The Age of Discrepancy. a Cautionary Tale in Un Banquete En Tetlapayac

♯11 second semester 2017 : 245-251 ISSN 2313-9242 Regina Tattersfield (UNAM, México) The Age of Discrepancy. A Cautionary Tale in Un banquete en Tetlapayac The Age of Discrepancy. A Cautionary Tale in Un banquete en Tetlapayac / Regina Tattersfield ♯11 second semester 2017 It undertook the curatorial operation of envisioning Mexican art history as a (neo) configuration of historical processes “[that] involve[d] a renegotiation of peripheral genealogies [and] a rewriting of our history”.3 Subjects and processes were joined together in The Age of Discrepancy. A clusters or in social groups tied to the concepts Cautionary Tale in Un banquete of tribe and kinship –terms taken from social sciences like anthropology and ethnography. en Tetlapayac The intention to evidence natural ties of kinship and affinity between artists and works as agent Regina Tattersfield of a shared visual culture differed from a previous historical fabric torn by earlier (UNAM, México) narratives. This change in character gave The Age an emancipatory bent as it constructed the genealogy of the family of Mexican contemporary art. Establishing a new historical One morning, on our way to the order that would pave the way for the urgent Hacienda, Lutz Becker argued that films articulation of new actors in art meant, the are the only place we have to witness curatorial argument went, recomposing the fate. One watches a movie and, no local art scene from a position of independence matter what one does, a certain and opposition. The strategy followed the tracks succession of events is bound to occur of explanations and constructions of before our eyes. mythologies surrounding movements that I thought that the great thing about a seemed to have come out of nowhere.4 There movie that remains, like Eisenstein’s was, then, a series of confrontations innate to Mexican film, in a fragmentary and the strategic argument that questioned the utter inconclusive form is that it keeps on tricking fate. What we did, or probably lack of information on art histories in peripheral what Olivier Debroise felt obliged to do, countries, the resulting distortion in order to was to intervene in that vacuum so as to insert local artists on the international scene,5 add another recoil to an always and the overwhelming amnesia regarding expanding temporality. historical consciousness of modern art and Which is to say that this film was made avant-gardes in Mexico in historiographies to keep another film very much a film of formulated in terms of the dichotomies of the hereafter.1 nationalism and cosmopolitism, figuration and abstraction. This essay focuses on the revision of recent In a recent interview, Medina spoke of that Mexican art history in Olivier Debroise (1952- discursive dissidence, stating that “[Jorge 2008) and Cuauhtémoc Medina’s (1965) Alberto] Manrique is probably responsible for academic and curatorial project The Age of having bolstered the belief that the narrative of Discrepancy. Art and Visual Culture in Mexico modern art in Mexico is a back and forth 2 1968-1997. The context for the exhibition between nationalism and cosmopolitanism. At project, which was held in 2007, was, to a large that time, he turned what happened in 1966 and extent, the reactivation and consolidation of the 1968 into the framework for Mexican art history Colección of the Universidad Nacional in its entirety. The problem is you are talking to Auntónoma de México and the formalization, in artists and art historians educated according to 2004, of its acquisitions program. The that vision of the world. The only way to work exhibition managed to distance itself from the around that narrative was not to put 66 and 67 nationalist canons passed down from the in the same bag as the later years. It would not “Fernando Gamboa regime” –a fact that serves have been feasible to include that narrative”.6 as a point of departure for this problematization of the exhibition’s globalizing process or, rather, The point of departure chosen, then, was the its intent to weave Mexico into the fabric of Salón Independiente, launched at the height of transnational discourses on the contemporary. the cultural crisis and social uprising, The Age of Discrepancy. A Cautionary Tale in Un banquete en Tetlapayac / Regina Tattersfield 245 ♯11 second semester 2017 particularly among students, in 1968. The banquete en Tetlapayac (2000).10 We envision closing date was ultimately 1997, though at a that film, produced a few years before the show, certain point in the creative process it was as a cautionary rehearsal of The Age, as a subject to doubt. The choice of that year did not montage of subjectivities, documents, sites, seal the narrative; on the contrary, 19977 was to agencies, and divided histories that reveals the act as an open and ambiguous device that would tumultuous index in which that urgent need to pave the way for the potential expansion of produce a contemporary art scene in Mexico is artistic production in the project’s final registered. How is it possible that detecting an historical chapter, entitled “Inclemency”, where intermediate episode that took place during the the possibility of a new “post-Mexican” shoot of an unfinished film veered the history of generation was insinuated.8 modern art toward the construction of the contemporary? It was also necessary to establish distance from the vision of the museographic tradition The Fondo Olivier Debroise11 housed at the advocated by Fernando Gamboa (1909-1990) as Centro de Documentación Arkehia contains a he communicated far and wide the pre-Hispanic set of documents pertinent to the disciplined world and Mexican avant-garde and neo-avant- and passionate research Debroise performed on garde art. Though declining, that vision filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein12 and on his stay in persisted in the exhibition Mexico: Splendors of Mexico (from 1930 to 1932) to film Qué Viva Thirty Centuries backed by the Mexican state.9 México! Never finished, that movie raised questions about the history of the Hacienda de As a university project, The Age was also tied to Tetlapayac and about Mexican art history. In a an idea of academic progress and to a paradigm vast corpus of original and facsimile documents of research that enabled an accumulation of (among them photographs, personal knowledge. Like a project in the social sciences correspondence, and drawings) is what or the humanities, its coherence required Debroise calls a series of interstices hidden in excluding, relegating, or enlisting unstable the historiographic interpretation of the shoot, elements as parts of the whole, dissipating interstices indicative of the failure of the Soviet materialities and subjectivities that, because film revealed in Un banquete as a simile for the shifting or divergent, failed to find a place in the gaps in the narrative of Mexican art. paradigm constructed. The repercussions of that Appropriating the invisible, the unspeakable, stance and the dilemmas it occasioned are not Debroise invited a tribe of friends to spend a few addressed here. We mention those days at Tetlapayac –the hacienda that served as repercussions –a clear yet spectral presence still set and home of the Soviet team working on found in narratives on the contemporary– to Eisenstein’s film– to talk about film, art, provide a glimpse of further discussion. history, Mexican culture and identity, and ideology on the basis of the figure of Eisenstein To differ as a means of acting on a horizon laden in Mexico. Cuauhutemoc Medina explains: with discourse and also with forgetting meant venturing meticulously into the void. Radical French-Canadian art historian Serge Guilbaut transformation of history was at stake, and the as Elie Faure, the Californian critic Sally Stein chance to return to it with the hope of as the American writer Katherine Anne Porter, remedying or salvaging what had been caught the American artist Andrea Fraser as the art up in its tragedy. As a sort of symptom in promoter Frances Flynn Paine, the German- English documentarist Lutz Becker stood as Debroise and Medina’s curatorial vision, a Eisenstein, the Mexican artist Silvia Gruner as precise formula –that is, to visit these sites on Frida Kahlo, the Mexican Singer Astrid Hadad the margin and to activate them anew on the as painter and actress Isabel Villaseñor, the basis of their conditions of possibility, dipping Colombian film archivist Enrique Ortiga as into that which has gone unspoken and the first Mexican “cinema clubber” Agustín undebated, that which has not been analyzed or Aragón Leyva, the painter Javier de la Garza exhibited– underlies the project. In exploring as the humorless Adolfo Best, the historian that symptom –the repetition of history, the James Oles as Sinclair’s brother-in-law and return to the exact place and its past to turn it the disgusting gringo Hunter Kimbrough, into a different history– we come upon a like re- among others. I had to be some kind of Diego Rivera.13 creation in Olivier Debroise’s film project Un The Age of Discrepancy. A Cautionary Tale in Un banquete en Tetlapayac / Regina Tattersfield 246 ♯11 second semester 2017 Diego Rivera/Cuauhtémoc Medina remarks on, Soviet director’s photographs, drawings, and among other things, the connection between his writings. These letters appear as document in character and Eisenstein who, upon arriving in one scene; one particularly intriguing envelope Paris, announced that he would attend the bears the words Eisenstein’s mexican pictures gatherings at Les Deux Magots café. He also of mexicans have no negatives of any of this mentions that Bataille was present at one of […]. In the scene in Debroise’s film, art Eisenstein’s readings; Bataille would return to historian James Oles holds the envelope in his the arguments on montage Eisenstein had hands while describing the contents of the letter articulated there in his text on monstrosity to his colleagues: published in Documents 2, a magazine that appears in the film as an indication of the fact Most of the photographs are variants of that Eisenstein was tied to the Bataillean strain photographs that are known, them posing of Surrealism, to Diego Rivera, and to Latin with this cactus, Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, America.

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