When the very bright and commanding Eduardo Galleano gave a reading recently at the Lensic during the final Lannan Foundation Readings & Conversations event of the season, I was suitably enthralled by the Uruguayan writer but horrified by my fellow audience members. Keep in mind that I don't play well with others and I despise all forms of the group singalong, including, apparently, group reverential moaning. Why is it that people (Santa Feans in particular) feel the need to grunt in understanding (feigned or real) when they believe something approximating wisdom has been uttered through a
microphone? It's a strange sort of emotional cave man grunt-an almost involuntary "him smart and me know it" noise, meant, no doubt, to assure the rest of the audience that the microphone wielder and the grunter are thinking along similar lines. It really falls apart though, when a guy like Galleano begins speaking in Spanish and the grunters insist on pretending they understand, nodding their approval, their knowing sighs in all the wrong places. But based on the applause that erupted after Galleano first read one of his characteristic vignettes in Spanish, it's less of a language and more of a party trick for us Santa Feans. The inexplicable applause at the author's sudden switch into his native tongue was summed up concisely by my smart wife with the phrase, "Dance, monkey, dance."
Really, it's a kind of sentimentalism that's pervasive in Santa Fe and often on grand display at the Lannan events where, much as one goes to church in order to feel pious, we Santa Feans flock in order to pretend to be more worldly than we really are. How else to explain that other burst of furious applause following a diatribe against smoking bans? Oh, how we love that clever Latin rule-breaker-standing up for fags and artists and weirdos while sucking down cigarettes and, for good measure, drinking at the wrong time of day. Just not, you know, in our town. So, in apprehension of a similarly saccharine halo around a head of hypocrisy, I was dreading the
Mexican Modern
exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts (107 W. Palace Ave., 476-5072). Meant to be a summer blockbuster to rival the last MFA blockbuster, the
Russian Summer
(a half-assed, monarchist apologist excuse for an art show that I remember as the Tsar that ate Palace Avenue), I had little hope that the exhibition would amount to more than a middling Diego Rivera celebration with an increased ticket price.
The sentimentalism is there; upon entering the exhibition hall and encountering the bright and specific colors on the walls-such Mexican hues-it's not just an art show,
compadre
, it's a
barrio fiesta
! One cannot, however, argue as to whether or not it's done well, as the usual expertise of the Museum of New Mexico's preparation staff is in evidence. The exhibition design may encompass a lowest common denominator marketing ploy or just an attempt to jazz it up Latino style, but it sure is slick. Before long, the work in the exhibition consumes all other concerns.
Mexican Modern
is, in fact, a precious and perfect exhibition for Santa Fe. In every way that the Nicholas and Alexandra
Russian Summer
exhibition missed the mark and bellowed irrelevance, the current exhibition is spot-on. It is sentimental, but with every reason to be. Each José Clemente Orozco painting, for example, is a tight squall of primal emotion, his 1940 portrait of the art critic Don Luis Cardoza y Aragón not only capturing the man in a fury of brushstrokes and pale washes, but exuding the complex experience of Mexico in the decades following the Revolution of 1910. "Niños con raqueta," a 1936 work by Jesús Guerrero Galván, offers such a rare moment of strange beauty as to create skidmarks on the museum floor as viewers are literally stopped in their tracks. Two children fill the entire frame in pose with a tennis racquet and a rose, a boy in pink with his arm around the girl in a short white semi-translucent tennis dress. Each element is malformed just to a point of indecision about youth vs. age, sex vs. innocence, rich vs. poor. The swollen brown eyes of both figures are on the verge of bursting off the canvas, so stuffed are they with the weight of 1936.
A wall placard hints that Diego Rivera's 1947 painting, "Paisaje nocturno," in which seven figures crouched in a tree and the burro standing below them are illuminated with an eerie yellow/green light, may have been done after the artist spied people observing a John Huston film a movie in Tampico. It's an unsettling and magnificent painting, easily open to a more contemporary interpretation of immigrants caught in the spotlight of
La Migra
or the Minute Men, the green and yellow cast of the light having an uncanny resonance with the contemporary Mexican code word for the immigration police:
limones verdes
. The timeless ease with which Rivera's work insinuates its relevance is echoed again and again throughout the exhibition, expertly curated by Luis-Martín Lozano of the Museo de Arte Moderno de México. The post-revolution government support for artists and intellectuals evident in
Mexican Modern
echoes the WPA-era works in Santa Fe's downtown post office and US Courthouse and calls to question how much more even the city government could be doing to encourage creative activity here and the legacy that such encouragement is capable of producing.
The exhibition hits home because it is ripe with commonalities between New Mexicans and Mexicans that can't be divided or hidden by fences or even by small armies. The immigration and border issues currently dominating the headlines and tiny brains of politicians everywhere are cultural voids, most ably described by El Corcito (Antonio Ruiz) in his 1939 painting, "Líder Orador," in which a small man gesticulates from a chair to an audience of hollow-headed pumpkins. That the Mexican government and the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs were able to work together so well in the midst of such mindlessness to bring so meaningful an effort to our museum may be a tiny revolution, but it's worth a "
¡Viva!
"
