Dirty Pictures
We went to go see the Frida Kahlo exhibit at the Walker last Tuesday; seeing things in person often gives you a different slant or provokes questions that you hadn’t expected. Exposure to Kahlo’s paintings has been pretty universal for many years now, to the point where my Spanish instructor in Little Rock absolutely forbade her students from presenting on that topic. I’ve spent more time researching and looking at Diego Rivera myself, largely due to my fascination with monumental works. Rivera’s choice of fresco as his primary medium was certainly a political one; I’d never really thought about Kahlo’s materials before.
While there was one fascinating fresco fragment chipped from a wall, most of her paintings were on masonite, with a few on tin or sheet metal. The surface was absolutely flat, with little in the way of texture or brushwork. The pigments were largely earthtone, and there was a certain flavor of dirt in the work, perhaps amplified by the natural browns of the masonite. I love dirt. But why masonite? I kept finding myself thinking about that—and I began to wonder just how long masonite had been available as a material. I found the answer in a corporate history. It was invented in 1924, and attained broad distribution in the 1930s. For Kahlo, it would have been a brand new material. But perhaps the most compelling factor, then as now, would be simply that it was cheap.
The night before, I watched a film I’d love to see again called Tina in Mexico. It featured many pictures of Rivera and Kahlo, as well as Modotti and Weston with a soundtrack taken from Weston’s daybooks and Modotti’s letters. One of the interesting diatribes from Weston suggested that the idolatry of the peasantry (as practiced by Rivera and Kahlo) was as annoying to him as the constant harping on revolutionary politics by Modotti. The mix of old and new, of cutting edge building materials with more traditional subjects and easel work made me think of Kahlo a little differently. But I find myself empathizing with Weston’s condemnation of idolatry and the harsh insertion of too much politics into art objects. It becomes a virtual necessity to deal with these matters in the twentieth century, because when critique isn’t explicit, writers will tend to render it implicit in all works of art. The whole process leaves me feeling a little dirty (and not in a good way). While Kahlo is not necessarily as overt as Rivera, the choice of the peasantry as the heroic center of Mexico's identity certainly is political.
The other show we looked at, Brave New Worlds had the same sort of political stench in places. But there were some pieces that I thought, if you just avoided reading the artist’s statements, they would really set you thinking for a long time. I hope to go back, and I hope to write more about them soon.
December 1, 2007 11:20 PM
