Notes on Enrique Chagoya’s “Misadventures of the Romantic Cannibals”

Travel writer, friend, blogger Snarky Tofu has alerted me to a Huffington Post piece about an Anglo woman taking a crowbar to one of a series of lithographs by Mexican-American artist and Stanford professor Enrique Chagoya.

The series is collectively entitled “The Misadventures of the Romantic Cannibals” and it depicts the sufferings and sexual proclivities of Christ in a crude, but graphic, way.

Here is an edited and expanded version of the comment which Snarky Tofu saw on Facebook and recommended I make at his site.

I’m of two minds about this work. I liked Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ” because it, to me, expressed the Aristotelean view of the transcendant as embodied and the Christian (and Dionysian) mystery of the suffering God. “He was despised, rejected of men”. “What if God is one of us, just a slob like one of us”. We’re all getting pissed on in trickle down economics.

Upon examining Chagoya’s work it seems to be in the popular Mexican iconographic tradition of Diego Rivera and the Dia de los Muertes which has always represented Christ as embodied all the way down, suffering torments. He really died, after all.

But: I have two issues about Chagoya and his work. The first is its style and the second is his position in society.

Without giving way to the usual conservative critique, I have to say that it means something when an artist, somewhat privileged in his youth by the class system in Mexico (Indian nurse, service work as opposed to being forced to work as a farm laborer, university education) uses a primitive or crude style.

This is because when a person who is now a Stanford professor dumbs down or crudifies his style, actual contemporary folk artists in Mexico, such as the artists who design tattoos of the suffering Christ or the Virgin of Guadalupe, are trying in many cases to make their work more polished every day as best they can. The guy who gets the tattoo wants it to look good in the popular way.

Thus Misadventures, in my opinion, rather mocks folk art made under genuine conditions of oppression in which the folk artist does the best he can using illustrations torn from magazines and rules of thumb.

There is certainly no indication that Diego Rivera tried to dumb down or crudify his style. Instead, he fused the techniques of European drawing and fresco, techniques that must be learned in the academy, with a very non-European vision of the Mexican body derived genuinely from pre-Columbian art.

What is also interesting is the apparent evolution of Chagoya’s style. “Against the Common Good” creatively pastiches Goya’s etchings of the Peninsular (guerrilla) war in Spain of the 1810s. But Chagoya’s recent stuff gets its force exclusively from an artistically dumbed down critique of politics entirely too reminiscent of Basquiat, a genuine original.

I also think the artist as a Stanford professor, in exhibiting Misadventures, was being a little bit insensitive culturally to the collision between NorteAmericano Protestantism (with its iconoclastic tradition, emphasis on the Word, and of course Puritanism) and the Mexican Catholic tradition, with its imagery, de-emphasis of the Bible, and celebration of the flesh.

He should have known that he would be perceived as one more member of the “elite” insensitive to whites. I frankly don’t think he thought about that. I think he was outraged by sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests in the permissible, for liberals, “moral panic” about the actions of the few, and the more serious inaction of the Church hierarchy.

And, of course, while many Hispanic Catholics are used to seeing icons of Christ’s torments, they would also be offended by this work.

I would have searched for something more universal in the specific culture. I got into a little bit of hot water as an artist when I exhibited nudes on Lamma Island at Cyan Gallery in 2007 and I don’t need the aggravation so now I factor in Chinese feelings about nudity and drape my figures.

Free speech? Perhaps. But there’s a difference between free and random speech. In a world where most people are voiceless simply by being dependent on wage labour, I’m not amused by recreational freedom of speech. The guy is just not as good as Diego Rivera or Mexican tattoo artists because as a uni professor he may be somewhat isolated from the real world.

The world needs a Beethoven, a free-thinking alcoholic who nonetheless could write a Missa Solemnis which speaks to non-Catholics about the reality of the holy and the need for peace on earth. What it gets are these tiresome tenured “bad boys” who take their cue from that thug, Bertolt Brecht.

The Huffington Post recently showed a photo of a Catholic ordination ceremony in which a postulant was kneeling before the bishop as if to give the bishop a blow job, if you have a dirty mind, and words to that effect.

So what are the rules? Who speaks? Who may be bullied by your art? Muslims? Catholics? Protestants? Women? Men? Priests? Nuns?

Even in the nudes I wanted to communicate the specific feeling form gives me when I create it to music, one of serenity. I wanted the viewer to realize the sacred vulnerability of the flesh.

Today I want to be able to show ALL my art to children because they are so damn honest about art; they don’t say the like it because they want to sleep with you, or think you can be bankable: they don’t say they hate it to wound you or bully you or promote their own crap. I took my kids to art museums post divorce as an alternative to blowing my brains out or taking them to some stupid Kiddie Fun place. Their childish insights were magical.

I don’t want them to have to deal with extensive blow jobbery. I can explain the hermaphrodite in the Louvre to them, and of course, the Venus de Milo’s robe has come down because she doesn’t have any arms. But blow jobs?

If Chagoya is indeed concerned about sexual abuse of children by priests, he should ponder that to have a child see Christ giving a blow job is, whatever the artist means, the sexual abuse of children who are brought to the art museum by parents who are, in some cases desperately, trying to compensate for the near-elimination of art creation or appreciation in schools, and looking for serenity with their kids.

A naked statue that celebrates the body’s vulnerable glory is one thing. Christ half naked on the Cross suffering torments is another. These are long sanctioned by tradition, and kids understand tradition. The (Brechtian) artist who, from a probably tenured perch earned by the brutal class system of Mexico in the 1950s, cocks a snook at the equally strong tradition of silence about Christ’s sexuality, hasn’t done the due diligence which real working commercial, and desperately struggling “fine” artists must do.

They must conform to exacting employer expectations in commercial art while being original and fresh. In fine art, they do indeed take the community’s mores into account and they do indeed take the tastes of potential buyers into account.

For example, most fine artists in Hong Kong’s galleries take pains to ensure that their work can be exhibited without frames, for in China, traditional art works were shown on unframed scrolls. The artists here therefore take pains, in nearly all cases I have seen, to continue the painting on the sides and in some cases even the rear, of paintings.

Real art is a free market. Real art in China is hyper-competitive: the Chinese kid who wants to Paint has to overcome enormous resistance, especially if his school art does not win first (and not second) prize.

American working class whites, and many working class Hispanics, have a perception that the elite laughs at their Protestant or Catholic religion. And deep art history reminds us that the art of historically powerful elites has often included a lot of sexual bullying and the imagery of physical bullying.

The Romans copied the Greeks, who celebrated the athlete rather than the ruler (albeit the athlete had to be of the gentry) but made the Emperor the only man other than the captive slave permitted to show his penis, and in the most famous “captive slave” sculpture, the Gaul is the equivalent of the Emperor only in that he is willing to die having lost.

Which is one reason why Christians put clothes on all but a naked Adam and Eve and a Christ with a loin-cloth.

If you look very closely at 17th century Baroque sculpture in the Louvre, as I have as a copyist, what do you see? You see slaves with Oriental or North American Indian characteristics, because under le roi soleil the function of art was to celebrate France’s glory including her domination of North America, one she lost in the 18th century. Poussin took one look at this and fled to Rome because Poussin wanted to celebrate the mysteries of the ancient world, not the French empire.

Women have since the 1970s identified an element of sexual bullying in the European female nude. In England before Parliament gave the vote to women, “suffragettes” attacked paintings of nudes in picture galleries for this reason.

They did so not because of the pure image. When Shakira shows her body this empowers her psychologically and financially, and Shakira has used this to help the poor of her native Columbia. Wonder Woman is skimpily dressed, not to show the lower orders that the upper classes have the time and leisure to have hot bods, but to fight the forces of evil.

A nude protestor making art to protest war or animal maltreatment is saying “this is my body, the beautiful, magnificent body, capable of such shattering pain” which for me is close to this (my own words):

This is my body this is my blood
Tomorrow you fellows I die on the rood

Whereas Bouguereau, we know, was in a culture in which women were sex objects: a witticism in a San Francisco production of The Merry Widow, inserted in excess of the libretto, was “in Paris of the 1880s, women were considered good for only two things, and one of them was discovering radium”. The feminists of Edwardian England attacked nude painting because of meaning.

If we take meaning into account, Chagoya needs to ponder whether he is telling Hispanic women with children, Hispanic schoolteachers on (rare) expeditions to the museum in Loveland with children that “I know about blow jobs and maybe Christ gave head”.

Chagoya is said to be protesting Catholic priestly abuse in “Misadventures”. I am reminded here of Adorno’s aphorism that “in sexual matters, the accuser is always wrong”, an echo of what Christ said when he came upon a woman bleeding in the dust: “let him who is without sin cast the first stone”.

The Huffington post also has published a jokey photograph of a Catholic ordination in which it appears the priest is fellating his bishop. Not once did The Huffington Post take into account the feelings of the clerics nor those of their relatives at the ordination. Both Chagoya and the Huffington Post seemed, to me, to have engaged in the cheap shot, as cheap in fact as drawing Muhammed throwing a bomb.

Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.

And what happens when someone says this? Here He is, and here is his Mom. No I’m not a Christian, no I’m not a commodity.