Mucho jaleo sobre una caja de zapateado vacía Painting

Acrylic on masonite "gesso panel," appropriately constructed with wooden structural support on back. Unframed, but with (removable) thin wood lathing strips to dress the edges. Dimensions with wooden lathing: 18.5 x 29.625 x 1.5 in. The title of this piece presents some complications in translation into English. A very imprecise—or perhaps overly precise, but nevertheless totally unsatisfying—English version might go as follows: “A Lot of Brouhaha Over a Flamenco Dancer’s Empty Shoebox on the Degollado Theatre Stage.” You’d think I could do better. I’m the guy who painted the damn thing and titled it…as well as being someone who occasionally makes his living working as a Spanish-to-English translator. Obviously, some explanation is in order. This painting combines a number of references to people, art, and situations, which are casually but not causally related. The idea for the work grew out of a then-current controversy in Guadalajara, regarding whether the University of Guadalajara’s “folkloric dance” group should be allowed to continue offering their Sunday morning performances on the stage of the city’s principal and most prestigious theatre in the historical city center, the Teatro Degollado. The dance troupe’s spectacle includes a potpourri of historic and interpretive styles showcasing many of Mexico’s different regional and ethnic traditions, including some forms of “zapateado,” a style derived from flamenco dancing and associated particularly with the “son veracruzano” music-and-dance tradition (but present in many other regional forms as well) which involves a lot of foot-clacking and stomp-dancing, done with hard shoes that loudly accentuate the rhythmic noisemaking against the wooden floorboards. The controversy centered on whether so much stomping and banging was damaging the floor of the Degollado’s stage, as well as whether such “popular” forms of artistic expression should have any place at all in the city’s major theatre and music forum, where the philharmonic orchestra performs. As a vehicle for expressing something related to that controversy, I utilized John Singer Sargent’s famous painting “El jaleo,” which is one of the jewels of Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Leaving the Spanish-style figures alone on the right side of the central dancer (herself converted into a version of the Mexican folk-art figure of the “calaca” or “huesuda”—traditionally a skeletal female apparition of Death), I converted those on the left side to Mexican-style musicians, in an attempt to underscore the parallel between the musical and other cultural ties between Mexico and Spain. Besides language, such ties include such things as flamenco and zapateado dancing, etc. The figure of the central dancer, who seems to have recently risen from her “equipal” (Mexican-style chair) after putting on some new dancing shoes, has left the empty shoebox on the floor. The empty shoebox is meant as a reference to Mexican contemporary artist Gabriel Orozco, whose “installation” of an empty shoebox, left on the floor of a Venice Biennial pavilion in the early 1990s, is one of his early, controversial “artworks.” Around the time this painting was being made, the University of Guadalajara had invited Gabriel Orozco to do an artist-in-residency program with students in its art school, as part of his being invited to deliver a major talk as part of its prestigious Julio Cortázar Lecture Series. His presence at the UdeG (Universidad de Guadalajara) underlined the university’s position vis-à-vis a decade-long controversy with respect to the importance it had been giving to the kind of “neo-conceptual” contemporary art he practices versus more “traditional” forms of artmaking such as painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, and so forth, which he generally eschews…and which the university now apparently does, too. The figures in suits are the Padilla López brothers, who have controlled the fortunes of the UdeG since at least 1988 and continue to do so even today. José Trinidad (“Trino”) Padilla López, seen talking on his cell phone, was the president of the UdeG at the time this painting was made. His elder brother, Raúl Padilla López, seen holding a copy of the newspaper La Jornada Jalisco under his arm, was the president of the UdeG from 1988 to 1994, and since then has continued to exercise his “whim of iron” over the budget and the politics of Mexico’s second-largest public university and its plethora of associated secondary schools, cultural festivals, and “para-university” commercial businesses. The university’s budget, derived from the public coffers, is second in size only to that of the state’s bureaucracy itself. A true contemporary version of the traditional Mexican “cacique” (overlord or autocratic political boss), Raúl Padilla López fancies himself to be a kind of Medici-like figure, reigning over such university-run projects as the annual International Book Fair, the annual Cinema Festival, the annual Music Festival, and so on. However, because of his ruthlessness and tight control—even today, decades after stepping down as university president—over the decisions made regarding political and academic appointments, budgetary allocations, and so on, there are many who see him more like one of the Borgias. His appointment of his brother Trino to be university president is only one example of how he keeps things, like the mafia, “in the family.” La Jornada Jalisco, which was the local, Jalisco-based version of the leftwing national daily La Jornada, was reportedly financed discretely by Raúl Padilla López with money from the UdeG, as one of his many methods for achieving consensus in public discourse for his projects (what Noam Chomsky, citing Walter Lippman, has referred to as “manufacturing consent”), minimizing criticism of himself and his practices, as well as amplifying and extending his political clout. The “graffiti” on the back wall of the dance hall is a rendering of the façade of the Teatro Degollado, with the building’s frieze depicting the classical muses converted into versions of the “calaca” who dances in the foreground. The inscription seen under them is taken verbatim from the theatre’s façade. It reads: “May the rumor of discord never arrive.” Clearly a reference to the golden apple of discord, inscribed “To the Fairest” and tossed into the crowd of Greek goddesses, resulting in the shepherd Paris being asked to resolve the question of whom, among the three who claimed the apple, was truly deserving of it. (An early moral lesson about corruption. He chose the goddess who promised him the most beautiful mortal, Menelaus' wife Helen, if he voted for her—the incident gave rise to the Trojan War and the Homeric epics). In a sociocultural environment in which a “cacique” like Sr. Padilla López rules by a combination of intimidation and cooptation, the absence of even the rumor of any “discord” is guaranteed by sometimes sinister and corrupt means. As a side note, I should say that part of the critique here is purely personal, related to an indirect run-in I had with Sr. Padilla López shortly before this work was created. I had been offered the position of editor of the Culture section of La Jornada Jalisco by director Juan Manuel Venegas. Apparently, however, Sr. Padilla López (rumored to be the sugar daddy behind the newspaper, which had almost no advertising revenue to speak of) must have objected, probably because of an ironic comment I had included in an article the newspaper had published months before (and which, according to director Venegas, was what inspired him to offer me the job), in which I criticized the obsequiousness shown to Gabriel Orozco during his lecture at the UdeG by Dulce María Zúñiga, the director of the Julio Cortázar Lecture Series—one of the crown jewels in the series of cultural activities over which Padilla López rules. The invitation was silently and mysteriously rescinded. The newspaper director never deigned to explain the motivation for his change of heart, nor would he ever accept any telephone calls, e-mails or personal visits from me when I sought an explanation. Curiously, however, at the same time, various of Padilla López’s lackeys suddenly emerged as reporters and opinion columnists for that newspaper, assuring he wouldn’t have to endure any further dissidence. Some people don’t have to stomp around noisily with their shoes to be heard. The term “jaleo” refers not only to the flamenco dance form but also, by extension, to the idea of any kind of wild and clamorous event, including just a plain old temper tantrum.