ULISES CARRIÓN’S MEXICAN DISCONTINUITIES Heriberto Yépez I. A Love-Hate Relationship with the Mexican Archive Ulises Carrión was a demiurge of the archive. Fully understanding him means knowing his flipside: Carrión was a pyromaniac of the archive. He blew up the Mexican archive using his own file as the fuse. In and out of Mexico, it was dispiriting that an artist as endearing as Ulises Carrión should be so unfeeling as to expatriate himself. As for Carrión himself, he accepted his dual impulse (creator and destroyer) toward all artistic heritage. A partial, unilateral image of Carrión has been projected, defusing the neural radicalism of his poetics. The words of his friend and collaborator Salvador Flores are representative of a widely held wish that Carrión’s relationship with Mexico, theory, and art had been more relaxed: I think that, at this stage in his life, Ulises unfortunately became very fundamentalist... Why should I let myself be convinced that it’s bad to listen to Brahms and good to listen to Los Panchos?... What Ulises never wanted to understand was that he wasn’t the one who was discovering the world, and that this had been done many times before, and we would tell him: “There’s something wrong with you...” The breaking point which was almost final happened with Lilia Prado... [I]n the end, whenever you questioned anything, he said: “I don’t agree with you, I don’t like it...” Believe me, he became a real fanatic, and it was unbearable.1 This portrait of Carrión is caricature-like and paternalistic. There is no evidence to suggest that Carrión thought he was “discovering the world.” On the contrary, he was clearly seeking to continue earlier aesthetic trends and take them to their logical conclusions. Carrión did not want to be “original,” he wanted to be systematic. He continued, where others left off half way. The dissemination of his work, before and after his death, has been inextricable from the attempt to tone down his radicalism. The writer Jaime Moreno Villarreal argued that Carrión’s belligerent tone recalls the rebellious attempts of the English neo-avant-garde critics of the 1960s and 1970s who encouraged attacking art as a bourgeois myth, and of the Situationism... [T]his radical vision did not flourish.2 After 1975, Carrión more or less fell into oblivion, and whenever he resurfaced he was either mythologized or misrepresented; his ideas were too radical for many of his colleagues (not just the Mexican ones). Carrión did not just disown his country of origin, he criticized all (of them), including his homeland. By taking his conceptual procedures to the extreme, Carrión outstripped the moderates, and he felt no qualms at these intellectual estrangements. He neither sought nor shunned controversy. He was consistent in his desire for mutability. One of the poles of Carrión’s relationship with Mexico was his rejection of its inflexible program; the other was his decision to break with his literary past. We will now go back and examine this break in its full scope. In 1976, Martha Hawley asked Carrión about the books he had published in Mexico. He replied, “I don’t know why you want to talk about them. I would prefer not to... they’re really not important... We can talk about anything except those.” And, at the same time, he said, “I came to the Netherlands as... an illegal immigrant...
1. Salvador Flores, statement in “Ulises: An Aural Portrait,” Ulises Carrión: ¿Mundos personales o estrategias culturales?, ed. Martha Hellion, exh. cat. Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico City (Madrid: Turner, 2003), 156. 2. Jaime Moreno Villarreal, “Liminar,” in Ulises Carrión, 8, 11.
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