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s1gnal · 12 years ago

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Signal:02 Excerpt: The Art of Rebellion: Oaxacan Street Art in a Mexican Context

(Corrido de Stalingrad, by Leopold Mendez)

We were privileged to have an article in the new Signal about contemporary street and print culture in Oaxaca, Mexico. The piece draws connections between Mexico's incredibly rich history of collective political printmaking (especially with the Taller de Grafica Popular) and current political struggles.

It was written by Deborah Caplow, an art historian, who wrote the definitive english-language history of the famed Mexican printmaker Leopold Mendez. Excerpts below from the article in Signal are below:

(TGP wheatpasting in Mexico City, WWII)

"The remarkable phenomenon of street art in Oaxaca today readily calls to mind the socially concerned artists of an earlier era in Mexico. Starting in the 1920s and continuing into the 1960s, artists’ groups in Mexico came together to express their opposition to injustice and oppression. Initially they worked to support the goals of the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920); artists in the 1920s began to see themselves as dynamic participants in a new society, responsible for communicating revolutionary ideology to the Mexican people and for helping the oppressed masses achieve political and economic equality. Painters, printmakers, and sculptors participated in a Mexican artistic renaissance that constructed political and historical meanings through a rich vocabulary of images. In addition to mural paintings, Mexican artists began to use prints to convey clear political messages. In the 1920s muralists such as David Alfaro Siqueiros, José Clemente Orozco, Xavier Guererro, and Máximo Pacheco made woodcuts to illustrate El Machete, the periodical of the artist’s union, and from the 1920s to the 1960s numerous artists created prints as illustrations for other leftist publications."

"Although Leopold Méndez died in 1969, his images continue to exert a powerful influence in Mexico, and to this day leftist publications and posters frequently appropriate his work. In 1992, a group of activists in Mexico City recontextualized one of Méndez’s most engaging images, El serpiente cascabel (The Rattlesnake), from 1944. Méndez himself based the image of a serpent on a section of the Aztec Madrid Codex, and the 1992 poster also refers to the pre-Columbian past, in a text protesting the five- hundred-year anniversary of the Conquest. In 2001, a flyer announcing a meeting of campesinos in Oaxaca utilized Méndez’s La carreta, an indication of the strength of his images and a statement that the rural poor in Mexico still live in the same circumstances as they did in Méndez’s time. In Oaxaca in June 2008 one of Méndez’s most forceful political posters, originally created for a miners’ strike in 1950, was incorporated into an announcement of a political meeting. His prints are used freely by political organizations, without attribution, in a sense acting as a kind of image base for contemporary political publicity."

"Some of the young artists active in APPO formed the collective Asamblea de Artistas Revolucionarios de Oaxaca (Assembly of Revolutionary Artists of Oaxaca, ASARO), working collectively and anonymously. ASARO distributed their works in the streets and on the walls of the city, organizing events and applying their political messages in sophisticated and sometimes humorous images. (Smaller street art groups also formed in response to the political crisis in Oaxaca, among them, ArteJaguar, StencilZone, and MCO Stencil, and although ASARO was the largest and most visible of these, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish the works of these groups from ASARO’s). During the uprising in 2006, they launched into a vibrant phase of political art production, and became more united as the situation became more dire. On the first day of November 2006, surrounded by federal police, ASARO made a radicalized version of a traditional tapete, the sand paintings often created during the Days of the Dead, in the center of the city. According to Yeska, one of the artists of ASARO, “It was during the meetings and preparations for Day of the Dead that we started working together in a more united and organized way. . . . We shared the idea that assemblies are a good way to organize. The movement produced so many mixed feelings: tragedy with joy, laughter with tears, order with chaos. The capacity for creativity was enormous and the arts were flourishing. We thought about freedom. We broke away from traditional rules and impositions and we found out about the liberating power of art. We experimented with new materials and forms of art, creating images to raise consciousness. . . . That was when I began to understand what I now believe is truly the meaning of art: making people more sensitive, raising consciousness, and creating new spaces for artistic expression” ."

Also check out some newer images of Oaxacan printmaking on Printeresting here.

#tallerdegrafica #signal02

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