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Starting at Home
John Haberin New York City
Amalia Mesa-Bains and Domesticanx
Can a Chicana's thoughts on domesticity spark a revolution? Amalia Mesa-Bains and "Domesticanx" demand change starting at home.
Mesa-Bains does not need to be at home to remember. Her family is from Mexico, and she has been collecting fragments of a life for decades now. The lives in her art go back deeper still. "Archaeology of Memory" is at once a retrospective, a family history, and a great tradition. A year earlier, "Domesticanx" saw what traditionalists might call a woman's world as a collective effort. Her solo show, too, holds both personal and collective memories, and at age eighty she is still digging. 
Her concluding work at El Museo del Barrio is no more than a circle of chairs, laden with shiny fragments. It is her Circle of Ancestors, but she leaves it to you to imagine them as people. The tchotchkes would make for uncomfortable seating for anyone. The circle facing inward, toward candles on the floor, could assert her place or exclude her—just as, she implies, the art scene and the United States have turned their backs on Mexican American women like her. She claims the memories as hers all the same. For so obsessive a collector, the claim will always be a work in progress.
Digging up the past
Amalia Mesa-Bains lived and worked through the heyday of the "Pictures generation" and critical theory, and her show's title plays on The Archaeology of Knowledge, by Michel Foucault. He sees knowledge itself as a means of dominance, but does she? Well, yes and no. El Museo del Barrio sticks to work from the last thirty years, much of it from the 1990s, including the four "chapters" of Venus Envy brought at last together. It is by no means satisfied with penis envy, but by no means triumphant. This is the territory of Queen of the Waters, Mother of the Land of the Dead.
The chapters start with First Holy Communion, Moments Before the End, and surely, some might say, the Catholic church is as repressive an institution as any. A life-size doll lies beneath its blanket as if dead. Maybe so, but display cases contain flower petals, family snapshots, lace dresses, and white curtains along with saints. The installation also has a dressing-room table, for more of a girl's or a woman's world. Later a "great green monster," the proverbial earth mother reduced to wallowing in earth, has a hand-held mirror, too. For Mesa-Bains, as for Renée Stout and Myrlande Constant in Haiti, parodies and protests are never easy to distinguish from models and memories.
The next chapter comes to a proper library, a fine-wood table laden with the Bible, a skull, a compass, and a globe. It belongs to Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, a seventeenth-century scholar, proto-feminist, and nun. It is just one of the chapter's "enclosures," including a harem along with A Virgin's Garden, adapted from illuminated manuscripts. Apparently the artist can claim the Enlightenment and the Renaissance as her own, too. The final chapter, The Road to Paris and Its Aftermath, has a large photo of the Arc de Triomphe draped in electric colors. Mesa-Bains can claim the city of the Mona Lisa, Gertrude Stein, and Modernism as well.
Just a year ago at the museum, her sphere seemed more modest. She was at the center of "Domesticanx" and domesticity, including younger artists. Even now, she conceives of her installations as altares, or home altars, and ofrendas, or domestic offerings to the dead. Yet her claims here cover a lot of ground, and so do her memories. The solo exhibition could serve as a model for other museums, returning to one show to add context and depth. It need not leave the past behind.
Mesa-Bains still treats personal and collective memories as one thing. As a guard said when I asked where to begin, anywhere, because it is all "a thing," and he was right. The remaining chapter centers on codices, or ancient manuscripts, and botanical texts from the past, both overlaid with snapshots and paints. It does so, she says, because she loves them, but they have a personal meaning as well. She worked on them while recovering from a near-fatal accident. Her faith in herbal healing is sentimental as can be, like so much of her art, but the pipettes and vials are evocative all the same.
As another title has it, these are Private Landscapes and Public Territories. One last work could never be hers along. It turns to the border with Mexico for What the River Gave Me. Growing up in California as the child of illegal immigrants, she could not have known it as an obstacle or seen it shine, but no matter. The water becomes half globes of blown glass, set on a bed of shattered glass between banks of vaguely humanoid brown earth. Let it shine.
Domesticity with an X
There is a word for what Joel Gaitan has made—from a time, place, and culture that he could never have known. They are "face jugs," like those of the Stone Bluff Manufactory in South Carolina, in and around the American Civil War. Set out on a crowded shelf, like the stoneware at the Met, they are every bit as comic, frightening, and schematic, and alive. For an oppressed people, like the black artists and laborers of Stone Bluff, they are also "us." Only Gaitan's honor his Nicaraguan heritage, his claims as a native-born American, and Mesoamerican art. They are also women, like Amalia Mesa-Bains and the rest of "Domesticanx"—or, not in the show, Natalie Ball.
Gaitan enhances his ceramics with gold highlights, as a woman's jewels or presence. You may not be sure how to take them, but then everything for Mesa-Bains is contested ground, much like Gaitan's immigrant community in Miami. She sees her own art as an expression of Latinx intersectionality, and she could hardly mind if the majority of Latin Americans do not care much for either term. She shares their concerns all the same, and her domesticity is only a step away from the traditionalism of others as well. It just happens to be a giant step, in the direction of Chicana and feminist theory, and she coined it in the 1990s in direct response to a male Chicano writer's notion of "rasquachismo"—a blend of machismo and rasquache, or ragtag. It appears in the show's title in full caps, as veritable shouting.
Like domesticity itself, it is a modest ideal all the same. Her photocollage pairs Eve, the requisite leaves covering her private parts, beside a sleeping nun. Yet neither will save herself or the other, and the grainy photos challenge their place in Western religion and religious art. It is not so far from a family photograph on a nightstand in someone's home. Sure enough, the rest of show boils down to domestic settings, with photos like that very much in evidence. Gaitan himself displays one, looking every bit out of the past, and so does a show of all but familiar household interiors, in paintings and assemblage.
The curator, Susanna V. Temkin, sticks to just six artists in addition to Mesa-Bains (who also appeared at MoMA PS1 in "NeoHooDoo"), half of them emerging. They seem more modest and intimate still in that all seven have much the same subject and motifs. One might never know which is from Mexico, Cuba, Puerto Rico, or Queens. Misla, single named, sets the tone with the largest and least cluttered paintings. She might be poring through memories of childhood and home, down to the neatly made bed, the knickknacks on an ornate chest of drawers, and the photograph on a wall. Maybe you can bring memories of your own.
People themselves rarely appear, apart from the photos and Gaitan's face jugs. Maybe it takes a man, the sole male artist, to make a big thing out of women. Portraits by Cielo Félix-Hernández do depict women at more than half length, with colors out of Paul Gauguin. Still, they belong to their setting, in a house and garden. Satin fringes enhance the domesticity, as do paper fringes for Nitza Tufiño (who appeared before at El Museo del Barrio as part of Taller Boricua, the Puerto Rican workshop). She mounts her photos on paper hung like clothing, on hangers or out to dry.
Modest or not (all the more so compared to Elso's talk of God), they are also altars to the downtrodden and the everyday. Gaitan constructs an altar for his family photograph, while Amarise Carrerasaltar assembles others for her color photos, including blood red and everything under the sun. Maria Brito constructs an entire house, with an absurdly tall crib, lips in wood on a black cabinet, hands on the side, and white ladders ascending from one to another. It would have room for Tufiño's painted coffee cans. Mesa-Bains has her cabinet, too, alongside video mounted in the stomach of animals. Conflict may consume Latin American women and human lives, but they are not just shouting.
Amalia Mesa-Bains ran at El Museo del Barrio through August 11, 2024, "Domesticanx" through March 26, 2023.