| Miguel
Angel Rios
by Cuauhtemoc Medina
ETNO GROOVY
In resorting to Peyote I didn’t want
to enter a new world, but to leave a false world.
Antonin Artaud 1947
Last year, Miguel Angel Rios built a
soundproof room where the audience could listen to the digital recording of a trip he
experienced with a "chamana" from the mythic town of Huautla, in southern
Mexico. Prayers and songs translate the experience of the initiated, and the babbling
points to the ecstasy of the newcomer. This was not just another case of chemical tourism,
but a trip – illusory and confusing, moving and unavoidable – through the
convoluted territories of post-colonial psyche.
The series Toloache: territories of the
mind rescues the battered tensions between Mestizo and Indian culture, melting with its
opacity the contemporary spectator’s prejudices on aging Latin American iconography.
Rios chooses to walk away from the tradition of indigenous and Latin American
representation, getting rid of his own iconographic identity. Instead of insisting on the
fiction of using art as a way of reaching some form of authenticity, he presents a
meditation about inter-ethnic relationships in the continent and their symbolic
overcharge. This is not a "mythification" of the melancholic image of the Indian
people or a desire to learn the lessons of their craft. Instead, it is a confrontation
with the misunderstanding between the Indian world and its white or mulatto consumer, in
which actual transcultural exchange takes place.
The artist’s inner trip becomes a
metaphor for Latin America’s psychodrama: a derive in which Indians, whites, Mestizo and blacks are
together in the same hallucinatory enthusiasm, believing to be a part of the same trance,
but probably immersed in their own unspeakable visions. At a time when both tobacco and
coca, the American stimulants par excellance, have been demonized, Miguel
Rios’ flower-power lightness suggests the chemical experience’s importance in
the molding of a regional culture.
The choice of the town of Huautla is not
random. It was there that in the summer of 1955, the legendary "chamana" Maria
Sabina introduced Gordon R. Wasson to hallucinogenic mushrooms, initiating postwar
culture’s ethnographic search of artificial paradises. Rios’ work invokes the
history of the psychedelic passions that the Indian world generated through the twentieth
century: Antonin Artaud’s metaphysical anguish when sharing peyote with the
Tarahumaras in 1936, the scientific and recreational enthusiasm of the expeditions of
Gordon Wasson and Carlos Castaneda; and of course the new cult to Xochipilli that grows in
"new age" stores selling smart drugs in the Netherlands.
In that sense, Toloache: territories of
the mind can also be understood as a critique of visuality in its colonial
connotations. Sound becomes prominent in this and other works because of the possibility
of questioning the centrality of vision as the instrument of platonic and Judeo-Christian
Western truth. What is audible, instead of music, suggests an aesthetic of distraction
more interested in an unconscious invasion than in the construction of new styles. If the
homogeneity of the Western subject is confirmed by the unity of the image, the dispersion
of post modern narratives and the elasticity of contemporary notions of identity have to
establish a relationship with the "secondary" senses.
Cuauhtemoc Medina is an art critic, curator and historian,
a researcher at the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas at the National University of
Mexico, and former Contemporary Art Curator at the Carrillo Gil Museum of INBA (Mexico
city 1989 – 1992). He was also member of the staff of Curare. Critical Space
for the Arts (1992-1998) an independent critics and curators group. More recently, he
was Adjunct Curator of the team lead by Ivo Mezquita that tried unsuccesfully to curate
the XXV Sao Paulo for 2001. He has written in many exhibition catalogues, magazines
and newspapers such as Curare, Poliester, Lápiz, Reforma, Flash Art, Untitled, Trans>
and Third Text. His article "Recent Political Forms: Radical Pursuits in
Mexico" was just been published by TRANS>arts.cultures.media #8. |
