Heritage Of Rich Imagery

By ROBERT HUGHES

Mainstream American museums have only just begun to accept that in contemporary American culture, there are many houses. Even today this recognition is not shared by everyone. But the situation has certainly improved since 1969, when New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art mounted its hideously condescending exhibition "Harlem on My Mind." Back then the Met confidently declared that spending $5,544,000 on Velazquez's portrait of Juan de Pareja, his dark-skinned assistant of presumed Moorish ancestry, would improve the self-esteem of the museum's black and Hispanic public.

$ Institutions such as the long-established Museo del Barrio and the newer Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Art in New York City have worked hard (heroically, even, considering the difficulty of funding) to set the work of Hispanic-American artists before the public. And yet there is still a gap, caused by a pervasive institutional nervousness about how to deal with minority culture while maintaining the ideal of purely aesthetic standards. For ethnic art repeats the problems posed for museums by women's art: it is prone to easy stereotyping.

When most non-Spanish speaking Americans hear the words Hispanic art, they think of the Chicano murals in Los Angeles in the '70s and early '80s, noble if garish campesinos brandishing their fists from the concrete walls of storm drains. In fact, some remarkably interesting artists were involved with the Chicano-mural movement. Among them were "Los Four" in Los Angeles: Carlos Almaraz, Gilbert Lujan, Frank Romero and Beto de la Rocha. But to suppose that this was the main form of Hispanic expression is rather like imagining that Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party is the chief work of art produced by an American woman.

America has no shortage of first-rate Hispanic artists who work out of deep convictions about, and connections to, their Latin heritage -- artistic, religious and ideological. There are also mediocre ones who use their ethnicity as a lever to induce guilt in curators, if not dealers (who by now are guiltproof). But quite a few excellent painters and sculptors who happen to be Hispanic or black regard "minority" shows as a form of ghettoization. And some of the best, such as the sculptors Robert Graham and Manuel Neri, are virtually invisible -- or are not widely thought of as Hispanic at all.

The path of the curator who would mount a serious survey of current Hispanic art is therefore rocky, steep and strewn with thorns. And yet it is unthinkable that serious attempts should not be made. Hence the interest of "Hispanic Art in the United States: Thirty Contemporary Painters and Sculptors," a show of some 180 works that has been on view jointly at the University of Miami's Lowe Art Museum and the Metropolitan Museum and Art Center in Coral Gables, Fla. Curated by Jane Livingston and John Beardsley, the exhibit has already been seen in Houston and Washington; after Miami, through September 1989, it will travel to Santa Fe, Los Angeles and New York City. It is by far the most detailed and serious effort ever made to survey the current painting and sculpture of Hispanic Americans.

To their credit, Livingston and Beardsley have stuck to their guns and striven to choose the art on artistic, not sociological, grounds. One may gripe about the presence or absence of this or that name. (Why, for example, was someone as distinguished and inventive as Puerto Rico's Rafael Ferrer left out?) But, in the main, the show is a real revelation.

Is there such a thing as Hispanic art in America? No, if what you expect is some kind of identifiable, shared Hispanic style; to go prospecting for that between Albuquerque and Miami is like looking for a homogeneous Wasp or Jewish style. But the answer is yes if you grant that the cultural and social experience of Hispanic Americans, their history, memories, imagery and lifeways, are different from those of other Americans. Hispanic-American art not only exists, but also provides a powerful means for both the artists and their public to grasp the meanings of their own ethnicity.

As Beardsley points out in the catalog, the search for an identifiable American style was one of the great cultural fantasies of the 1950s and '60s. Once found, it was assumed, such a consensus would enable Americans to pit their art with confidence against the School of Paris. And it was found in abstract expressionism and then in color-field painting -- both high styles and, in theory at least, sociologically neutral. Thus, writes Curator Beardsley, there appeared an "unwritten presumption that the nearer an artist aspires to the level of high art, the more leached out will become the ethnic content of the work." Hence the peculiarly airless and circular way in which New York City defined itself from about 1965 on as the cultural caput mundi, pulling all talent into its gravitational field of orthodoxy, refusing to accord "seriousness" to provincials and barbarians.

This formalist geography lesson could not last, of course. In the '80s it came apart like wet Kleenex. America has no single culture, but cultures. And so it should, since diversity is better than monotony. In any case, many ethnic Americans are still exiles within the dominant, white matrix. One painter in this show, Martin Ramirez (1885-1960), epitomized the extreme fate of the Hispanic as outsider. A migrant railroad worker from Mexico, Ramirez lost his powers of speech and became a catatonic schizophrenic in Los Angeles in 1915, was committed in 1930 and spent the last three decades of his life in a California madhouse. There, he drew all the time. One could hardly imagine a more marginal existence, yet Ramirez's drawings are of phantasmal and sometimes ravishing beauty. One in this show, the tall Untitled (Tunnels and Trains) from the 1950s, is so grand in its architecture of repeated curves that it deserves a place in any anthology of American drawing.

A sense of ethnicity confirms belonging; it may not reduce the pain of otherness, but it helps one face it. This show is an exaltation, not just a symptom, of diversity. And of course the diversity is internal as well: the artists themselves are a broadly diverse lot.

Reflected in the images of art, this produces a wide spectrum. Some Hispanic artists are, without doubt, socially declamatory: Luis Jiminez's figures of Latino cowboys and migrant workers and their women in the Southwest are imbued with a raucous vitality -- Rubenesque honky-tonk. There is what the catalog calls the "obsessive urbanism" of Los Angeles Barrio Painter Frank Romero, for whom the recurrent image of the car, that chariot of the ego, turns up even in toy form in a passionately brushed still life. But then there is internalization too, as in the triptych of self-portraits by the Puerto Rican artist Arnaldo Roche. In Roche's The Spirit of the Flesh, Carving the Spirit of the Flesh and Burning the Spirit of the Flesh, one seems to witness the progressive disintegration and peeling away of the self under the pressure of some psychic force.

There is much reflection on history, but in very different ways. Felix A. Lopez's powerful religious sculptures, like San Ysidro, 1986, are based on the tradition of devotional polychrome bultos that has lasted some three centuries in his native New Mexico. These stiff hieratic forms are carved from cottonwood and then painted with pigments decocted from soot, blood, flowers and ocherous clays he gathers himself. They are rooted in Hispanic folk culture and draw much of their effect from the directness with which they say so.

At the other extreme, the work of Ismael Frigerio, 33, who was born and raised in Chile but now lives in New York City, is haunted by the Spanish conquest of South America in the 16th and 17th centuries, a primal wound that is referred to obliquely but often. Frigerio has not digested all the neoexpressionist devices he uses best, as in The Lust of Conquest, 1985-86, but he is an artist of real promise and talent. He gives this reflection of the terrors of the conquista a sepulchral dignity: the invaders' dark caravel moored by the bare virgin shore, the snake that stares unblinkingly at the bound and martyred bodies of Indians on their pyre. The latter image is quoted from the work of the late 16th century German engraver Theodorus de Bry, who got his bulky, mannerist bodies from Michelangelo.

To the last man and woman, the participants in this show appear possessed by a need for explicit imagery and a belief in the powers of the icon: no deconstructors or ironists here. The presence of nature is, as one might expect, robust and sometimes very funny, as in the animal carvings of Felipe Archuleta, 78, of Santa Cruz N. Mex., in which the beastly character of each figure (and not some cute anthropomorphic substitute for it) is vividly preserved. The Hispanic artists deal with the human figure, as Octavio Paz writes in his catalog introduction, to "exalt it or mutilate it -- in either case, transfiguring it."

The result can be overload, paint's equivalent to the excess tropisms in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's prose. There are not just intermittent flashes but veritable gorgings on what surrealism used to call le merveilleux, like the gleaming bodies of hammerhead sharks and roosterfish that float, as in a dream, out of the water toward a kitsch tapestry of a Caribbean island in the center panel of John Valadez's big pastel triptych, Beto's Vacation. What seems abstract never is. Carlos Alfonzo, 38, a Marielito exile from Havana who now lives in Miami and is perhaps the most gifted young artist in the show, paints somewhat under the influence of Wilfredo Lam. His images seem abstract until one sees how they pullulate with emblems of Afro-Cuban religion, amulets against the evil eye and the enemy's tongue, suns, hands, knives, genitals.

"Seek those images that constitute the Wild," wrote William Blake. That is what this show does. Some of it is incoherent, hasty, top-heavy with indulgent fantasy and excess paint. No matter. You still cannot get the good work out of your mind.