dieser beitrag wurde verfasst in: englisch (eng/en)
verfasserin/verfasser: Tatiana Flores
titel: An Art Critic in a Contested Field. Anita Brenner and the Construction of the Mexican Renaissance
+: In: Karen Cordero Reiman (ed.), Another Promised Land. Anita Brenner's Mexico, Los Angeles 2017, pp. 86–103
«Siqueiros called on artists to draw inspiration from the Aztec, Maya, and Inca cultures, whose 'constructive vigor' he admired. He elaborated on Mérida's vague description of a work's essence by locating it within its skeletal core, preferably a geometric foundation. Favoring form over content, he exhorted artists to 'abandon literary motifs' and not to listen to poets, 'whose beautiful literary articles are completely distanced from the real worth of our works.'
Siquieros's essay in turn was read by a poet, Manuel Maples Arce, who obliquely responded to it in a manifesto of his own, Actual No. 1, 1921 […], a raucous and rebellious text heavily inspired by models from the European avant-garde art, especially Futurism and Dada, and which would launch the Estridensta (Stridentist) movement. On the one hand, Maples Arce challenged Siqueiros's aesthetic, which was based on the 'return to order' classicism that pervaded the visual arts after World War I, through his dizzying, disjointed prose, which was anything but orderly. On the other, Maples Arce made prescriptions of his own to visual artists: to draw inspiration from new technologies, such as the radio, and the sensations – as opposed to the architecture – of the contemporary city, and to be cosmopolitan and forward-looking, not introspective. He did agree that painting should suppress 'all mental suggestion and false litera-tourism so celebrated by our buffoon critics' and advocated for a medium-specific aesthetic, both in poetry and painting. Indeed, the poet's main target was not Siqueiros, whom he regarded as an ally, but the local literary establishment, which he considered retrograde and selfcongratulatory. In time, the poet would eventually align his aesthetically revolutionary message to social revolution, embracing both the changes wrought by the Mexican Revolution and the dream of greater social justice, bringing him even closer to Siqueiros.
Maples Arce's text shifted the terms of the debate from the polemics between artists and their critics to the question of what should constitute a contemporary Mexican aesthetic. Like Mérida, both he and Siqueiros disdained the folklorism then in vogue, such as the appropriation of indigenous motifs for the purposes of decoration or bourgeois entertainment. Whereas Mérida and Siqueiros sought to locate a deeper, structural connection to indigenous cultures, Maples Arce was interested in changing the conversation from issues around nationalism to those related to an interconnected global contemporaneity. For him, 'The only possible frontiers in art are the insurmountable ones of our own marginalist emotion.' The electrifying sensations of fleeting modernity – the smell of gasoline, sounds of car horns, continual visual stimuli from billboards – and how these were experienced by the individual, whom he regarded as an urban flaneur, were of greatest interest to him.» (p. 89)
«Clearly [Anita Brenner's] writings were imbricated in a complex network of friends, aspirants, mentors, and rivals, which colored the contemporary reception of the book. Today, Idols Behind Altars remains a richly textured primary account of a crucial moment in the history of modern art, akin to Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists (1550), while also offering an interpretive framework for Mexican culture so as to help situate foreign readers. Still, it is useful to be mindful of Brenner's positionality. Her celebration of the indigenous legacy prevented her from taking seriously other perspectives on Mexican art and literature – such as those of Maples Arce and the Contemporáneos – that pursued different directions from those she outlined in her text. In so doing, she unwittingly offered preemptive support for Siqueiros's infamous dictum, first expressed in 1945: No hay más ruta que la nuestra – 'There is no other road but ours.'» (p. 95)