20th Century Mexican Masters of Semiotic Wonder : José Clemente Orozco
Two tropes for an artist as she or he comes of age: a random sight flows in the windows of our eye, and once witnessed, said sight charts a destiny.
The second, a commonplace — the artist loses something dear, and like magic, her/his abilities evolve somehow, making up for the loss (think Borges and Joyce, blind, yet seers — Oedipus, too; or deaf Beethoven composing, that kind of thing).
The two tropes come together with the case of our birthday boy, José Clemente Orozco. Born 23, November 1883, one of the four horsemen of 20th Century Mexican muralismo (along with Diego Rivera; Davíd Alfaro Siqueiros, 29, December 1896; and Rufino Tamayo, 26 August 1899), Orozco loses a hand in a firecracker accident, and, in compensation, the other hand evolves, transmogrifies, becomes monstrous, lacing walls with evocative, outsized portraitures that come to symbolize the chaos of Mexico (bad and good) in the 20th century. Murals are a peculiar genre — marrying architecture with painting, the muralist incorporates the space you walk through — changing it and you in the process.
Enough with the missing hand — on to the eye!
Orozco becomes a painter through a repeated, ritual act of voyeurism — it is no metaphor to say that his destiny came to and through him via an optic semiotic influenza.
On his way to school, Orozco would stop to watch Jose Guadalupe Posada (2 February 1852, for the future, josh!), master Mexican printmaker through the open window of his workshop. Orozco’s eye is seduced forever and, anointed thusly, and inspired through and through, he goes on to fill the walls of post-Revolutionary Mexico’s establishment with expressionistic massive panels filled with sex, violence, and passion — the legacy of Mexico’s brutal revolution refashioned and recorded in its larger-than-life brutality on frescoes that seem large but that actually document the massive forces at work in Mexico and beyond.
He also had a sense of humor, in the 20s and 30s, Orozco traveled around American universities (Pomona, the New School, and Dartmouth) leaving traces of his Mexican outsized visual “ranting”— like tags on Uncle Sam’s garage.
At Dartmouth, he transforms a room in the Baker-Berry Library into The Epic of American Civilization (1932–1934), a massive, sprawling, tapestry of gods (Quetzalcoatl) and men (revolutionaries, generals, academics!).
My favorite part of the mural is a caustic portrait of Professors as calaveras (skeletons). Here, laying bare the dirty little secret of the ivory tower, Orosco’s wit reveals how intellectual collusion with the status quo is a commonplace in American academe, dissecting the very reactionary heart of an institution yahoos (especially here in the U.S.) associate with lefty revolution. You can tour the room here: http://www.dartmouth.edu/digitalorozco/app/
In the painting, robed professors are midwife and witness to the birth of stillborn knowledge — the mother of it all, a skeleton herself, is some odd fusion of soma (body) and biblio (book) lying prone suffering and screaming on a bed of books, whose color scheme, carrying over from the panel previous, is the province of avaricious bankers sucking at filthy lucre. It’s either a tribute to the tolerance of Dartmouth professors that they didn’t paint over the allegory or a monument to their blindness of a pointed irony writ large.
Image credits/provenance:
The monumental mural cycle The Epic of American Civilization was painted by Mexican artist José Clemente Orozco between 1932 and 1934 in Baker-Berry Library at Dartmouth College, via http://www.bocamuseum.org/index.php?src=gendocs&ref=JosClementeOrozco&category=ImagesforPress
JOSÉ CLEMETE OROZCO, Autoretrato [Self Portrait], 1937, oil on canvas, 31 x 26 inches. Boca Raton Museum of Art Permanent Collection PC 1988.013. Gift of Mrs. Jeanne Wechsler in memory of A.F. Wechsler
Originally published in hilobrow.com — this is the “director’s cut” ie, a somewhat edited draft; original posting → https://www.hilobrow.com/2014/11/23/jose-clemente-orozco/
