The merging of the modern and the primitive – what could also be described as a sensibility willing to confront death and catastrophe – appears in Tamayo more naturally than in others. The world of terror and the mechanical is the other side of the solar and blissful world. The canvas is where all these forces meet (1951, p. 7).
We should not be surprised by the eccentricity of this construction; particularly, the echoes of Artaud and Péret should not distract us from the fundamental operation at play here.
Serge Guilbaut and others have suggested that toward the end of World War II there was an international race to define the new artistic world geography – a symbolic competition won, in the end, by the New York of Greenberg and Pollock (Guilbaut 1983). Paz's mythological‐thermonuclear operation must be seen as an expression of that hegemonic ambition – an attempt, like many of the return‐to‐myth projects of late surrealism, destined to fail. Instead of submerging his metropolitan spectator in the glow of a world subject to termination, Tamayo was marginalized by the center as an example of a new kind of emotional illustration – what Clement Greenberg denounced as “illustrated” emotion, that is, denoted rather than embodied (1986–1993, p. 284).
Oddly enough, Paz's bold endeavor (the jump from the particularity of judgment to the generality of symbolic power) produced an effect in a terrain other than that of world painting. Instead of “Aztequizing” Westerners, Paz imposed Tamayo as a local Mexican glory; in fact, as a new official canon. For half a century, Tamayo became the referent for “good Mexican painting,” a highly paradoxical model of the supposedly aboriginal artist who, because of his direct contact with his Indian roots, can converse with the international avant‐garde. This was a much more watered down version of Paz's argument in 1950, a shadow of the original critical operation. However, Paz himself authorized the rewriting.
Conveniently, after 1957, Paz's version of the essay on Tamayo was reformed to suppress its postatomic allusions, and to direct the weight of the argument toward criticism of muralism. In other words, Paz transformed his inability to generate a new global artistic hegemony into a new model of national representation. We have, then, a case where a type of self‐censoring reframes an eccentric critical operation to re‐localize it. With the so‐called “triumph of American painting,” the circle of Tamayo and Paz once again became peripheral. Under the regime of modernism, the peripheral‐excluded were inevitably transformed into “national art.” I would even add “(cosmopolitan) national art.”
7.2 Mexican But Universal
Of Paz's 1950 campaign of cosmopolitan mythologization, there remains only a trace – the notion, incessantly repeated, that Tamayo is the incarnation of the “universal Mexican.” Paz's reasoning, in this regard, is a teleology of Mexican culture: “the Revolution is a return to origins as well as a search for a universal tradition.” In this argument, Tamayo appears as the resolution to a conflict – the absence of a truly universalist philosophy in the Mexican Revolution. Today we would say that Paz belonged to a state without a project of global power. Given this marginalization, what alternatives were open to an eminently centripetal culture?
This is where it is worth examining the oxymoron of the “universal‐Mexican,” because this formula admirably summarizes several of the paradoxes of the peripheral imaginary in modernity. To begin with, this categorization sees “universality” as a principal of exception; it identifies it as a rank that can be reached only by those artists who are saved from the sin of particularity. Becoming “internationalized” means being (or attempting to be) recognized in the metropolises as a participant in the history of art. This category is of course made for local consumption, because it is back in the homeland where (contradictorily) this internationalism becomes effective.
In any case, if this national/international artistic system differs in any way from our own emerging global system, it is in how it depicts itself as a progression of exclusions, where everything is “national,” “regional” or “municipal” until it is locally believed that such and such an artist takes part in the metropolitan game. This contrasts with the global circuit, where the center embraces the game of minorities and old colonies, in order to keep on appearing metropolitan.
The fact is that, despite all of these neocolonial features, the concept of the “national‐universal” continues fundamentally to drive the unconscious of Latin American criticism and cultural administration. And a mediator – “universal‐Mexican” (Tamayo, Paz) or “universal‐Argentinian” (Borges) – is always established to prevent the local from drowning in its provincial inertia. The concept encapsulates the failure of the peripheries to obtain an effective place in the symbolic distribution of high modernism. This is how criticism devolves into history: as an unpaid balance submerged in ideology.
Of course, this negotiation between the local and the universal is complicated. One of its paradoxes is that it attributes a supposed universality precisely to a local practice that embraces autochthonous features only when they are sublimated. As Olivier Debroise has demonstrated, elevating Tamayo to the rank of “universality” provoked instability in his racial identification, which shifted progressively from the myth of his Indian origin to his proclamation in a 1987 interview that “I am mestizo. I am Mexican, because the true Mexican is mestizo” (Debroise 2004, p. 130). Indeed, it was in 1948 that another poet, Xavier Villaurrutia, first called Tamayo “this universal Mexican painter” – one who knew how to take the tropics to painting “like an inner sun,” devoid of folkloric traces, as a “inalienable legacy of his ancestors both recent and remote” (1966, p. 1036–1040) There is, moreover, an extravagant and ominous line in this essay that describes better than any other the implicit meaning of this universalization: “Time,” wrote Villaurrutia, “has lightened the color of Rufino Tamayo's skin” (1966, p. 1034).
7.3 Duchamp and Analogy: The Criticism of Things
R.G.: Octavio Paz, one last question: What are your plans for the future?
O.P.: To abolish it (2003, p. 470).
As I have mentioned elsewhere, a dark view of the indio and the pre‐Columbian past defines an important part of the aesthetic attitudes (and writings) of the Mexican artists and intellectuals who reached modernism through surrealism (Medina 2003, p. 195‐213). Employing the concept of “Gothic Indo‐American,” I have argued that modernizing Mexican elites conceived their relationship with the Mexican Indian based on the metaphor of the living‐dead: the “survivals,” ghosts and “half‐buried structures” of a “murdered” indigenous world must be treasured and channeled, even as they must be attenuated to guarantee the whitening of modernization.6 We now see clearly how the claims of a modernity inhabited by aboriginal spectrality were implicated in Paz's interpretation of Tamayo. The “indigenous” was not only an administrative mechanism for cultural and ethnic difference, but also a surface on which to project the political terrors of the world. Just as Paz suggested years later, in another essay on Tamayo, “the twentieth century teaches us that our place in history is not far from the Assyrians of Sargon, the Mongols of Genghis Khan or the Aztecs of Itzcóatl” (1986, p. 369). By the late 1960s, this discourse, where ancient wisdom is imbricated in the crisis of modernity, had taken on new features. For example, in “La nueva analogía: poesía y tecnología,” (The new analogy: poetry and technology, 1967), it had become one of the elements of Paz's radical critique of modernity:
Believing that the world could end at any time and losing faith in the future are non‐modern features, and they negate the suppositions that founded the modern age in the eighteenth century. It is a negation that is also a rediscovery of the central wisdom of ancient civilizations. … Today it reveals to us the same question that it did for the Aztecs at the end of each cycle of fifty‐two years: will the New Sun rise once more, or will this night be the last? (1973a,