Two recent exhibitions at the San Diego Museum of Art (SDMA) offer opportunities to contemplate the changing face of Mexican art in relation to issues of nationalism and identity. With curatorial assistance at SDMA from Amy Galpin and Julia Marciari-Alexander, Mexican Modern Painting from the Andrés Blaisten Collection presents eighty paintings from the first half of the twentieth century, complementing the San Diego Museum of Art’s permanent collection by including works by many of the same artists, such as Diego Rivera, Jean Charlot, Rufino Tamayo, and Alfredo Ramos Martínez. Although the exhibition loosely situates these works within the context of the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920) and debates surrounding the role of populism and popular culture in the visual arts, it mostly avoids discussions of muralism and politics. The goal of the exhibition (and of collector Andrés Blaisten) is to call attention to the many lesser-known Mexican artists who have never achieved the recognition of “Los Tres Grandes,” muralists Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and Davíd Alfaro Siqueiros, although their work is also included.

The result calls to mind the blockbuster exhibitions of the late 1980s and early 1990s, such as Mexico: Splendor of Thirty Centuries (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1991), that presented a “timeless” culture forever linked to its pre-Columbian past. The image of Latin America as colorful, exotic, and mysterious cultivated in these exhibitions, which also included Art of the Fantastic (Indianapolis Museum of Art, 1987) and Images of Mexico (Dallas Museum of Art, 1988), initiated a backlash that eventually resulted in the current interest in Latin American geometric abstraction and conceptual art, as manifested for instance in the exhibitions Inverted Utopias (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2004) and Geometry of Hope (Blanton Museum of Art, 2007). The Blaisten Collection exhibition presents a distinctly retrograde view of Mexican art, as if these developments in the history of Latin American art, and Mexican art in particular, had never occurred.

The first room of the exhibition is arguably the strongest, and includes Mayor of Almolonga (1919) by Guatemalan-born Carlos Mérida, which approaches geometric abstraction, finding parallels between the flattened, stylized shapes that comprise the mayor’s body and the design of the indigenous textiles he is wearing. In addition, there are several examples of early twentieth-century modernismo in the work of Saturnino Herrán and Julio Ruelas. The dandy sporting a ruffled lace collar and plumed hat in The Portrait of Rubén M. Campos (1900) by Ruelas hints ever so slightly at the bohemian decadence of the artist’s illustrations for the Revista Moderna (1898–1911), and his life in general. Herrán’s painting Our Ancient Gods (1916) is so strikingly beautiful in person that a fellow museum visitor loudly exclaimed “Wow!” when she saw it. Unlike Ruelas, who spent the bulk of his career in Europe, Herrán never left Mexico during his short life. In spite of this, his work references nineteenth-century European art in its celebrations of manual labor, and it makes use of fin-de-siècle symbolism in the sensuousness and eroticism of its treatment of the male figure. The fact that symbolism flourished in Mexico, even if only briefly, is an episode in the history of Mexican art that often remains untold, and in this regard the Blaisten Collection’s offerings are a step in the right direction.

The exhibition also features several works by Martínez and students of the Open-Air Painting School that he founded in 1913 and 1914. Originally inspired by the Barbizon School in Europe, it emphasized painting the landscape and people of Mexico, resulting in paintings such as the Impressionist Indian Women on Market Day (1922) by Francisco Díaz de León. After the Mexican Revolution, the Open-Air Painting School became much more populist, including the work of children and artists who had received little or no prior artistic training. The catalogue essay by art historian Karen Cordero Reiman provides much of this historical context, which the exhibition glosses over. However, her essay barely mentions the role of the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes, aka the Academy of San Carlos, which produced artists who painted historical scenes in a neoclassical style developed through years of in-studio training with instructors who were themselves often European. The preponderance of subject matter depicting the experience of everyday life among the Mexican peasantry, frequently painted in a deliberately naïve style, reacted against the grandiose historical narratives and positivist tendencies of the academy, which came to be associated with the dictatorship of Porfírio Díaz. Without this information, the presentation of image after image of women selling flowers and men taking siestas can come across as quaint and folkloric to the gaze of present-day viewers.

In 1938, André Breton famously proclaimed that “Mexico tends to be the Surrealist place par excellence. I find Mexico Surrealist in its flora, in the dynamism conferred on it by its mixing of races, as well as in its highest aspirations” (Breton, as quoted in Ilona Katzew, “Proselytizing Surrealism: André Breton in Mexico,” Review: Latin American Literature & Arts 51 [Fall 1995]: 21–33). As Katzew effectively argues, Breton’s “discovery” of Mexico was hardly natural, but rather had political origins, in Breton’s status as a French diplomat and in his personal desire to forge a connection with exile Leon Trotsky. The Blaisten Collection exhibition devotes an entire section to Surrealism, with multiple paintings that reference the work of either Pablo Picasso or Giorgio de Chirico, and do so in a way that is obvious and clichéd. At least three works include images of frightened horses taken straight from Guernica, causing one to ask: at what point does emulation of Picasso become excessive? Similarly, to what degree might the association with Surrealism have negatively influenced Mexican art?

Elsewhere in the exhibition Mexicans fall victim to typecasting, for while the portraits of bourgeois subjects and even artist self-portraits depict people with names and personalities, the images of working-class Mexicans present a series of undifferentiated types: dancers, bathers, workers, prostitutes. The indigenous person may function as a symbol of mexicanidad, or Mexican identity, but the image has become a symbol stripped of any reference to actual individuals. In the paintings by Alfonso Xavier Peña, for example, the masklike and anonymous faces of the people transform them into beautiful objects not all that different from the bundles of flowers they are carrying.

The exhibition also includes a room that contains some film footage, a timeline, and books that provide a sense of socio-political context. There one learns about the comic actor Cantínflas (Mario Alfonso Moreno Reyes), one of the most beloved figures of Mexican popular culture to this day, despite having died almost twenty years ago. His foray into American films, Around the World in Eighty Days (1956), plays on endless loop at one end of the room, while the most picturesque and least disturbing scenes of Eisenstein’s unfinished film ¡Qué viva México! (1932) are projected on the opposite wall. While easily overlooked, the inclusion of Cantínflas offers an antidote to the lack of agency of working-class Mexicans displayed elsewhere. In his Spanish-language films, he played the downtrodden man who still managed to survive by his wits and get the girl, with some highly humorous wordplay thrown in for good measure. If one really wants to have a discussion about Mexican identity, perhaps the acting career of Cantínflas would be a better place to start.

Immediately preceding the Blaisten Collection exhibition, the SDMA had a much smaller showing of the work of Rubén Ortiz-Torres, who came to Southern California from Mexico City in 1990 to attend the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) and has been a professor in the Visual Arts department of the University of California, San Diego, since 2001. Ortiz-Torres is a multitalented artist working in photography, painting, video, and multimedia, who has done some curating and art criticism as well. This exhibition, entitled Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, curated by Amy Galpin, focuses on works from his early career, before he left Mexico, the majority of which had never before been exhibited. One of the major themes that this exhibition explores is his involvement with punk, which flourished within Mexican and Chicano culture during the late 1970s and early 1980s. The Asco exhibition on display at the same time at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art presents another take on this phenomenon. Unfortunately, there is no exhibition catalogue for Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, but Ortiz-Torres’s essay, “Mexipunx,” in the anthology Punkademics: The Basement Show in the Ivory Tower (Zack Furness, ed., Brooklyn: Minor Compositions, 2012, 187–201) discusses Mexican punk and functions as a substitute.

Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man offers a series of black-and-white photographs of chilango youth sporting mohawks, Flock of Seagulls haircuts, and black “goth” clothing, all prints made in 2011 from negatives produced in the 1980s. The Mexico portrayed in these images is distinctly urban and international, quite the opposite of the paintings in the Blaisten Collection. This fascination with punk would come across as little more than a novelty were it not for Ortiz-Torres’s uncanny ability to reference the work of other Mexican photographers without it seeming obvious. For instance, the photograph Fumadores (Smokers, ca. 1984; reprinted 2011) shows an androgynous youth enjoying a cigarette while seated in front of an advertisement featuring an image of a turbaned man from India who is also smoking. This is just the sort of visual pun that photographer Manuel Alvarez Bravo frequently made in his own photographs of Mexico City street culture. An image of a nude woman surrounded by cacti (Flor del Desierto [Flower of the Desert], 1985; reprinted 2011), similarly references the Surrealist nudes in Mexican landscapes in Bravo’s work. The label text reveals that Ortiz-Torres had at one point studied with Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide, who has herself produced a series of images of female nudes in the landscape and had apprenticed with Bravo.

A number of paintings accompany the photographs, including portraits of the artist’s friends and also several self-portraits (hence the exhibition title). Daniela Rossell, herself quite well known for her Ricas y famosas (Rich and Famous) series of photographs of the Mexican elite, is the subject of two portraits. The text accompanying an image of Catherine Hardwicke, the person who persuaded Ortiz-Torres to attend CalArts explains: “This drawing . . . is representative of the way in which Ortiz-Torres’s inner circle of friends were both his muses and extraordinarily influential in the formation of his artistic career.” Whether the photos are of punks or friends and colleagues, the relationship between artist and subject is one aspect that saves them from the romanticizing tendencies of the Blaisten Collection images of mexicanidad. Ortiz-Torres has commented on his proximity to his subject matter, noting in regard to his punk photography that, “I realized that I wasn’t a good photojournalist, because I was involved with these guys and directing instead of just observing. I realized I wasn’t interested in documenting a culture or a subculture; I wanted to make it. So here, in a way, I was supposed to document this movement, but I wanted to help invent the thing” (Ortiz-Torres, as quoted in Kinsee Morlan, “Rubén Ortiz-Torres Captures Cultural Collisions,” SD City Beat, August 31, 2011).

Ortiz-Torres’s exploration of punk brings together the international crosscurrents of Mexico City popular culture and a subculture that originated in New York and London. In this regard, his work is typical of artists of his generation. In their essay for the catalogue accompanying the 2007 exhibition La era de la discrepancia. Arte y cultura visual en México 1968–1997 (The Age of Discrepancy: Art and Visual Culture in Mexico, 1968–1997) at the Museo Universitario de Ciencias y Arte of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in Mexico City, curators Olivier Debroise and Cuauhtémoc Medina argue that, starting in the 1990s, “the scene was no longer governed by an ideology that opposed ‘cosmopolitan’ to ‘national’ or that equated the ‘local’ with some kind of provincial heroics, but that now assumed that global interaction was necessary in these new circuits of exchange” (Debroise and Medina, “Genealogy of an Exhibition,” La era de la discrepancia/The Age of Discrepancy, Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2007, 25). They include Ortiz-Torres within a group of artists such as Gabriel Orozco who received recognition abroad before they received it in Mexico. They also refer to an “institutionalized amnesia” within state museums in Mexico that has favored the nationalist tendencies of Mexican modernism and ignored the more politically motivated and internationally influenced art of post-1968 Mexico. Thus it is possible to view Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man as forming part of a larger project of recuperating the art produced from 1968 to 1997 and resituating it within global artistic circuits.

It is worth considering the nexus between San Diego and Mexico City at play in these exhibitions. Institutions in San Diego have addressed the city’s proximity to the Mexican border in shows that date back at least as far as the late 1980s, reaching an apex with the InSite exhibitions of 1992 to 2005. Ortiz-Torres presented his Alien Toy UCO (Unidentified Cruising Object) at InSite 1997, which was organized by Installation, a San Diego nonprofit organization, and Mexico’s National Council for Culture and the Arts. In regard to the SDMA exhibition, he has commented that showing his early work in San Diego rather than Mexico City made it possible to appreciate the work itself, without focusing on the social status of the subjects, who in many cases are relatives of recognized artists and intellectuals (the daughter of Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes, the niece of Argentine artist Liliana Porter).

The emblematic image of Ortiz-Torres’s exhibition is Retrato de pasaporte (Passport Portrait, 1999), an oil and tempera self-portrait in the style of a passport photo. The artist’s face is divided in half, one side depicting himself, the other half divided into strips, each containing fragmented images of other men, of differing ages and ethnicities. This work expresses a more contemporary understanding of identity, not as fixed and coherent, but rather fluctuating and depending to a certain extent on the person with whom one is interacting (the other men are all people that the artist knows) and life circumstances. In a larger sense, it could also function as a metaphor for the changing nature of Mexican art, no longer fixed in an eternal and mysterious past, but rather very much in flux and part of the present.