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Native to What?
John Haberin New York City
Pacha, Llaqta, Wasichay: Indigenous Space and New Art
Manuel Mendive and Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa
Can a dead civilization live on in contemporary art? That goes without saying, but it can also survive in a continuous chain of the living.
The artists in "Pacha, Llaqta, Wasichay" at the Whitney do not need to appropriate a distant past or a distant culture. They can call it their own and live it every day. Yet they have to grapple with just how little or much they can. They have to grapple as well with how much they can rely on a majority culture and its institutions. Manuel Mendive at the Bronx Museum seeks a Cuba behind the masks, while Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa at the New Museum recalls some of the same peoples and a lost homeland. He does best, though, when he confronts history and the viewer on-screen and alone. 
Building a home
The Whitney's formidable title, in Quechua, signals a concern for indigenous peoples from its language alone, but then things get complicated. It means first and foremost a universal, in space, time, and the world. Then come nation or community, followed by the still greater specifics of building a home. Art often places a single act in a wider and wider context, like a photo by William Eggleston of a hand in an airplane with a drink and a view of the sky. Here, though, it dares anyone to claim a universal or a home. A subtitle identifies them with "Indigenous Space, Modern Architecture, New Art," without an and or or—leaving open whether it demands acceptance or a choice.
The artists themselves are between cultures, like Tarsila do Amaral before them, as the "primitivism" of early modern art could only hope to understand. All seven were born in the Americas and live in the United States. Jorge González still lives in San Juan, where he can be an American citizen without the right to vote. He creates a lived environment from marsh plants and scaffolding, but its walls have come apart—and then he populates it with found ceramics and the work of an anthropologist. Others take the refugee crisis and racism personally. Guadalupe Maravilla maps his movements from El Salvador in wall drawings and inkjet prints, but with the assistance of undocumented immigrants and books dating to the Spanish conquests. Ronny Quevedo tracks migration, too, his own and that of others from Ecuador, but as marks on a gym floor or playing field, like strategies for the game.
Clarissa Tossin, from Brazil, enters a disassembled space, too, of faux terra cotta and broken wood frames—with a long serpent's skin culminating in feathers as if lurking in the garden. And then she enters a real space on video, a Mayan revival Frank Lloyd Wright home in LA. She finds it apt that the region has a large Mayan population today. Mayans, really? Their pre-Columbian grandeur is long gone, but the term, to my surprise, still names a people with a living language. Tossin's dancers, in leopard skin and a shimmering dress, could be celebrating or mocking it and Wright alike.
Livia Corona Benjamín finds ancient forms in conical grain silos, part of a government program to encourage Mexican agriculture in the 1960s. She may also worry that the program, like the ancients, has passed away. If anything, she articulates its passage in photograms, pixilated photographs, and floor plans in white on gray. Claudia Peña Salinas clings more fervently to the past, in photographs of a stone monument to an Aztec deity that conservators have moved to a museum in Mexico City. She is not happy. William Cordova is content with his own Sacred Geometries—a blond wood lattice meant to recall a temple from the Ichma people, makeshift shelters in Peru, and (dare I say it) Minimalism.
The exhibition exudes political correctness. The curators, Marcela Guerrero with Alana Hernande, call the artists Latinx rather than Latino or Latina—although gender does not seem terribly at issue or in doubt. They have, though, truly corrected the record. They point to cultures many centuries before Modernism and persisting after it. Where the same space last hosted Jimmie Durham, whom the Cherokee refuse to recognize as Native American, these artists, mostly around forty, like Alan Michelson (or Jaune Quick-to-See Smith in her eighties) are the real thing.
Or are they? For all the show's optimism, they gain by at once tracing and questioning their identity, much like Carolina Caycedo and David de Rozas in looking to the land. Where Durham makes art about himself and his short attention span, they also make art on a large scale with a striking focus. Most pair images and signs, seeing past the obvious to present-day structures and older hieroglyphics. They run to similar parchment shades as well, although Quevedo's playgrounds come most alive in color and at night. In their built environments, they might even share a universal or a home.
Cuba behind the masks
Manuel Mendive finds magic in the rituals of his native Cuba, but I cannot swear that he ever experienced them at first hand. That could be why they seem at once so mournful and so playful. In photographs at the Bronx Museum in collaboration with John Rowe, base-chested actors comport with masks in the uncertain space of nature. The disguise may be as simple as paper, obscuring faces without suggesting that they are anything but ordinary behind the mask. They may be face paint directly on the skin, in a fluorescent blue or green that really does approach magic. Like the cast's movements, they can look savage, decorative, clumsy, or just a put-on.
The masks continue past the lobby and into paintings, where they take over more completely from the faces. There Mendive's figures, at full length, look right out of Mr. Potato Head, but without bright red noses. Sharing an often crowded scene, they look half-ashamed of themselves and each other. The landscapes are idyllic all the same, even without the lushness of a color photograph, but all the more awkward for that. A figure reaching for a tree might be Eve in a lost Eden—all the more pointed by appearing male. Another has three legs and animal feet, like a poor excuse for the devil.
A mask can also serve for protection, and so can the black arts of photography and painting. While I cannot quite assign a name to the irregular shaped canvas, it may come closest to shields, as for Mark Grotjahn in abstraction. Freestanding sculpture could serve as protection, too, from prying eyes or the elements. Pillars, painted inside and out with much the same tropical scenery, leave part of one side open. A Cuban artist may well have needed shelter to pursue an interest in ritual or religion. Just do not expect to enter or to touch.
Where another Cuban, Belkis Ayón, found her self-image in Christianity, Raphael Montañez Ortiz his in the Taino, and Juan Francisco Elso his in a Cuban martyr and the face of God, Mendive bases his on the Yuroba religion of western Africa. Like other Caribbean artists, he is interested in a transcontinental diaspora of people and culture. Eclecticism wins out over absorption or salvation, much as in his diversity of media. The museum calls its small retrospective "Nature, Spirit, and Body," which sounds ever so profound, but he puts in question whether spirit will ever win out over nature or the body. Besides, he has lived and worked not in paradise or the jungle, but in Havana. The photographs are staged, and the paintings and sculptures are works of the imagination.
Born 1944, Mendive could still pass as an emerging artist—and not just because he is all but new to New York. The show might seem to belong to a much younger artist or, given its mix of media, three or four of them at that. And the museum often makes up for its own low profile by displaying older artists that it sees as close to the streets, like Martin Wong after his death. Here it picks up the hot themes of Latin American art, culture and wisdom, gender, and people of color. One might have seen masks only recently in photos from Gauri Gill at MoMA PS1. If one expects an essential Afro-Cuban identity from either artist, Gill reports instead on India.
The show has a slippery physical boundary as well. A sign pointing to the south gallery takes one to painting and sculpture by Diana Al-Hadid, but by way of a spacious passage with a wide-screen video. There Mendive's performers immerse themselves in a larger, more inviting, and more impenetrable landscape, with close-ups of insects and the sounds of birds. Successively male and female, they slink around like Clarissa Tossin's dancer in "Pacha, Llaqta, Wasichay," a show of indigenous American art and culture at the Whitney. Mendive's familiarity despite himself can have the drawback of his seeming stale even before his opening. His references may be at best elusive. He is, though, old enough to intend the slipperiness, the magic, and comedy.
Preserved in green
Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa has in mind a back story. One can tell from the moment one enters the New Museum, though one can hardly say what it is. The lobby gallery at back has become a space apart, as if in memory, from the café just outside its glass front. It is preserved not in amber, but rather in a uniform green light. One can look out, but only barely in. And the installation, The House at Kawinal, can look back, but only barely ahead.
Inside, the light seems far less hazy. It does not offer a space for contemplation, like site-specific work from James Turrell, Doug Wheeler, and the California Light and Space movement. It functions less as element, like light fixtures for Dan Flavin, François Morellet, or Jan Tichy, than as a tool for scrutiny. It illuminates a ragtag assortment of objects, few able to get much off the floor. They include a stepladder, a boom box, and a table with a coffeepot. They might be lying around much as in the artist's studio—or left over from his nation's history.
For all I know, a boom box is still current there, in Guatemala. No matter, for Ramírez-Figueroa is looking back. He has become fascinated by the Chixoy hydroelectric dam, completed in 1983, which submerged the late Mayan city of the show's title. The military killed thousands of native people in the process, and construction displaced much of the rest. The remaining sculpture may represent them, if not directly. Female nudes have the smooth curves and uniform surfaces of department-store mannequins, but with poses somewhere between rest and torment.
The loose clutter of an installation has become trite, and the story never quite takes hold. It feels like an afterthought, when one wants to see in Latin American art a more recent refugee crisis, a deeper history, or greater particulars. The green itself might evoke nearby rainforests, but I doubt it. Then, too, the sculpture might fade into irrelevancy under more scathing museum light. Still, its personal memories grew on me on a second visit. I began to feel at home in the enclosure of art and light.
A payoff comes on video. Life in His Mouth, Death Cradles Her Arm on the far wall evokes village poverty and what was lost. Ramírez-Figueroa stands at the center of the projection, unmoving, as day descends into night. He also stands just feet from the picture plane, on stone tiles degraded by wear and overrun by weeds. Walls to either side carry the eye into depth, as if tunneling through a lost community and into infinity. Closely confining, they drive home his immobility.
They also bear memorials to the dead. They may look like the passageway through a shantytown, but they serve as just two immense headstones, constructed from countless others. And the man bears something as well. Is that a live infant cradled in his arms, another mannequin, or death? This once, he withholds a back story, and he is the better for it. The nine-minute descent into night is always followed by day.
"Pacha, Llaqta, Wasichay" ran at The Whitney Museum of American Art through September 30, 2018, Manuel Mendive at the Bronx Museum through through November 4, and Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa at the New Museum through September 9. The review of Mendive also appeared online in ArteFuse.