"Too Big", 2009, charcoal and pastel on paper

Last October, Enrique Chagoya received that rare “honor” of having his work attacked — literally. A self-identified fundamentalist Christian took a crowbar to Chagoya’s The Misadventures of the Romantic Cannibals at the Loveland Museum in Colorado, claiming that the work’s depiction of Jesus Christ receiving oral sex was sacrilegious. The incident sparked several protests and counter-protests, as well as an attempt by a local councilman to defund the museum if it did not remove the work. Chagoya defended himself not only on first amendment grounds, but by patiently explaining his intentions and by attempting to encourage dialogue with the local Christian community.

Regardless, such an incident, alongside the recent removal of David Wojnarowicz’s video A Fire in my Belly from the Smithsonian, not only demonstrates the ongoing intensity of the culture wars in this country, but also the continuing effect that political art (as well as nonpolitical art that has become politicized) can have on audiences outside of the echo chamber of mainstream art world.  Indeed, one of the challenges facing political artists in the U.S. is how to reach both inside and outside the dominant institutional frameworks of critics and collectors who enjoy the satisfaction of “recognizing the critique,” as long as that critique is aimed at someone else.  Thus, the recent controversies in Loveland and Washington can be seen as wake-up calls for those who cynically imagine that political art can no longer provoke serious response and debate. 

"The Headache", 2010, etching with chine collé

Chagoya’s recent exhibit Surviving Paradise/Sobreviviendo el Paraíso, curated by Robert Wuilfe for the di Rosa Preserve in Napa, showcased several new works that, while not shying away from controversy, also demonstrate the diversity of his practice, both in subject matter and materials.  To be sure, there was little chance of protest in the relatively staid setting of Napa Valley, but the exhibit still popped with bold and brazen attitude.  With few exceptions, Chagoya, in his new work, shows no evidence of resting on his laurels or on easy liberal platitudes.  His intensely cross-cultural and trans-historical aesthetics continue to resist surface-level interpretations, demanding that we attend to the tangled complexities of politics and culture in a postcolonial world of oppression and resistance.

While almost all the works in the show were made in the last couple of years, visitors are initially greeted by When Paradise Arrives¸ an iconic work from 1988.  It features the giant gloved hand of Mickey Mouse inscribed with the words English Only, poised to flick a woman of color out of the frame.  Several large new works shared with this earlier piece the template of black charcoal on white paper, with bold borders and slashes of red.  In “Time Out” (2009), skeletons golf as speech balloons offer ironic questions about the meaning of art, and in two 2010 canvases, Untitled (Homage to José Clemente Orozco), historical figures like Gandhi and the Dalai Lama are situated amidst crowds of marching figures.

"My Cat Santos had a Nightmare", 2010, intalio in 2 colors with hand-coloring on Rever Suede warm white

Both drawings are dominated by a monstrous figure with eight snake heads and writhing feet.  Their ominous nature is balanced by ambiguity, a characteristic that carries over into other works where Chagoya’s cat or some other seemingly minor elements add a carnivalesque feel, as if George Grosz or Max Beckman had been sharing drinks (if not stronger substances) with political muralists such as Orozco that Chagoya is in clear conversation with.

In other works, set in more surrealist landscapes, political violence and dread are thematized with a sense of uncanny poetics, all rendered with deft use of collage and color.  In My Cat Santos had a Nightmare (2010), a crowd of seeming outcasts positioned against a background of flaming ships symbolizes a revolt or catastrophe.  In Homage to the Un-Square and My Cat Frida (2009), the cat is again in frightful flight, this time through a modernist living room replete with a color-field painting on the wall.  Art references appear again in Orozco Meets Victor Hugo at the Auction House (2009), where the snake-headed monster meets Hugo among several other art figures and figurines, each affixed with a sales tag.

"Atlas and the Arugulas", 2008, UV-cured acrylic with watercolor on Amate paper

In “Too Big” (2009) the hydra-headed reptile/figure reappears.  It’s confronted by a small briefcase toting figure whose speech balloon is a name tag that reads “Fuck off” – an apparent reference to the bank bailout.  The Headache (2010) portrays President Obama as George Washington sitting at the fire, berated by a posse of small devils with trumpets and axes.  Atlas and the Arugulas (2008) shows Obama as Atlas, the globe balanced on his shoulders, as he marches with an unsavory mix of characters into an uneasy future.  While using allegory to map out the difficult political challenges Obama faces, these works are not merely hagiographic or heroic portrayals.  Indeed, just as much of the idealist hope invested in Obama has faded into disappointment, Chagoya here demonstrates ambivalence about our desire to have one leader take the world onto his back for us, or to expect that a single savior can meet our lofty expectations.

Chagoya’s recent sculptural works also comment on the current economic crisis and its underlying machinations.  2012: Super-Bato Saves the World (2009), a slot machine, is customized to represent the Vegas-style risk culture of the stock market, where the odds seem to be fixed in favor of the house.  Pyramid Scheme (2009), a pyramid-shaped stack of green Campbell’s soup cans, takes Warhol into the realm of political economy, with flavors such as Wall Street Gumbo and Ponzi Chowder.

"Homage to the Un-Square and My Cat Frida", 2009, intaglio in 4 colors with hand-coloring on Somerset Velvet soft white

One Recession Watchdog (Instant Update) (2011), a mixed-media contraption of wood and electronics, forged into a pulsing dollar bill, flashes a running total of the national debt as it rises second by second.  While playfully commenting on the current crisis, these works — the debt monitor in particular – gloss over too many subtleties, most notably how rising national debt has been invoked to justify brutal cuts to social services, not to mention a war on the middle class through union busting.

It’s easy to categorize Chagoya as a left-leaning political artist.  But it’s notable, too, that his major works almost always employ historical events, both near and distant.  In his poignant cross-cultural mash-ups, where repressed indigenous icons return to a Disney-fied America, and art historical figures dance through cartoon vistas of transnational intrigue, Chagoya explores a terrain where, as he has said, “all cultures meet and mix in the richest way, creating the most fertile ground for the arts.”  For Chagoya, art trumps didactic moralism.  He resists the shop-worn models of celebratory postmodernist cultural hybridity and knee-jerk anti-Western cynicism. Thus, his art continues to remain politically and aesthetically potent for those willing to go beneath its multi-layered surfaces.

– DAVID BUUCK

#  #  #

Enrique Chagoya: “Surviving Paradise/Sobreviviendo el Paraíso” @ di Rosa Preserve through April 16, 2011.

Enrique Chagoya is represented in San Francisco by Gallery Paule Anglim.

Cover image: The Headache.

David Buuck is a writer who lives in Oakland, CA. He is the founder of BARGE, the Bay Area Research Group in Enviro-aesthetics, and co-founder and editor of Tripwire, a journal of poetics.

2012: Super-Bato Saves the World, 2009, customized slot machine, coins, cups

Gilbert and Sullivan may have written that “a policeman’s lot is not a happy one” in “The Pirates of Penzance”, but neither is the progressive political artist’s. Denounced by the political right for socialist proclivities (no Canada!) and by the cultural left for abandoning the lofty plane of pure sensation to produce agitprop for the groundlings, such artists generally get no respect. 

St. George and the Dragon, 2004, paper plate monoprint over lithograph

“Super-Bato” a humorous version of Batman, is given high, window-like eyes, an Aztec-style nose, and curled-moustachio fangs. (Bato, by the way, is Mexican slang for guy, dude, gangster and gringo, and given a phonetic spelling by Chagoya.)

A couple of paintings from 2002 are representative of Chagoya’s art of juxtaposed signifiers. “Untitled” depicts a scene set within an engraving appropriated from a Renaissance treatise on perspective.  A long room is covered with a grid of tiles whose vanishing point is located within a central figure, as with Leonardo’s “Last Supper”. In this case, the focus is Petunia Pig, six-breasted and grown up, in a blue bikini. Arrayed around her head, receding into space like monumental movie credits, in large capital letters, are various examples of mangled beginner’s English: “English as she is spoke”, “I am catched cold in the brain”,  and “It must never to laugh of the unhappies”.

Dream, 2002, Digital print with hand work on Amate paper, 48 x 48"; Histoire Naturelle des Especies Illegal Alilen’s Manuscript 2008, color lithograph, 11 x 74.5"

 

“World Backwards” features a similar repurposed background. Crude Spanish woodcuts depict the Judgment-Day revenge of the animals on their cruel taskmasters: a dog beats its cowering pet; two pigs cut a man’s throat, catching the blood in a pan; a burro whips its bipedal beast of burden; a horse, unsatisfied with its one-manpower carriage, resorts to the lash. Several of the panels are overlaid with red or white paint; atop one them sits a can of Chagoyesque soup: Cannibull’s Consultant with Beans.
 

Untitled, 2002, archival pigment print with handwork, 47”x67”

 
Chagoya’s codices carry the imagery of the paintings into a sprawling, horizontal panoramic format. Endowed with loquacious, sprawling surrealist titles (e.g., “The Axis of Goodness vs. the Eroticized Aerials of the Psyche”), these accordion-shaped works on paper are catalogues of visual/verbal absurdities: butterflies labeled Pessimists; skull-headed tots labeled Hedge Fund Managers; Egyptian/Assyrian soldiers, riding a war camel labeled Critical Theorists and Philosophers opine on ”free-wheeling non-linear thought”; and a Lone Ranger, labeled Museum Directors, muses on “superficiality and facades.”

Pyramid Scheme, 2009, digital pigment prints on cans, silk screened cardboard storage box

The soup cans and slot machines made for this show reflect more recent contemporary anxieties. The stacked soup cans of “Pyramid Scheme” (2009) reflect the fall of the House of Bush with flavors like Wallstreet Gumbo, Bailout Bisque, and Freddie Mac ’n’ Cheese. The exquisitely crafted, full-sized slot machines and their gold tokens (inscribed with party-hatted skulls) – collectively titled “2012: Super-Bato” –reflect our impolitic money policy and perhaps the imminent collapse that the Mayas foretold.  That vision includes: nuclear plants emitting toxic clouds, comets raining down on earth, and a dozing black cat who, like Chuang-tzu’s butterfly surrogate, philosophizes, ”Life’s a dream, then you wake up.”

 

Yes, now we’re finally awake. But as Chagoya suggests, we may have overslept to find a world we scarcely recognize or care to inhabit. 

 

—DeWitt Cheng

DeWitt Cheng is a San Francisco-based critic and curator. He is a regular contributor to the Art Ltd., the East Bay Express, Artillery, Shotgun-Review.com, ArtSlant, ArtBusiness.com and San Francisco ArtMagazine.com. 

 

Enrique Chagoya’s "2012: Super Bato Saves the World" closed July 2, 2009 at Electric Works, SF.

 

 

 

From de Tocqueville to Baudrillard, American history is filled with foreigners who have come to these shores to reveal truths that make us squirm.  When painter/satirist Enrique Chagoya burst onto the Bay Area scene in the mid-1980s, his charcoal-and-pastel drawings did exactly that.  Smash-ups of American pop culture and Mesoamerican myth, his art exposed the concealed ideological baggage that culture carries when it crosses national borders.             Practicing what he calls "reverse anthropology," Chagoya, 54, redraws Latin American history to show the conquistadores (represented by American cartoon and comic book heroes) being vanquished by the natives.  In this violent, sardonic oeuvre in which the artist upends the modernist practice of appropriating primitive art, Aztec and Mayan warriors and ancient goddesses clash with the likes of Superman and the Lone Ranger, oftentimes at length across multi-panel codex books that fold out, accordion-style, like the original pre-Columbian history texts that the Spanish destroyed.

            While such methods and concerns put Chagoya squarely inside the identity-obsessed, appropriationist milieu of ’80s and ’90s, his work has always seemed to operate outside the high-low fracas. No doubt, that distinction helped Chagoya catch the eye of Neo Expressionist painter Sue Coe who introduced Chagoya to the San Francisco dealer Paule Anglim who in turn helped orchestrate his 1994 exhibition at the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco – a precursor to the current 25-year survey ("Enrique Chagoya: Borderlandia") mounted in 2007 by the Des Moines Art Center that travels to the Palm Springs Art Museum for three months beginning Sept. 27.  (The show’s three-month run at the U.C. Berkeley Art Museum ended May 18.)             In the intervening decades, Chagoya has had nearly 40 museum shows in which curators have linked him to the great Mexican muralists (Rivera, Siqueiros and Orozco); the 19^th century political cartoonist José Guadalupe Posada; the French caricaturist Daumier; and to the Russian Constructivists who believed as Chagoya does "that art should be seen as life."  Indeed, in the art verité mode, Chagoya has redrawn Goya’s "Disasters of War" scene-for-scene with contemporary political and religious figures and recast Philip Guston’s "Poor Richard" cycle with a Pinocchio-nosed George W. Bush standing in for Richard Nixon.              Chagoya’s best-known works – charcoal-and-pastel drawings on paper – are practically iconic in the Bay Area where he has lived and worked since emigrating from his native Mexico City in 1977.  Ronald Reagan and Henry Kissinger as Mouseketeers spreading graffiti from buckets of blood and former Gov. Pete Wilson being consumed by Aztec cannibals were two of his more sensational images.  More recently, he pictured the dramatis personae of the current Bush administration as "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" along with the unlikely triumvirate of Bin Laden, Jesus and Gov. Schwarzenegger dressed as ballerinas -  an undisguised swipe at the governor’s "girlie men" crack.              Chagoya draws these large-scale pictures (the biggest are 80" x 80") in red, black and white, fully aware of the color scheme’s agit-prop history, as well as its ancient roots in the legend of Quetzalcoatl who, according to Chagoya, transformed himself into a black ant to learn the origin of corn from a kernel-carrying red ant – a symbolic collision of "opposites that interacted to access truth." Chagoya also makes a frequent practice of creating paintings on canvas collaged with swatches of amate paper – the same fig-leaf bark used by Mesoamerican Indians.              Another of his trademarks is his use of stark differences in scale to represent gross imbalances of power.  In "When Paradise Arrived," the outsized middle finger of Mickey Mouse (inscribed with the words "English Only") flicks an immigrant child like an insect.  Similarly, "Thesis/Antithesis" shows the hard-shoed, power-suited leg of a corporate type pushing the upended bare foot (presumably that of a dispossessed native) into a sea of blood.   In a typical gesture, Chagoya often adds the imprint of his own hand, in smeared down strokes, indicating what can only be interpreted as a collective last grasp.             It’s a sensibility "related to death, which is different than here because in Mexico there’s a cultural influence that comes from before pre-Columbian times in which life is a dream and when you die you wake up," explains Chagoya who lives in San Francisco and teaches art at Stanford.  "It’s a reaction from people to protect themselves against pain."  The aesthetic translation of that ethos is seen in his penchant for dressing evil in the clothes and poses of comic heroes.  "The devil has a beautiful face, just like in the Bible, so I wanted to look for that face.  I never made a portrait of a politician with sharp teeth.  I wanted to make them clowns, and it turned out to be closer to reality."             Goateed, bespectacled and dressed in loose fitting denim with his thinning salt-and-pepper hair pulled straight back, Chagoya looks like a retiring anarchist.  His eyes twinkle when he speaks and he laughs easily, citing art-historical references in a supremely modest manner that betrays none of the anger that underlies his work.             Before moving to the U.S., Chagoya studied economics and contributed political cartoons to newspapers.  He also participated in the student uprisings of the late ’60s and early ’70s that the Mexican government brutally suppressed.  And though he arrived well-educated and politically savvy, he wasn’t prepared for the race-based identity politics that crisscrossed the U.S. art world.  "In Mexico," he explains, "we have conflict, but it’s a conflict based on class, not race.  "Here," he says, speaking of the nationalistic fervor expressed by Bay Area Chicano artists in the ’70s and ’80s, "I felt like I was in a foreign film without subtitles.  Suddenly there’s an ethnic war taking place that I was not aware of."                   Unable to express himself through the prism of race, Chagoya turned to headline news, ancient and modern European art sources and to his own newly bifurcated relationship with American pop culture which, as a youth, he consumed voraciously through translated comic books and TV shows like "Gunsmoke."             Contrary to the evidence in "Borderlandia," which seems to indict U.S. foreign policy unequivocally, Chagoya claims his work is "a mirror on humanity" rather than an exercise in finger pointing.  "There is," he maintains, a measure of "good and evil within every culture" that is accompanied by stereotypes that are designed to propagate ideology.  "All of these stereotypes are created to justify dominance, and that’s what I’m dealing with in my work.  Culture," he asserts, "becomes an imperialistic force, a colonialist force that replaces somebody else’s culture. "If you’d been conquered by the Aztecs," the artist points out, "we’d have pyramids instead of churches."

–DAVID M. ROTH

  Enrique Chagoya’s 25-year survey, "Enrique Chagoya: Borderlandia," is at the Palm Springs Art Museum from Sept. 27 to Dec. 28, 2008.  He is represented by Gallery Paule Anglim in San Francisco and the George Adams Gallery in New York.