82 Andrea Fraser. Soldadera

Andrea Fraser. Soldadera (Scenes from Un Banquete en Tetlapayac, a film by Olivier Debroise), 1998/2001. Video stills. 82 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1526381042464590 by guest on 25 September 2021 The Strong and the Weak: Andrea Fraser and the Conceptual Legacy JAMES MEYER To Alexander Alberro Conceptual Art can be seen as an amalgam of attempts to critically analyze and dissect the situation in which artists were working to assume responsibility for articulating these ideas and ways of incorporating the critical perspective into the work of art itself. By these means it hoped to transform the nature of art. Such intellectual Luddism was unashamedly idealistic. perhaps the most significant thing that can be said to the credit of Conceptual Art is that it failed. —Ian Burn1 I. Soldadera A peasant rides toward us. Garbed in worker’s overalls, a red shirt, ammunition belts, and a white kerchief, perched on a brown steed, she carries a scarlet revolutionary banner. Later, in another scene, she appears with two comrades in a trench. They are prepared for battle, yet their “weapons” are hopelessly old- fashioned agrarian tools. They are proletarian underdogs. The salt of the earth. We easily imagine what comes next. A bloated landlord accompanied by lackeys overwhelms the revolutionary cabal. They have guns. The peasants are outnum- bered. They’ll lose, but others will follow and eventually win. This is the march of progress. This is, according to Marx, how history works. The proletarian is the agent of history; the worker is the embodiment of social change. Do we not dis- cern this narrative written on the peasant’s face? She gazes upward with beatific determination, a saintly martyr to a just cause. She’ll fight to the end, all right. The initial impression made by Andrea Fraser’s Soldadera (Scenes from Un banquete en Tetlapayac) is one of an inevitable proletarian triumph.2 But this is a momentary impression. The loop repeats: the landlord never comes; his henchmen are nowhere to be seen. There will be no battle. The rider gallops up the hill again and again in a Sisyphean journey, never achieving her goal. The class Grey Room 17, Fall 2004, pp. 82–107. © 2004 James Meyer 83 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1526381042464590 by guest on 25 September 2021 Left: Andrea Fraser. Soldadera (Scenes from Un Banquete en Tetlapayac, a film by Olivier Debroise), 1998/2001. Video stills. Opposite: Andrea Fraser. Soldadera (Scenes from Un Banquete en Tetlapayac, a film by Olivier Debroise), 1998/2001. Installation view, Dunkers Kulturhus, Helsingborg, 2004. Photo: Andrea Fraser. war never comes to pass. She and her comrades pose stiffly, like statues. The revolutionary gesture, the act of revolt, is arrested, incomplete. The heroic horsewoman, the scythe-wielding farmer, the corrupt landowner, the valiant last stand: we have seen this scenario before. Stock clichés of the Marxist narrative, these images are knowingly derivative of social realist representations. Indeed Fraser’s work, like the Debroise film it excerpts, revisits a Sergei Eisenstein original: Que Viva México!—an unfinished “film symphony” produced by the great Russian director in 1931.3 Debroise’s and Fraser’s reflections on Eisenstein’s project differ in ambition. If Un banquete en Tetlapayac “completes” the larger project of Que Viva México! by means of a literal and figurative return to the hacienda of Tetlapayac where Eisenstein worked, then Fraser’s projection is a gloss on the film’s unfinished final section, which was to have been called Soldadera. What is the nature of this return, this invocation of avant-garde cinema some seventy years after the shooting of Que Viva México!? Soldadera means female “camp follower.” During the 1910 Mexican Revolution the wives of proletarian soldiers were called soldaderas. By the 1930s the image of the soldadera, imply- ing group solidarity, had acquired an iconic status in the propaganda of the Mexican Left. The soldadera offered moral and military support of her husband (she was not above taking up arms), but she was also construed as the mother of future “freedom fighters.” For Eisenstein and his crew, the soldadera was to have served as “a symbol of Mexico itself, symbol of a land whose people have come to realize that strength lies in unity.”4 And, indeed, had Eisenstein completed Qué Viva México! his depiction of the soldadera would have invoked these symbols. The aim of revolutionary cinema, the great director insisted, was to be widely comprehensible.5 By devoting the conclusion of his film to the common soldadera, Eisenstein sought to incite revolutionary feeling. Fraser dismantles the semantic transparency of the soldadera. Where Que Viva México! is a single-screen work, Soldadera is a split-screen projection, and the screen to the left depicts a second, dissimilar figure, also performed by Fraser. Pan shot of a theater, an audience of culturati (students, patrons, gallerists). Close-up: a young woman dressed in the style of the 1930s. She is Frances Flynn Paine, president of the Paine Mexican Arts Corporation. Organized during the Great Depression, this Rockefeller-funded entity promoted Mexican arts and crafts in the United States during a moment of intense—and conflicted—American engagement with “south of the border” culture.6 An ambivalent perception of 84 Grey Room 17 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1526381042464590 by guest on 25 September 2021 Mexico during the 1930s was hardly novel. As James Oles observes in his important study of this subject, the relationship of the United States and its southern neigh- bor has “been marked by serious interest and concern, but also by broken vows and condescension” since the nineteenth century.7 Fraser’s Paine is exemplary in this regard. Although her passion for Mexican culture was sincere, Paine found it necessary to couch this interest in ideological terms. American support for the Mexican avant-garde, she claimed, would quell the leftist politics of its leading artists, among them the painters David Alfaro Siqueiros, Diego Rivera, and José Clemente Orozco (Eisenstein’s “guides” during the making of Que Viva México!).8 As Paine observed with regard to Rivera and Siqueiros in a letter to her patroness Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, “Most Mexican artists, though ‘Red,’ would cease to be ‘Reds’ if we could get them artistic recognition.”9 Despite her hostility to the Communist politics of the Mexican artists, Paine took an odd pleasure in the leftist representations they produced. A staunch advocate of the separation of art and politics, she confessed to Mrs. Rockefeller that the infusion of socialist subject matter into fine art, although distasteful to her political sensibility, could have a desirable aesthetic effect: A letter from [the photographer] Tina Modotti yesterday. She is afraid that her pictures will be too “Red” for exhibition in this country. But the work is superb and I sent word back immediately . that we were interested in the work in spite of her subjects (and probably a little because of them too).10 The “Red” content of Modotti’s images was a problem, Paine confessed, yet it lent Modotti’s work an avant-garde edge, a radical chic. Paine insisted the Marxist ide- ology of these artists could be contained, even suppressed, by indenturing them to Rockefeller largesse (in this she would prove to be mistaken).11 Intriguingly, she seems to have been drawn to these practices out of formalist conviction. Her taste was for the radical, the new. During the early 1930s in Mexico this meant an art with explicitly political aims. And so she supported practices of advanced formal quality whose subject matter she could not otherwise endorse. Meyer | The Strong and the Weak: Andrea Fraser and the Conceptual Legacy 85 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1526381042464590 by guest on 25 September 2021 Letter from Frances Flynn Paine to Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, August 13, 1930. Rockefeller Family Archives, New York. It is an important detail of Soldadera that the shot chosen by Fraser from Debroise’s film does not show the per- formance the audience witnesses (the Eisenstein character being interrogated about Que Viva México!). Instead Fraser merely shows the audience. The effect of the split-screen format is to position Paine and the others as “observers” of the montage sequence of the peasant-rider and her comrades: Fraser/Paine gazes upon Fraser/ Soldadera. This subtle symmetrical arrangement locates us, the actual audience, as the spectators of the depicted audience, who are in turn the spectators of the soldadera. In other words, the rhetorical structure of Fraser’s work twice distances us from the soldadera and the narrative she embodies: we are positioned at a “second degree.”12 In contrast to Brecht and the Russian formalists’ theorization of modernist estrangement as a single degree of distance (one that confers consciousness and mastery of the thing perceived: class relations, a poem’s structure, and so on), the second degree is a point of view wherein the thing perceived recedes from knowability. The expe- rience of the second degree is a postmodernist effect. As Craig Owens, perhaps the most influential of Fraser’s professors, once observed: Where the postmodernist work speaks of itself, it is no longer to proclaim its autonomy, its self-sufficiency, its transcendence; rather, it is to narrate its own contingency, insufficiency, lack of transcendence. It tells of a desire that must be perpetually frustrated, an ambition that must be perpetually deferred; . its deconstructive thrust is aimed . against the symbolic, totalizing impulse which characterizes modernist art.13 The soldadera envisioned by Eisenstein was a stable symbol of the kind of “totalizing” narrative to which Owens alludes: the narrative of proletarian triumph, the narrative of Marx.

Load more