El código Orozco: cura d’or en plan familiar Painting

An approximate English version of title: The Orozco Code: golden curating on the family plan Painting is unframed, but has thin wooden lathing strips to dress the edges. ******************************************************************* This piece developed out of a painstaking research project into the details surrounding a secretive “contemporary art” project that involved the placement of a wealthy Guadalajara art patron’s red Ferrari inside the chapel of the city’s Cabañas Cultural Institute containing the largest cycle of murals by José Clement Orozco, so as to be able to photograph the reflections of the murals on the car’s surface. The project had been undertaken as part of a series of contemporary art installations, performances or other activities purportedly to honor the Mexican sites that had been declared “Humanity’s Patrimony” by UNESCO (the United Nations’ Education, Science, and Cultural Organization). There was no open call for project ideas; everything just preceded according to the iron whim of a handful of artists, curators, and museum directors. The mise-en-scène at the Cabañas was a closely guarded secret, according to an inside source who requested anonymity, with the then director of that institution forbidding entrance to members of the press or any leaks about what was being undertaken (perhaps, as I later learned, because there had been an end-around run by the Cabañas, which needed to remove the chapel doors from their hinges in order to make enough room for the car’s width to pass through, and that would necessarily require long, bureaucratic procedures, the outcome of which were far from certain, precisely because the Cabañas is one of the UNESCO “Humanity’s Patrimony” sites). The curatorial justification for this curious project—obtained only through a Freedom of Information-style request—suggests that the “mastery” of Orozco’s line could only be compared with the mastery of a Ferrari’s design, thereby making it seem a natural and obvious consequence that the two should be united. When I read that, I was immediately reminded of Marinetti’s proto-fascist “Futurist Manifesto,” with its glorification of machines and steel, speeding cars, airplanes, military tanks, machine guns, and war itself, which he saw as the cleansing purge for all the ills of modern social life. Hence, I developed the idea for this painting, which is set in the Orozco murals chapel of the Cabañas, albeit with Orozco’s replaced by images more in tune with the new aesthetic governing the control of that space: images of Mussolini and Francisco Franco (including one of him playing “la Malinche” to a Nazi official’s Cortez) and war tanks, automobiles and motorcycles, of the founding tyrant of Mexico’s television broadcasting monopoly (Emilio Azcárraga Milmo), and so forth. Also on view are the then Cabañas director (closing the door behind the Ferrari, so no reporters can get in), one of the principal curators who likely facilitated the connections between the people required to get the project accomplished, the Ferrari’s owner and his brother (both high caliber figures in the Guadalajara contemporary art scene). There is also a copy of the edition of the Paris newspaper in which Marinetti’s Manifesto was first published, sitting atop a pile of liquor bottle boxes from two of the booze distributors whose P.R. operations were then being directed by the brothers of the contemporary artist behind the red Ferrari being placed in the chapel. (They are shown with pool cues in their hands, in a mural space over the far door, in an image drawn from a magazine profile of them.) They and their artist brother are nephews of the priest shown in the lower right, Monsignor Francisco Ugarte Corcuera, then the longtime Vicar for all of Mexico of the Opus Dei movement. To celebrate this (coincidental?) connection, there is an image of the founder of Opus Dei, St. José María Escrivá de Balaguer, taken from the propaganda used for his sanctification festivities. Father Escrivá was quite close to the fascist dictator Franco and his movement, founded on Oct. 2, 1928, flourished under such conditions in Spain. The image of Pope Pius XII is also present in the same section of the corrupted chapel imagery, a reflection of the support that Opus Dei received during that papacy, which lasted through the late 1950s. Another “coincidence” is that on the 40th anniversary of the founding of Opus Dei, the date Oct. 2 acquired a different significance in Mexico: that was the date in 1968 when the Mexican government had its army massacre innocent people at a peaceful rally at the “Plaza of Three Cultures” outside the Tlatelolco housing developments in Mexico City. The single white glove and the flare, both painted in the upper left section are references to that incident, in which those symbols played a significant role in the initiation of hostilities and the identification of members of the special forces who had been seeded into the crowd to open fire as an excuse for the soldiers to “return” fire. The Televisa president, Emilio Azcárraga (also portrayed in upper left) had a close relative, Gastón Azcárraga, who was the owner of the Chrysler franchise in Mexico and who used his money to fund the development of the Opus Dei movement in the nation. The autos shown in the “revised” mural niches include two Chryslers: one from 1928 and a 1968 model. The latter, falling from the sky, is a wink at an other “contemporary art” project by the same “artist,” much closer in time to when this painting was being produced: he hired people to hoist a car with a crane and drop it into a shallow reservoir, so he could film it with a movie camera and have the laboratory produce a photographic still of the car at the very moment it was about to hit the surface of the water. This, he claimed, was somehow related to Stephen Hawking’s theories about time and the universe. But the real bottom line seems to be that his daddy had a car dealership, and he enjoyed playing in the lot when visiting his father at work. He liked all the shiny reflective surfaces, he said. The image of one of the indigenous revolutionaries from Orozco’s original murals survives in my version of things, but he has been enslaved again, pushing the red Ferrari into position for the photo shoot, while the curators, car and art owners, and the museum director drink wine and smoke. This painting was produced for the group show “Orozco desde el siglo XXI” (Orozco [seen] from the 21st Century), to which I was invited, and which was held at the Cabañas Cultural Institute in 2008, in honor of the muralist’s 125th birth anniversary. Although the invitation specified that the subject matter was to be the free choice of the participating artists, I had to request a written guarantee beforehand that there would be no subsequent censorship on the basis of subject matter (as I had been the subject of similar censorship in the past). There were also a series of “contemporary art” projects done in parallel to the group painting exhibition, by a series of artists that originally included the person responsible for the red Ferrari photo project, but he ended up “not being able to participate,” according to the organizer of the events. If the theme of my contribution to that Homage to Orozco was in way responsible for such a tragic outcome, the artist involved must by now have overcome his wounded ego, as some of his photos of the red Ferrari reflections were recently acquired as part of the Cabañas Institute’s permanent collection. As a result of requests for information about the planning of the two series of art activities in “homage” to Orozco, it was revealed that the “contemporary artists” were offered approximately a thousand dollars a piece in order to mount their ephemeral projects. The painters were offered and received nothing, not even any assistance in covering the cost of their materials for works which were stipulated as having to be “new” and “made specifically for the exhibition.” A first cousin of the artist who did the red Ferrari project, himself also a “contemporary artist,” was included in the festivities and, in fact, was the owner of a company hired by the Cabañas Institute to arrange the installations of all the contemporary art installations and distribute the funds promised to those artists for their work. He is also the nephew of the (now former) Vicar of Opus Dei in Mexico. This painting was also subsequently shown at my 2010 solo exhibition, Espectáculo e insignificancia (Spectacle and Insignificance) at the ex-Convento del Carmen in Guadalajara. A full color reproduction of this painting was included in the catalogue for the 2008 exhibition “Orozco desde el siglo XXI,” published in March 2009 by the Instituto Cultural Cabañas.

Painting:Acrylic on Canvas

Original:One-of-a-kind Artwork

Size:60.3 W x 78.5 H x 2 D in

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