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Tina Modotti and the Image of Mexican Communism in 1928: La Técnica

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Tina Modotti and the Image of Mexican Communism in 1928: La Técnica TiNA MODOTTI AND THE ImaGE OF MEXICAN CommuNism IN 1928: LA TÉCNICA Leonard Folgarait Tina Modotti, Máquina de escribir de Mella, 1928, blanco y negro. Julio Antonio Mella (1904-1929) was activities dangerous to the regime of the Ché Guevara and Subcomandante President Machado, Mella took up Marcos of his day in terms of owning headquarters in Mexico City, galvani- the very image of the charismatic and zing leftists there under his forceful uncorrupted revolutionary leader. Exi- oratory and writings. He occupied led from his native Cuba in 1926 for positions in several communist orga- nizations and publications. It was as a "in the [Mexican] revolutionary socia- journalist that he made his greatest list tradition".6 reputation in Mexico, signing some Rivera celebrated this photoge- articles as Cuauhtémoc Zapata, com- nic pair in a mural painting on the bining the two most legendary names walls of the Secretariat of Public Edu­ of resistance against oppression in cation in Mexico City in 1928-1929, Mexican history.1 Ione Robinson refe- in a section entitled Distributing Arms. rred to him shortly after his death as Modotti seems to be handing Mella "a symbol around which everyone a bandolier in preparation for pit- I know in Mexico [the Tina Modot- ched class warfare. That Rivera inclu- ti-Diego Rivera circle] revolves".2 By ded them in such a militant scene late 1928, Mella and the Italian-born speaks of the place they both held photographer Tina Modotti (1896- in communist circles at this time. A 1942), having met in the offices of the portrait of Mella by Modotti of 1928 Mexican Communist Party organ El captures the heroically handsome fea- Machete as co-workers in June, were tures he was known for. In this year, a public couple, striking for their com- Modotti produced what amounts to mitment to the cause and for their another portrait of Mella, this time attractive appearance. Because she in the form of his typewriter. This is had left a relationship with the pain- titled La Técnica. ter and graphic artist Xavier Guerre- It seems disarmingly simple and ro to join Mella, and because both artless at first. We look down at a men were members of the Executive Committee of the Mexican Commu- 1 Sarah Lowe, Tina Moddotti: Photographs, nist Party (Partido Comunista Mexi- New York: Harry N. Abrams and Philadelphia cano, PCM),3 Modotti felt that she Museum of Art, 1995, p. 40. 2 Letter to her mother of July 4, 1929. had to clear this relationship with Ione Robinson, A Wall to Paint On, New York: the PCM. Baltasar Dromundo remem- E.P. Dutton, 1946, p. 92. bers that "What [Modotti and Mella] 3 Margaret Hooks, Tina Modotti: Photo- had they spent on the Party [or] on grapher and Revolutionary, London: Pandora, 1993, pp. 168, 169. other people; they were truly mag- 4 Hooks, p. 159. nanimous and as a result sometimes 5 Baltasar Dromundo, Rescate del Tiempo, didn’t have a cent …"4 In reference Mexico City: self-published, 1980, p. 40. 6 Barry Carr, "The Fate of the Vanguard to this couple, Dromundo says of the- under a Revolutionary State: Marxism's Contri- se years, "It was the romantic stage bution to the Construction of the Great Arch", of communism".5 Both Modotti and in Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniel Nugent, Eds., Mella were honored in the 1940s by Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico, the naming of Mexican communist Durham and London: Duke University Press, 40 cells after them, due to their status 1994, pp. 326-352, 341. fragment of a typewriter and read technology of the production of mea- the ends of four lines of writing on ning. The typewriter here is a machine the paper. This is a machine that we of social change, a weapon of the revo- can trust, because its workings are so lution, as Mella himself congratulated straightforward and so much at the Modotti on "this typewriter [that] you service of its human operator. The have socialized with your art".7 camera is also to be trusted because The typewriter is angled slightly it records these qualities so clearly. By away from our eye, so that although looking at such a partial view of the there is a clear recession into space, typewriter, we complete the machine there is also the sense that the plane by mentally imaging the whole key- of the object is almost parallel to board, the second spool, the remain- that of the photograph. The typewriter, der of the written lines, and probably although a squarish object with gridded the missing writer himself. Perhaps internal arrangements, such as in the we are looking over Mella’s shoulder, keys, is organized so that we see the which might explain our angled view, composition mostly in terms of crossing and perhaps his fingers are even now diagonals joining opposite corners. The resting on keys just outside the frame curved arrangement of the hammers of the image. Mella’s implied presen- and their armature and the large cir- ce gives a new dramatic quality to cle of the spool play counterpoints to the subject, which is now perhaps not this dominant rectilinearity. But even wholly mechanical. His missing but within explicitly squared grids, such as in maybe present body further embo- the keyboard, irregularities can be seen. dies the image and endows it with Because the rows of keys are offset, the narrative implications of the next diagonal and sometimes curved diago- key to be struck, driven by his politics. nal lines appear, such as in the line that The typed lines are followed by a starts at P and goes left toward L and blank space, perhaps, because the wri- toward yet another key, whose curved ter has not finished typing. frame is barely seen. The line connecting Seeing fragments of the mechani- O to L and then to the accent marks cal properties of the typewriter leads key is a slightly curving diagonal. There is to a conceptual understanding of the also the cylindrical platen, which is both complete machine as a metaphor for round and straight, depending on the communication in general and activist rhetoric in particular. The keys produce words of revolutionary purpose which 7 In a letter to Modotti published in Excél- sior, January 16, 1929. Cited and translated in could inspire action at the barricades. Patricia Albers, Shadows, Fire, Snow: The Life of Meaning is inherent and waiting in tools; Tina Modotti, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: one merely needs to understand the University of California Press, 1999, p. 229. 41 axis, around which the sheet of paper vigilance of these shifting operations. alternately goes from flat to curved and The leftist vision, then, is a perpetual flat again. Even the typed lines are a performance of the score provided mix of curves (in the letters) within a by daily realities and agendas for the grid, with the occasional diagonal of the future, but a performance that is self-cri- accent marks. The culmination of the- tical and capable of making the sort of se combinations is in the ribbon itself, adjustments in positions that allow it to which goes from circular on the spool keep a viable place in this endlessly revi- to flat as held in the frame ready to sing score. A true revolutionary needs receive the hammer; in between these to remain a constant revolutionary by states quite irregularly curvilinear as it correctly understanding the context of floats in space. transforming relations. These formal devices add up for The typed lines on La Técnica are Modotti as a way of saying the follo- not authored by Mella and therefore wing: A revolutionary subject is more a complicate the reading of this as his moment in flux, a dynamic movement, typewriter and the image as a por- than an object or idea or event measu- trait of him.8 This is a fragment of rable in static, quantitative terms. This a text written by Leon Trotsky and movement, then, is a performance of which Modotti quoted in full in a and among several possibilities. Activist brochure describing her one-person political movement and performance exhibit in Mexico City in 1929. The can occur only between multiple and full Spanish text reads: si-multaneous possibilities. Revolution does not occur in a linear or measu- La técnica se convertirá en una rable or predictable manner. Thus the inspiración mucho más poderosa angle of view in this image neither de la produccíon artística; más penetrates space forcefully nor rests tarde encontrará su solución en only on the surface of the photograph. una síntesis más elevada, el con- The person and instrument of action traste que existe entre la técnica and propaganda fall into an order that y la naturaleza. is always highly pressured by contingen- cies that distort that order. The laye- Which I translate as: ring of visual information both enriches and confounds our reading, highligh- 8 The title Mella’s Typewriter, was applied ting some details and obscuring others. fifty years afterward by Vittorio Vidali, another The life of the leftist political activist, Italian communist working in Mexico at this to Modotti, is about recognizing the time. Vidali wrongly claimed that the text on the sheet of paper was from an essay that constant instability of social relations Mella had written on Modotti’s photography. 42 and about the need to keep constant Lowe, p. 40. Technique will convert itself into a hybrid (word/image) form of propa- a much more powerful inspiration ganda and its implied hybrid form of of artistic production: the contrast political action (the hybrid here being that exists between technique Stalinism/Trotskyism, the first term cham- and nature will later find its solu- pioned by the PCM, of which Modotti tion in a higher synthesis.9 was now a member, and the second seen as its enemy), to act across rather I depend on this statement to sup- within political labels.
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