9. Private Struggle / Public Protest 1965–1972
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9. Private Struggle / Public Protest 1965–1972 Five long years of private struggle followed Pepe’s exhilarating col- lective experience at the Museo de Antropología. It was a private struggle not in the sense of utter solitude, for he interacted with friends, family, lovers, and increasingly iconoclastic cinema, theater, and music. He be- gan to break into the commercial art market while responding to op- portunities federal and state governments opened to young artists. His experience was private in relation to the public explosion that engulfed the city between 1964 and 1968—a youth movement that began with the strike of medical interns, swelled in a mobilization against the university administration in 1966, and culminated in a tsunami of student protest against repression and authoritarianism in 1968. While he shared many sentiments, principles, and visions that energized the student movement, he lived a different moment as he struggled to create his own work— painting at once disciplined, expressive of himself, and recognized by others. If he began to exhibit regularly in 1966, it was not the first time. Since 1958, he had been in show after show for Esmeralda students, most of them sponsored by Mexican federal art agencies (under the aegis of inba) with cosponsorship by Mexico’s states and by foreign governments. They sought to capture youth’s diverse and experimental creativity, a particular form of contestatory creativity facilitated by the unprecedented expan- sion of higher education. Perhaps no government moved as energetically as the Mexican in mobilizing its prodigious cultural apparatus to channel Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/590506/9780822376125-010.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 these youthful energies and to showcase Mexican cultural achievement to the world. Mexico’s hosting of the Olympic Games and Cultural Olym- pics in 1968 followed the flurry of museum openings of 1964. Enabled by new wealth and in search of both regional cultural iden- tity and cosmopolitanism, Mexican state governments joined the list of sponsors. The business sector—both private and state-owned industries and associations—got into the act. They were sensitive to proliferat- ing art markets and the notion that aesthetics brought prestige to the mundane and increasingly maligned business of producing goods and making money. They saw that U.S. multinationals sponsored exhibits and contests, opened their own galleries, and built their collections.1 The rise of the art market favored easel painting. In the increasing number of competitions and exhibits, young artists like Pepe found venues for recognition and communication. The student protests of 1968 took place within this milieu of expanding opportunities and benefited from them even though artists directly involved in the protests voiced hostility to both state and commercial sponsorship.2 Taken together—those who re- sponded to traditional modes of exhibit and those who did not—young artists broke apart old cultural monopolies to introduce a plethora of languages speaking to distinct, often new publics. For Pepe Zúñiga, neither the development of a style nor public rec- ognition came easily. For a while after the museum work ended, Pepe focused on Emma. He had known her since they had lived in the same vecindad in Magnolia, she with her husband and three daughters. She was four years his senior. The Zúñigas had moved around the corner to the vecindad on Soto Street when in 1963 Emma asked him to repair her record player. “You have changed a lot,” she commented upon his arrival. “You’re very handsome.” “No, my father is handsome and my grandfa- ther, not me,” he demurred. “No,” she responded, “you are handsome.” She asked him how he was doing in school. When he said he was doing some pencil portraits at home, she asked if he could do one of her. “But won’t your husband be upset?” he asked. “Don’t you know I am divorced now?” she answered. In repeated visits, he did her portrait (see figure 9.1). It was pleasing to draw her—it was as if he were caressing her cheeks and her long, chestnut-colored wavy hair. But it was also intimidating because he feared her children would see them, and she herself had begun to make advances. When he finished, she asked how much she owed him. When he said nothing, she insisted on having a party. It was her saint’s day, and he brought her a record of the popular Cuban singer, Olga Guillot. She served her guests equally Private Struggle / Public Protest 185 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/590506/9780822376125-010.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 Figure 9.1. Emma, pencil drawing by José “Pepe” Zúñiga, 1964. popular Cuba libres. She sent her children to bed, and Pepe and she began to dance. They danced beautifully together. After that, they began to go to intimate bars in different parts of the city that served a well-off clientele. She insisted on paying. He did not like it, but she earned more money than he. She worked for a homeopathic doctor. She gave him a religious medal with “Love and Hope” engraved on the back. She brought him flan and gelatines. She told his mother she wanted to do his laundry. Lupe would have none of that. Pepe had tender affection and respect for Emma: his was not a conquest like those of his professor García Robledo. But one day, when he was visiting Emma at her apartment, Guillermo, her ex-husband, appeared and gave him ten min- utes to vacate the place. He left in a hurry. That ended his romance with Emma. Years later in Paris, he would paint Homenaje a Emma, exhibited at the prestigious Salon de Mai and bought by the Musée d’Art Moderne. He was in his final year at the Esmeralda. He had missed the 1964 school year as he had gone to the museum while the Esmeralda build- ings were remodeled. When he returned, his friends had graduated. He 186 Chapter 9 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/590506/9780822376125-010.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 was frustrated and angry. He thought he had learned everything there was to be learned there. He knew from memory the muscles, bones, and flesh of every model. He wanted to find his own style, his own mode of expression. He wanted to go abroad because he was not sure he could find his voice in Mexico. He had watched a film at La Esmeralda about the geometric painter Victor Vasarely, who received foreign students in his Paris studio. Pepe wanted to go, but there was no way. Instead, he had to sit through boring classes. In class, Fernando Castro Pacheco had explained repeatedly the dif- ference between Apollo (Phidias, Michelangelo, and Rodin imitating nature) and Dionysus (French Impressionism’s willful transformation of color, form, and composition). The students had had enough of the classics. Joking with one another, they would say, “That’s Apollo. No, it’s Dionysus. No, it’s Apollo.” They called him “Castro Pachuco” after the Chicano street dandies imitated by Tin- Tan in the movies. It was not a compliment. Pepe took him on. He was a student leader now. He challenged the director when he denied a student the opportunity to take the annual trip to Yucatán. Castro Pacheco responded to Pepe, “Zúñiga, you think a lot of yourself but you’re nobody. I’m going to ask you in five years what you’ve achieved as an artist.” Years later, Pepe would have the pleasure of telling him he had been invited to show at the Salon de Mai in Paris. But in 1965, Pepe Zúñiga had no way of knowing where he would be in five years. When he graduated from La Esmeralda, he felt even more at sea. It was as if someone had cut the umbilical cord that tied him to the creative life. He had no place to paint, no supplies, and only sporadic exchange with his former classmates and professors. From his parents he had learned the artisan’s commitment to craft, but they could not understand his creating in a new form. His father particularly feared the life of misery that would follow from his dedication to painting. He kept demanding money from Pepe for the family. He had cut off the legs of Luz Jiménez in Pepe’s painting to use the wood of the frame for his own pur- poses. His mother was more supportive, but both parents harped at him to find a wife. They were afraid of Emma because she was divorced, and her ex-husband could take revenge. His father wanted to present him to other women. Whenever he brought a girl to the house, his mother called her nuera—“my daughter-in-law.” He kept busy installing new stereo systems, repairing radios, and acting as disc jockey at parties with his records and sound equipment. But he earned money irregularly as he was Private Struggle / Public Protest 187 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/590506/9780822376125-010.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 painting and taking courses in engraving at the opic, the government agency that prepared traveling exhibits and offered classes and exhibition opportunities in its galleries. Often he did not have enough money to put gas in his car—that sym- bol of independence and success that now seemed to elude him. He was haunted. He had long feared turning thirty with nothing to show for himself. He saw the film La Dolce Vita—again and again.