the other. , See http: //www.elephantart.com. , Komar & Melamid, "Ecolaboration," La BiennaJe di Venezia. 48 Esposiziorle Intemazionale d'A rte, Edizioni
La Biennale
di Venezia, Venice, 1999, p. 167. I
The information in this section is based on
Thierry Lenain's Monkey Painting, introduc·
Hon by Desmond Morris, Reaktion Books, l.ondon, 1997. • Concerning the London ICA exhibition, Ibid., p.93; the Royal Festival Hall exhibi-
tionship between art and democracy by directly applying market research criteria to the decisionmaking processes around artistic creation. Komar & Melamid thus call into question the commitment to "the tastes of the people" which Soviet artists supposedly must attempt to satisfy. In addition to introducing a destabilizing method for researching socialIyestablished tastes, the series presents itself as a means through which to explore a new relationship between artist and public which discards the position of leadership previously he Id by the "great master." The result is a formidable conceptual short-circuit. As the artists themselves have said, while "Picasso mimicked Stalin, so we try to mimic Clinton.'" 244
Hon, p. 96; Dalí's statemen t, p. 117; the concept ot "biology of art," p. 24; Picasso's interest in Congo's art, p. 95.
, Philippe Dubois, El acto fotográfico. De la
representación a la recepción, Paidós, Barcelona, 1986, pp. 68-73. 6
Roland Barthes, La cámara Meida. Notas
sobre la fotografía fotografia . Paidós, Barcelona, 1990,
p.48. 1
See the interview "Painting by Numbers:
The Search for a People's Art," The Norion, March 14 th , 1994, pp. 334-348 (also at http://www.diacenter.org/km /nation.html). General information on the entire I' Most
Wanted Painting" project can be found at the Dia Center website, http://www.diacenter.org/km/intro.html.
A CANINE PHOTOGRAPHER?
This question comes to mind immediately when you encounter
photographs by Bola de la Can. Photographer Enrique Villaseñor equipped Bola de la Can, a female Cocker Spaniel, with a small, nearly weightless automatic camera which captures what the little dog is looking atoHow do animals see us? This project, which has its own web-page (lenteporlente.com) and was shown at the 8th Photography Biennial, has generated differing opinions within the photography community. There are those who consider the project humorous, and think of it as a kind of joke; there are those who become outraged, and those who applaud it. The following excerpts from letters illustrate how the inclusion of work by an animal can affect our understanding of the culture of the image. Utilizing the rhetorical devices made possibly by prosopopoeia, Bola de la Can speaks: lf my work stirs "passions" and genera tes discussion, then 1 have achieved my main goal. I am sure that everyone will draw their own useful conclusions from my work. As far as the hard knocks 1 get every once in awhile, l take them in stride. 1 know that everybody is playing the same game which, among other things, is a very serious game indeed. The hard knocks she refers to are critiques which question whether the project makes sense at all-like this commentary from Claudia Reindes in Buenos Aires, addressed to Enrique Villaseflor: From an ethological point of view, the project seems aberrant to me, since a dog does not have this camera's field of vis ion, nor does it see colors the way we do. Due to structural differences, not intellectual ones. The question of will interests me in terms of the project. Does it depend on you or on her? [... ] Doesn't it seem a bit
embarrassing for you to have presented her within the photographic milieu? lf your intention is to demonstrate that art is not an intellectual or technical construct, do you feel that debasing photographers is the way to do so? 1 should mention, by the way, that I've heard of cats who are painters, in the same way that Bola de la Can is a photographer: completely by chance and due only to the human stupidity of the animal's so-called owner. One last thought: the better l get to know people, the more [ love my dogoMy heartfelt condolences to your dog, who's had the bad luck of belonging to a family who uses her for commercial purposes, without any
imply any ill-treatment of the dog, as it is not an activity that necessitates any previous training or obedience classes, as is the case with most dog training, where the dog is taught to do things it wouldn't normally do on its own. The dog isn't suffering; on the contrary, she enjoys going on "photographic outings" [.. .]. Of course there's a photographer involved in the work. This doesn't alter the ethology of the process. This is an experimental photographic project conceived and directed by a photographer [...]. It would be absurd to think of it in any other way. The images do, however, give us a very approximate fiew (with a highly aesthetic content) of what the dog "sees" from her own particular angle. THE PROBLEM WITH WILDLIFE PHOTOGRAPHY BiII McKibben
respect tor her canine nature. Villaseñor's response, in Bola de la Can's stead, was the following: Regarding the little animal's disposition or will to "take pictures," I can tell you that she does it with a small camera attached to her collar which works "automatically." The camera shoots at random and captures the image the dog has before her eyes. The camera has automatic focus and film-speed settings, inside a hollow, lightweight plastic base. The photographer adjusts the timer and the camera shoots a few seconds later. During that time the dog changes positions, moves or even runs wherever she pleases. When the shutter snaps, the result is totally fortuitous. [... ] As far as my respect and affection for my dog are concerned, [this project] doesn't 245
There's a bright blue sky in the woods this moming, sun lifting from behind the mountain, snow mostly melted but ice still scabbed on the northward slopes. What living things do [ see? Only a redwinged blackbird and a startled blur of quail whirring off through the branches And several píles of scat-deer, hare, coon, coyote. This essay, ostensibly a brief study of certain controversies about wildlife photography, raises an unlikely question: in the time now approaching-inarguably an age of limits-will we want to find Iimits for ideas and expressions, as well as for things? The art of wildlife photography employs quite a few people scattered around the country. Filmmakers supply hour upon hour of video for PBS, the major networks, and cable channels. Still photographers take pictures for magazine s, calendars, books, and
advertisements, and they market countless trips for amateurs and aspiring professionals, teaching them the tricks of the trade. And their images do a lot of goodfrom Flipper and Jacques Cousteau to the mountain lion nuzzling her kitten on your latest mailing from an environmental group, these photos have helped change how we see the wild. I've seen neighbors of mine, who once had no use for wolves, begin to melt during a slide show about the creatures. It is no great exaggeration to say that dolphin-safe tuna flows directly from the barrel of a Canon, that without Kodak there'd be no Endangered Species Act. At the same time, and in more . easily observable ways than other kinds of art might provide, wildlife photography raises ethical problems. These stem from the fact that most animals are extremely shy and extremely good at keeping their distan ce from people. 1 walk in the woods every day here, and mostly it's like this 11l0rning's trek-the occasional sign of wildlife, but very rarely the actual sight of it-especially of those charismatic fauna most highly prized by magazine editors and calendarmakers. I see raccoons pretty often, but I've come across bears twice in all my years in the Adirondacks, and that's twice more than most of my neighbors. I once spent several days in a bugridden North Carolina swamp helping researchers from the Fish and Wildlife Service try to trap a few red wolves. These wolves were wearing radio collars and we had the receiver, and we still managed not even a glimpse-just the occasional scatter of feathers or fur where they'd made a meal. In a partial effort to overcome this handicap, wildlife photographers, who include among their number
sorne of the most accomplished and intrepid outdoorspeople I know, have copied a number of strategies from hunters. Filmmakers, for whom the rewards are greatest and the costs of waiting around the highest, have been accused of staging scenes-the Denver Post, in a recent series, quoted employees of the PBS series "Wild America" as saying animals had been tied to posts with fishing line so that others could attack them, a charge the program's host denies. Still photographers may wait by a water hole for animals to come in and drink; they may spread a little bait (bears like jelly doughnuts); they may lure ani-
mals with decoys or with calls. AII of these strategies cause problems, of course. An animal may scent someone hiding in a blind by a water hole and steer clear, though he needs the water. A wolf might have been hunting fruitlessly for three days, near the end of her strength, when she chases off after a tape recording of a baby rabbit. I've talked to a photographer who sea red a cougar off a mountain goat it killed; the result was she had to kili another goat. And even these strategies don't always work, especially with the shyest creatures. "1 don't know of any pros who have gotten pictures of cougars without going to the extreme of tracking them down with dogs and treeing them," says Art Wolfe, one of the country's 246
premier wildlife photographers. Erwin Bauer, a veteran of the profession, owns a hundred acres in Montana. "From time to time a mountain lion comes through. I know he does, because 1 see his tracks, find deer he 's killed. But we never see the animal." To overcome su eh problems, wildlife photographers have in recent years increasingly turned to a series of private game farms, basically small zoos. Jay Diest runs the Triple D Game Farm in Kalispell, Montana. It is home to a long list of "primary species" (black bear, wolf, Iynx, bobcat, cougar, mountain lion, arctic fox, fisher, wolverine, river otter) as well as a number of "secondary species" (badger, raccoon, porcupine, mink, snowshoe hare, and wild turkey). Still photographers pay three hundred doHars a day to stand outside the "professionally designed enclosures" and shoot one primary species; if you want to shoot three primary species, the fee drops to two hundred dollars apiece. But the grizzly bear cub-he costs four hundred dollars. "They respond to certain commands," says Diest. "They will stand up, they will sit, they will pretend like they're growling. On command they will get up on things-if you want them up on a large rock, they will get up there They will strike poses." The animal s are by aH accounts well fed and humanely treated, and they have an increasing number of peers in other places. Montana alone now boasts three such operations, and tropical countries are getting in on the act as well. There is, for instance, a famously approachable jaguar in a game farm in Belize that several photo editors told me about-if you've seen a photo of a jaguar recently, there's a good chance it's this one. Pictures taken at game farms are
not uncomrnon. A couple of years ago, for instance, when the staff at Natural History gathered to plan a piece on cougars, rernernbers managing editor Ellen Goldensohn the photo editor projected slides on the walls. "She told us to guess which ones were captive animals and which were wild. Most of the really good ones turned out to be frorn the game farms." If you see a c1ose-up of a snake in a magazine, it alrnost certainly hasn't been taken in the wild, but instead in a cage designed by a herpetologist and outfitted with lights "In the field, copperheads are quite rarely seen in a noncluttered environment," says photographer Joe MacDonald. "They live in brush piles-you're never going to see thern from a ground level perspective. You're not belly to belly with thern." It's not just still photos, either-a great many television nature sequences come straight from game farms. Such images-- I repeat-can be easily defended, both as more ethical than those shot in the wild and as necessary for a greater good. "Game farrn animals are like animal soldiers," says MacDonald. "In a war you have people who die to save democracy. These anirnals, who are not suffering, are also playing a very irnportant role. Without the pretty pictures, would there be the sarne affection for them?" But there are problems here, too, and severe ones. You get a small hint of them when you talk to wildlife biologists like, for exampie, Don White at Montana State University ''1'11 see a picture and say, 'How in the world did he get that? It's got to be staged.' But it's passed on as part of the natural world. And then you understand when you see an elderly lady bail out of her tent and run to a grizzly to take a picture One wornan got within fifteen feet. Fortunately,
the bear didn't think she was important enough to kilI. But it's that kind of thing that makes you wonder if we're communicating any kind of common-sense understanding of animals." That elderly lady was not alone. Chuck Bartlebaugh, director of the Center for Wildlife Information, spends much of his time trying to reduce encounters between Yellowstone tourists and Yellowstone bears, who end up being shot when they become too habituated to tourists. After surveying four hundred peopie who were taking pictures along the roads, he and his colleagues concluded that the images provided by professional nature photog-
raphers were the biggest cause of problerns. "We asked these people where they got their information that it was safe to approach bears or elk or whatever, and they immediately referred to TV prograrns and other pictures that showed biologists or photographers getting c10se to anirnals. A lot of the magnificent shots that the public tries to imitate in our national parks were shots taken of captive animals with handlers there." Chuck Jonkel, who runs the International Wildlife Film Festival, instructs his judges to scrutinize pictures carefully. "Sorne of those pictures tell a lie. They say you can get this c10se to an animaL" Wildlife photographers and editors, to their credit, have begun to 247
think seriously about the peril that game farm photos might pose both to hapless shutterbugs and to our general understanding of the natural world. And the solution slowly gaining ground is to label photos, either in the caption or the photo credit, as corning from game farms. Videomaker Marty Stouffer, whose "Wild Arnerica" series for public television has come under particular attack, has offered to label what he calls "factual recreations" in his footage. Sorne photographers say such fine print is entirely unnecessary, while others comment that they might favor it when sending pictures to a scientific publication Iike Natural History but not to an advertising agency; others simply label their slides and let editors decide. Such measures are akin to the warning labels on cigarettes, and even more c10sely resemble the warnings that carrnakers flash on the screen before a commercial showing the latest rnodel careening down both lanes of sorne mountainous highway. That these warnings probably won't matter very much can be assumed from the photographer's credo about the relative worth of a picture and thousand words. But even if it did reduce the number of Kodachrome maulings, little labels on a picture can't overcome the deepest problems, which have to do with how we perceive the world, in this case the natural world. After a lifetime of nature shows and magazine photos, we arrive at the woods conditioned to expect splendorsurprised when the parking lot does not contain a snarl of animals attractively mating and killing each other. Because all we get is c1ose-ups, we've lost much of our sen se of how the world actually operates,. of the calm and quotidian beauty of the natural
world, of the fact that animals are usually preoccupied with hiding, or wandering around looking for food. There is something frankly pornographic about the animal horror videos ("Fangs!") marketed on late-night TV, and even about sorne of the shots you see in a publication as staid as Natural History. Here is an emerald boa eating a parrot-the odds, according to the photographers 1 talked to, were "jillions to one" that it was a wild shot. Indeed, the photographer who took it boasted to People magazine about how he'd spray-painted ferrets to convert them to the endangered blackfooted kind, and how he'd hoisted tame and declawed jaguars into tree branches for good shots, and starved piranhas so they'd attack with great ferocity. Another photographer took a game stab at defending the shot of the emerald boa munching down the parrot-"It very graphically illustrates the relationship between higher and lower vertebrates," he said. So it does-but that's a little like saying Miss September graphically illustrates the development of the mammary glands in Horno sapiens. Even worse, perhaps, is the way the constant flow of images undercuts the sense that there's actually anything wrong with the world. How can there really be a shortage of whooping cranes when you've se en a thousand images of them-seen ten times more images than there are actualIy whooping cranes left in the wild? In ElIen Goldensohn's words, "They (these images) imply an Edenic world. And yet the real world is shrinking cruelly." No one ever shows a photograph of the empty trees where there are no baboons anymore; the few baboons that remain are dutifully pursued until they're captured on
film, and even if all the captions are about their horrid plight, the essential message of the picture remains-baboons. At this point we couldindeed we should-start talking about a new ethic. People have tried, from time to time, to promulgate ethics for most of the arts, and nature photography is no exception. As the photographer Daniel Dancer points out in a recent issue of Wild Earth magazine, the British oOrganization of Nature Photographers issues just one single commandment: "The welfare of the subject is more important than the photograph."
It's an apt rule, but as Dancer also points out it does nothing to address the larger questions I've alluded to, what he calls "the impact on society and our relationship to nature as a whole. If overimaging the world furthers our separation from nature, then there is something inherently wrong in our covenant with the camera." He offers a number of practical suggestions of ways that individual photographers might rewrite that covenant: by offering "sacrifices" to their "prey," by using their photos for advocacy purposes, and by shooting the clear cut next to the forest-and not just the foresto Others offer suggestions from an editorial point of view. Fred 248
Ritchin, for instance, former picture editor of the New York Times Magazine and author of In Our Own lmage: The Coming Revolutiol1 of Photography ca lis much of
nature photography "nostalgia at this point-and a vicious kind of nostalgia, like big game hunters putting the horns of an elephant over their fireplace ." Instead of worrying about game farms, he says editors could rethink their whole approach. "1 might want to send a photographer out to spend a week with a snake and take notes and photograph the snake every hour for the entire time. Or to begin to take pictures of what the photographer understands would be the point of view of the snake. Or photograph snake fragments for a week, as if it were a disembodied thing. So you could really see it, as opposed to saying, 'There's only one part of a snake that's interesting-its head-and only one or two poses, and we're going to do them over again.'" Reading work by such thinkers, though, and talking with them, it's easy to sen se a note of resignation-the deep suspicion that such rhetoric is not going affect the marketplace in which photographers operate very quickIy or very profoundly. If one photographer or editor falters, chances are there will be another to take his or her place, offering the very nostrils of the snake. Changing course even slightly makes an editor nervous, says Ritchin, beca use "you might not be pleasing your readership. It's like going out on your first date. Once you've told a great joke you don't want to tell a more matter-of-fact joke." Dancer offers the wise advice of Wendell Berry, that "one must begin in one's own life the private solutions that can only in turn become public solutions." That is so. But my work on environmen-
tal issues has me wary of completely private solutions-the momentum of our various tragedies makes the slow conversion of small parts of the society insufficient. Aren't we ethically impelled to also try and imagine ways that such private solutions might turn into public and widespread practice? And it's precisely for that reason that wildlife photography interests me so much oIt's a small enough world that-at least for purposes of argument-you could postulate real changes. Suppose the eight or nine magazine s that run most of the nature photos, along with the three or four top TV nature shows formed a cooperative among themselves, a sort of clea ringhouse for wildlife pictures. Suppose that they announced that anyone cciuld mail them as many slides as they wished for their files by a certain date, and that after that date they wouldn 't take any new submissions. Then, when the editors of Natural History decided they needed sorne elephant photos, the staff of the cooperative agency could send them a wide array to choose from . The fact is, there are already plenty of elephant photos in the world-when Wildlife Conservation was planning a piece on elephants a few years ago, according to art director Julie Maher, they reviewed ten thousand slides. lf "Nova" needed a mountain lion, they could ask for the miles of film already shot and then make selections from there. lf sorne member of the con sortium had a good reason for needing a new pictures-if there was a new species, or new behavior that needed illustrating, or someone was needed to accompany a scientific expedition-then the cooperative could assign a photographer, along with strict instructions about conduct: about how far
away to stay, for instance. These measures might solve sorne of the ethical problems involving treatment of animals. And it's possible such an agency could also eventually begin to deal with larger questions, too. For example, over time, it could cull from its stock extreme close-ups and other kinds of photos that miseducate viewers about the natural world. In this context a new ethic might adhere, and might grow into something truly powerfuL Since most of the competitors would belong to this cooperative, the commercial pressure that cur-
rently prevents such backing off might diminish; no one else would have a two-inch-away c1ose-up of the golden tamarind monkey either. "A big problem we see is an editor who says '1 want this kind of picture: and then the word gets out," says Chuck Jonkel of the Wildlife Film FestivaL "They'lI say, 'Give us a picture of a caribou running full tilt and we'lI give you $1,700: Someone's going to hire a helicopter and run the shit out of them so they can get their $1,700. I don't blame the photographer for that-I blame the editors." Such pressure would ease; there'd be a place to bring complaints. At the same time, such an agency could become a real center of action for
249
those who want to use cameras to docu ment the ongoing destruction of animals and habitats that is the crucial chore for nature journalists today. It is not, 1 believe, completely quixotic to imagine the form ation of such a c1earinghouse. Most of the magazines involved are publications like National Geographic; a good deal of the film appears on public channels both in the U.S. and abroad. Members of these groups in fairly small numbers might become convinced that these issues are important and campaign for the formation of such an agency. This type of consortium would have the added benefit of saving money for the participating enterprises; once it was well established, no serious publication could afford to opera te without its seal of approvaL (Check out your supermarket and see how much non-dolphin-safe tuna they're selling.) There would surely be all sorts of mercenary advertisers and calendar-makers and rogue video artists-but at least there'd be something to measure them against. Imagining the development of new institutions allows you to test the strength of the ethic on which such projects are based against very real and practical objections. In this case, the most obvious drawback is that it would put photographers out of work, or force them to find new subjects. If it worked as planned, this cooperative agency would need very few new wildlife photos annually-no one would be paying for zebras anymore. And this, we intuitively feel, is not fair-who am 1, or you, to tell someone else how they can or can't make a living. We're reasonably comfortable with the process as long as the impersonal economy makes the decision. We don't grieve for blacksmiths, and
the tears we shed over the "downsized" are, frankly, few. If public fashion changed suddenly and there was no demand for photos of animals, no one would suggest supporting photographers in their vocation. But it feels different to set out on a campaign that would put people out of work as one of its direct byproducts. Still, it's not much different from, say, enacting zoning laws in a town-you can be pretty certain that'lI cut down on work for carpenters. Or say you campaign for a recycling system in your community-it's only a matter of time before sorne millworker in Maine loses his or her jobo In this case, though, you couldn't even argue that new work will be created. Newspaper recyc1ing, after all, crea tes whole new categories of occupations-<ollecting the papers, working in sorting plants, running recycling milis. This potential c1earinghouse for wildlife photos would announce, in effect: We've got enough images now and we can recycle them more or less forever, so please don't bother taking any more. And since negatives don't really degrade with use, that would be that. It is an almost unknown thing in our society to say-"that's enough," to answer the question "How much is enough?" with "We've got plenty." And it sounds especially heretical in any creative endeavor. The word "censorship" rises unbidden to one's lips. And even if you can convince yourself that it's not really censorship--it's not the government, after aH, and it's no more censorship than sorne magazine telling you they won't print your story for whatever damn reason-that, rather, it's editing, even so, it seems repressive. It is repressive. It's the imposition of a new taboo, something we've rarely done in recent cen-
turies. We've been going about the business of demolishing taboos, and we've succeeded. COflsumers aren't supposed to have taboos, they're supposed to consumeand consume we do: not just goods and services, but images, ideas, knowledge. Nothing is off limits. So there's something a little creepy about saying, "We'lI be buying no new photos of wildebeests. We don't think it's a good idea to be taking them." It is a new taboo-and do we want any new taboos?
The case I've constructed about wildlife photography depends for its c1arity on several peculiarities: the obvious problems (as weH as benefits) inherent to the practice; the fact that it might conceivably be voluntarily restrained because of the size and the environmental!y-minded sponsorship of the industry; most crucially, perhaps, the fact that animals evolve very slowly and so there is little rationale for constantly redocumenting them. By contrast, pornography can obviously be destructive, but since Hustler isn't published by the National Organization for Women you'd 250
need big government intervention, with al! the dangers that portends, to bring on its demise. (Either that oc or you'd need a new taboo to spread among the consumers of pornography.) Documentary films or photos or writings about peopIe, as another example, can cause real problems for their subjects. This is one reason anthropologists have evolved codes for their work; human societies evolve so quickly and radically, however, that it's unlikely we'd ever reach the point where we would want to simply stop that kind of journalism. Still, a developing sense of taboo wouldn't hurt these endeavors-a sen se that one was treading on somewhat sacred ground, and so needed to proceed with careo I can remember writing a piece for The New Yorker on homelessness. I was twenty-one, and had just moved to the city. Mr. Shawn, the editor, asked me to spend sorne time living on the streetsthis was before the idea had become clichĂŠ, before people had completely noticed homelessness as a crisis. I wrote a good, absorbing piece. A few years later I reprised it-spent another fascinating stretch living without a roof. I spent time at the last remaining private flophouse in the city, and in the vast armory al 168th Street where thousands of men slept each night, and on the endless A train run to Rockaway, a mobile dormitory for dozens of men and women. And yet when the time carne to run piece, I pulled it at the last minute, out of sorne inchoate sen se that this would hurt, not help; that it was part of what was by now a flood of media, the total impact of which was to normalize that crisis, to make it seem not a crisis at all but an inevitable fact of urban living, like pigeons. As I've beco me more interest-
ed in environmental matters, I've thought a lot about these questions of restraint, about when one's curiosity or creative impulse can be bane as well as boon. About whether there are places where taboos might once more make sense. Jt's easier to see when it comes to things, not ideas. Clearly, for instance, we'd be better off environmentally if as a culture we frowned on automobiles-if we said that the freedom they afforded was not worth the cost in terms of global warming, suburban sprawl, and so forth . And a taboo against the next ever-Iarger version of the Ford Explorer, if one could somehow develop, wouldn't seem to pose any real threat to the human spirit. But there are other, tougher questions, ones that focus more clearly on ideas. Take as an exampie genetic engineering, the greatest creative endeavOI now gripping the scientific community. There's probably more human imagination being spent on this task than any other. And fOI good reason-it carries certain obvious hopes, like the eradication of childhood diseases. But it also carries certain great dangers, I think, and in the wake of Dolly the doppelganger sheep, I am not alone in thinking so. It gives most people a slightly queasy feeling if they think about it, no so much beca use they fear the creation of sorne Frankenstein germ, but because they sen se that our seizing control of every force around us on the planet has grave implications for the human soul. Do we want to redesign the most basic biological instructions, inevitably for the benefit of our species? Perhaps we do-perhaps what we want most is a sort of shopping mall world, planned solely for our material ease and delight. Or perhaps we don 't. I'm not making the case fOI a new
taboo here, one that might allow us to limit our tinkering to cystic fibrosis and muscular dystrophy. AlIl'm saying is that it's an open debate. Yet it's a debate we're incapable of having because we operate under the assumption that debate is unnecessary, even repellent. We take as a given that we should find out everything we can, develop everything we can, photograph and write about everything we can, and then let the marketplace decide what to do with the results. By definition, therefore, if it sells it's good. We've short-cir-
cuited the process of thinking things through as a culture-a process which may be the basic task of a culture. We have no way . to entertain the possibility of restraint as a society~ven mentioning that we might not want to find out everything there is to know about the genetic code seems deeply repressive. And yet self-restraint is a uniquely human gift, the one talent no other creature OI community possesses even as a possibility. By afternoon the sky has turned shiny gray, but it's warm, and the woods are noisy-a crow caw-cawing nearby, angry about something I can't see. A blur of rabbit catches the corner of my 251
eye. 1 nestle in the big root of a hemlock and watch a squirrel hop branches. HOMO HOMINIS EQUUS EST Armando Barna We have already see"
th es~
Indians reduced
to tlle state of beasts of burden.
M. E. André, América Equinoccial, 1876
Trepanéticos and Juichij/lichiS "A fair took place every year to celebrate the feast day of Santa Cruz. There Chiapaneco merchants sold trappings and riding gear, aroma tic glazed rolls, earthenware toys, guitars made of freshly cut spring wood, pictures of clowns and acrobats painted on board s, quince and squash preserves, peanuts, almonds, anis-seed candy, whistles from San Cristóbal de las Casas, trepanéticos, juichijuichis and countless other objects ... " This too k place at the beginning of the twentieth century in Cunduacán, Tabasco, as Alfonso Taracena joyfully recounts. As a writer with a good memory, he does not forget the darker side of the matter: "all these goods were carried over the southeastern mountains on the backs of Chamula' Indios, tireless walkers used as beasts of burden." The sweets, small toys, trinkets and endless wonders that dazzled the children of Cunduacán carne down from the Los Altos region of Chiapas on the backs of Chamulas. But trepanéticos and juichijuichis were not the only things that Tzeltales and Tzotziles carried. A Two-Headed Mountain Climber. In colonial times, Indios were forbidden to ride horses; however, nothing stopped whites from riding Indios. Furthermore, the custom of riding Chamulas continued to be practiced long after Independence, at least in Chiapas.
Riding human mounts is nothing but an extreme way of reducing natives to the state of talking mules; one mode among others of the indentured subjection of colored raees to men of reason.' And c1imbing mountains with a traveler on his back was not the worst kind of labor a Chamllla might face: the Soconusco coffee plantations or the Petén mahogany timberlands were even more murderous. Though comparatively bearable, being yoked to a silla de Indi0 3 is al so a symbol of disgrace. Along the precipitous trails of the Los Altos region of Chiapas-as on the slopes of the Andes-white people Iiterally rode on the shoulders of brown-skinned people, and this perverse piggy-back became the allegory of the extermination through overwork of Mayas and Incassupposedly dull, lazy races whose proverbiallack of needs and ambition served as the justification for their subjection to the educating switch and the civilizing lash. Thus the rebellious nature of native Americans served as an excuse for them to be tumed into living maehines-talking mules which could be hunted down, chained, whipped and even ridden. The beast with two heads and only two usefullegs, the bicephalic mountain climber, is, moreover, the symbol of a dual, shared infamy, since the rider's state of being is as shameful as the mount's. Like an asymmetrical figure out of a deck of cards, the bizarre pair is also an imperfect palindrome: viewed from top to bottom, the bearer is the one humiliated, but seen the other way around, it is the cargo-that tense, helpless package traveling upon the mount's shoulders-who is disgraced. Distinguished Travelers, Anonymous Mounts. In his trips
through southeastem Mexico between 1839 and 1842, John L10yd Stephens was carried by his fellow men of color. The American writer's account of this experience shows that he had quite an eye for detail: " ... it was a large, uncomfortable armchair, attached with wooden pegs and henequen cords. The Indian who was going to carry me, Iike all the others, was short, no more than five feet seven in ches tall, [and] very thin ... A belt ... was tied to the arms of the chair, and after I sat down, he put his back against the back of the chair... , adjusted the length of the cords
and used a small rushion to soften the roughness of the cord across his forehead ... Two Indians, one on each side, Iifted it up and the carrier stood, remained still for a moment, threw me up once or twice to place me comfortably on his shoulders, and began his trek ... " Following in Stephens' footsteps, Frenchman Désiré Chamay explored the Southeast sorne fifteen years later; in Chiapas he, too, traveled on Chamllla-back. He reports the following: "Upon our arrival in Santo Domingo, Don Agustín went to ask the mayor if he could not put at my service mountain Indians who were going to San Cristóbal. Six of them, 252
from the town of Tumbalá, happened to be retuming 'with their backs free.' I hired them. it must be said that throughout the highlands lndians take the role of beasts of burden, as horses and mules are very scarce and [moreover] they are unable to cross the steeper trails." The same thing happened to him in Cancuc, where "there were no horses, but the town priest, always kind and goodhearted, put four lndians at my service who, bearing chairs, had to carry us to Tenejapa, that is to say, go on a fifty-kilometer journey, in exchange, I believe, for one peso fifty per mano The unburdened lndian relieved his tired companion." Though Stephens had brought a daguerreotype on his second trip to Mexico, his photos did not come out and the marvelous prints which ilIustrate his books are based primarily on the drawings that Frederick Catherwood made with the help of a camera lucida: a painstaking process which, in the end, he was only able to use to create a record of the impressive archeological ruins. Chamay, on the other hand, managed to overcome the problems of primitive photography, recording more fleeting situations which featured human protagonists; it is quite possible that he captured a silla de Indio on collodion. If it did indeed exist at one time, the alleged photograph has been lost; in its stead, we have an excellent print made by one of the craftsmen who transposed photographs onto metal plates, etching them with a burin and then printing them. As was customary with human figures, the image is stylized; nevertheless, it is an exceptional, powerful representation of barbari ty.5 "1 went up and down with every
breath, 1 felt his body trembling beneath mine ... "· Both the American and the Frenchman left behind accounts of their perso~ malaise. Charnay states: "One experiences, while riding upon this human beast, an unpleasant feeling which mingles with a profound disgust for the humiliation imposed upon a being of one's same nature who carries one, so to speak, on his back. .. " However, a bit of shifty reasoning spoils it all: "But the wretched mdn has so little consciousness of his degradation that one ends up getting used to it. ,,6 The Frenchman attempts to avoid feeling guilty by clumsily arguing that the offended person does not perceive the offense. But the uneasiness goes deeper than that, and the American undoubtedly sensed this: "1 could feel his every movement, even his chest heaving as he breathed. The ascent was one of the steepest ... A few minutes later he stopped and exhaled a sound, common amongst Indian carriers, halfway between a wheeze and a gasp, always painful to my ears but never had it seemed so unpleasant. 1 went up and down with every breath, 1I felt his body trembling beneath mine and his knees seemed to be buckling ... There 1I remained until he let me down of his own will. The poor boy was soaked in sweat and each of his limbs shook. Another was at the ready to lift me up." The discomfort evaded by Désiré and assumed by John Lloyd does not only lie in ethnic and social inequity: it has to do with skin. lt is not the same to order enslaved coffee pickers to take on a heavier work load, to demand that rebels be jailed, or even to
personally give someone abad whipping to teach them a less.on as it is to enact a form of submission without mediation, the servitude through bodily contact that comes into play when one human being mounts another- a primitive action which recalls the archetypal subjection of women. To be covered in the sweat of a person whose sweating you have imposed is to take part in the chemistry of oppression. Stephens' references to his mount's body language, then, are far from gratuitous: his extreme closeness to the Indio man makes Stephens aware of his labored breathing, his per-
spiration, the shudders of a young body trembling under his own. The vertigo of heights thus mingles with vertiginous intimacy. A human, skin-to-skin relationship that cannot be overlooked: there is either mutual recognition or there is debasement and submission. And when the silla de Indio is used, it is clear who is on top and who is on the bottom-but not who commands whom. The worst of it, however, is the carrier's gasping for air, his whimper or whinny which makes Lloyd's hair stand on end, particularly when it is he who is being carried. Too equine? No-undoubtedly only too human. Troglodytes Porfirio Díaz's. technocratic regime 253
boasted of having redeemed us from anarchy and barbarity, but the Southeast remained his government's disgrace: debt-incurred slavery in the henequen fields of the Yucatan, the tobacco plantations-turned-death camps of Valle Nacional, the forced labor of the Soconusco orchards, the murderous toil in the timberlands of Tabasco .. . and the unfortunate Chiapaneco custom of riding Chamulas.
The men in power, when they could not deny the obvious, blamed it on the Indios' natural savagery. "And in vast regions of Chiapas," writes renowned sociologist Julio Guerrero, "travelers may come across troglodyte families and Quiché settlements with secret phallic cults and hieroglyphic symbolism they no longer understand. Here the primitive system of transportation continues and the Chamulas are used as mules to carry people and goods." He conveniently forgets that those who use the primitive form of transportation he mentions are not the troglodytes, who limit themselves lo to renting out their own backs, but rather the Creole landowners of Los Altos and the modern German farmers of Soconusco. Guerrero is a fervent supporter of the theory of outlying savagery-the ideological myth according to which modernity is a kind of island besieged by barbarians bent on restricting the spread of civilization. Thus, Díaz's system only responds to that which takes place in large urban centers. To support his point of view, Guerrero quotes Tayllerand: " ... any who left a city where civilization had reached a high degree of development, gradually and suc-
cessively encountered on his path all the inferior stages of social life ... " To our sociologist, then, the primitive system of transport by which people used Chamu/as as mules belonged to a bygone time; though it was happening right then and there, it corresponded to "ways of life that perta in to a bygone era in the capital." Human Taxi Guerrero's theoretical justification, which consists of relegating awkward presents to the past, is doubly fallacious. A system whose balance of trade and public finan ces depended largely on the export of tropical produce and a modern industry which made use of slave labor could not be dissociated from the barbarity taking place in the Southeast. Furthermore his allegation that ta/king mu/es were an issue of the barbarous outlying regions did not hold up in light of the photographic evidence that in the country's very own capital there were human taxis-peoplecarriers for hire fitted with the infamous silla de Indio. The offending image was published in Nineteenth-Century South (sic) America in Photographs, by H. L. Hoffenberg, and reproduced in ¡mages of History by Robert M. Levine, who adds his own caption: "Another image captures a human taxi-a man transporting a passenger on his back. This practice was common not only in Mexico, where the photograph was taken, but in the Andean countries also, well into the twentieth century." Fortunately, the Revolution emancipated the poor; their images were incorporated into vindicating murals, and they themselves beca me part of the Institutional Revolutionary Party. But in sorne parts of the country even that revolution never took place. Henri Favre narrates how "until 1937 the presence of
Tzotzil-Tzeltales in the town of San Cristóbal remained subject to legal restrictions and Indios were forbidden to walk on sidewalks, ride horses and be out on the street after seven in the evening, under penalty of fines or incarceration." And if a little over seventy years ago it was still against the law for them to ride horses, until quite recently they continued to be ridden by men-and womenofreason. So As Not to Dirty One's Shoes Dr. QUo Hann sta tes that at first he did not believe what his German relatives who had settled in Chiapas told him: " As elegant footwear was made of c1oth, during the rainy season employees
carried my aunts so their shoes would not get dirty. There were the so-called Indian sadd/es-a chair tied to an Jndian man's back on which he carried people in places where horses could not pass. This was around 1981, and it is only now that J can actually believe what my aunts told me" (interview with Marta Durán). And in case there are others who find it hard to believe, here we present a photograph taken in the mid-19S0s (p.ZO?) that shows the invincible Chamu/as carrying people-teenagers of reason who could be your aunts and unc1es, gentle young readers. Sorne time ago, however, the so-called Chamulas began standing up for themselves. To begin with, they demanded that people stop calling them Chamulas and 254
name them by ethnicity and place of origin; then they demanded their full rights. Because disgrace does not subside of its own accord. They were too/s, flesh and blood motors, work machines during the time of outright racism, little Indians in the years of condescending racism, and now, in the era of consequential, politically correct neo-indigenism, they are marginalized communities which must be redeemed through social programs. Today, when mounts throw off their riders and straighten their backs, it is offensive and stupid to offer them knick-knacks, marbles or liUle mirrors. Historical infamy do es not reside in the fact that they were not given low-interest micro-credits or excellent educational opportunities: the fact is that they were excessively offended and humiliated. And the man who was ridden by a man has, aboye all, an ethical stance, a pending moral obligation. The sores incurred by wearing a silla de Indio, Iike those inflicted by fetters, trusses or whips, are not healed by way of English courses and computer training, llar by VW Bugs, televisiolls or convenience stores; they might yield, possibly, with justice, respect, freedom and good will; the rest matters too, but will fall into place in good time. , The term C/¡amula is properly use<! lo refer lo people native lo Ihe village oí San Juan Chamula In Chiapas. However, il also carne lo be applied, derogalorily, lo all the índígenous peoples oí Chiapas, regardless of Iheir ethnlcity (Ir. nOle). , A term Spanish colonísts use<! in relerence lo themselves, implying Ihal native Americans were not bJessed with this facul-
ty (Ir. nOle). , Literally translaled as "lndian saddle, " thls term ís painfully
• " ...on
self~xplanatory.
(tr. note)
our arriva) at Uxmal, Mr.
Calherwood began takíng views; but Ihe
results were not sufficiently perfect ... They gave a general idea of the character of the buildings, but would not do to put into the hands oC the engraver without copying the views on paper and introduclng the defeco tive parts, whích would require more labor than that oC making at once complete drawings," Stephens as quoted by Oavis. , Chamay first describes the silla de Indio
in American Cities and Ruins, in which he recounts his journey of 185 7 . 1861. However, in Andent Cities of the New World, he teHs a very similar tale. lf, as it seems, the print was made during this second trip, the scene took place in the vicinity of San Cristóbal de las Casas in the last days of April, 1882, and the rider is not Chamay, by then gray-haired, but rather his assistant
Julián. 'The conéept of men of color carrying whites of good standing is a recurrent ane in Chamay's writings. In his account of a trip to Madagascar he made shortly afler his
an exhibition in Veracruz which too k the sea as its theme-is not the giant manta ray that terrified pearl divers, the one the naturalists C.W. Townsend or M. Léon Diguet refer to in their writings.' It is a species of small ray, known in Mexico as the "devil ray" (Platyrhinoidis triseriata), or "guitar fish" (Rhinobatos glacostigma or Rhinobatos productus). It inhabits the sandy bottom of the Sea of Cortés (also known as the Gulf of California) where the water te mperature is high and stable throughout the year. A relative of sharks rather than of real fish, this sea creature has no bones-it is practically all cartilage. Live specimens are barely 40 centimeters long, and their tails are shaped like a harpoon and function like a
nest Mexican adventure, he writes: "The Madegasse of the coast is of a gentle and timid disposition, faithful and devoted ... He particularly enjoys the motion of the tacon, and will carry you from daybreak to evening, and then, forgetting his fatigue, will ¡oin his companions in choruses," Quoted by Oavis.
THE DEVIL FISH
Cuauhtémoc León "lt is said that when this fish discovers, not
fae away from it, aman moving underwater like divers often do, it attacks, grabs him wlth its arms, and wraps him up tight· ly in its own body, keeping him from returning to the surface. For this reason, dlvers are very frightened of the manta. And since they swim at the bottom of the sea with Iheir eyes open, seeing everylhing that is there, when they notice the wide body of this terrible fish approaching, casting a shadow between them and the surface, they attempt to dodge it, to find sorne escape ... n Miguel del Barco, Historia Natural y Crónica de la Antigua California, 1770.
The devil fish depicted in the photographic postcard -a piece from
scorpion's, injecting a poison through the skin of anyone who inadvertently steps on them. As they have no commercial value as a foodstuff, fishermen commonly throw them onto the beach when they accidentally catch the fish in their nets. In fact, the creature's devilish appearance is due to the sun's rays: as it dries up, its head and mouth become eyes and ears, forearms appear, its dorsal fins turn into hips, and the showy claspers of the male-the creature's sex organs-become legs. Thus transformed, it is readily incorporated into the gallery of hellish creatures and sea monsters that inhabit our imaginary ocean-the waters plied by Jonas, Moby Dick, giant squid and tourist-eating sharks alike. Nature yielded an inedible fish and human imagination, in turn,
255
invented a being which, feeding off our deepest fears, had the power to devour uso Like the manatee that became a mermaid, the devil fish is no longer an animal; rather, it is a symbol of the unknown depths, the dregs at the bottom of the ocean. It is a being of the netherworld and the night. A superstition . I
See C. W. Townsend, IfThe Pearl Divers ot
the Califomla Gulf, " The Californian Magazine #2, 1892, pp. 116-125, and M.
Léon Oiguet, "Sur le céphaloptére du golfe de Califomie," Bulletin du Musée d'histoire nalllrelle, Serl, 1898, pp. 127-129.
micro y
próxima LUNA CÓRNEA
Francis Alys. Puentes, 1994.
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