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CRITICAL COMMENTARY
Jennifer González "My America is a continent (not a country) which is not described by the outlines on any of the standard maps." —Gómez-Peña Standard maps, those which
position national identity, cultural allegiance and the laws of wealth and poverty,
are precisely what come under scrutiny in the CODEX
ESPANGLIENSIS, a collaborative book project of Guillermo Gómez-Peña,
Enrique Chagoya and Felicia Rice. Instead of fixed borders that appear in printed
ink, it is the thin, imaginary lines stretched taut against unequal relations
of power between North and South that chart the longitude and latitude of this
unique project. The CODEX ESPANGLIENSIS exists between—rather than within—traditional
domains of artistic practice; unraveling the formal outlines and delimiting
vocabularies that separate visual images from spoken-word performance, book
arts and typography. A rich unfolding of colonial conquest, cultural genocide
and linguistic admixtures that have formed the Americas "from Columbus
to the Border Patrol," the CODEX offers a critical analysis of a border
politics through a density of historical references, icons of popular culture
and masterful typographic compositions that orchestrate the many voices in the
text. Inspired by the pre-Hispanic
codices of Central America, the book is printed on thick, deeply embossed Amatl
paper and expands in accordion folds to thirty-one feet (following the form
of the original codices that sometimes exceeded this length), creating a monumental
textual space for the reader to inhabit. When the pages are fully extended the
work becomes sculptural, a multilateral mural within the frame of book ends.
The artists also choose to honor the tradition of the codices that read from
right to left by having the book open on the left-hand side, while at the same
time they subvert this traditional form, as each individual panel of the text
reads from left to right. Caught between two worlds, between familiar and unfamiliar
visual and corporeal modes, the viewer begins to experience the dissonance of
bi-cultural literacy as a concrete, material practice of reading in two paradigms.
Registered in this ghostly manner, the problem of textual legibility is more
than a question of words, it is a question of distinct systems of signs coming
into conflict, or merging in a conflation. This is the case regarding not only
the overall structure of the book, but also the relations of text to image that
fill its pages. Thus, for all of its reference
to a pre-Hispanic form, the CODEX ESPANGLIENSIS ought not to be thought of as
a facsimile. Instead it is a reinterpretation of this original form through
the contemporary concerns of Gómez-Peña, Chagoya and Rice who
have created a structured narrative and layered iconographic system in order
to examine in an imaginary and ideological cartography what the past has been
and what the present is becoming. Canonizing tales of colonial greed and power
with a visual and textual montage, the CODEX implicates such US popular culture
figures as Superman, Mickey Mouse and Wonder Woman in a visual history of political
oppression and exploitation. Action figures and cartoon icons stand in for the
cultural imperialism perpetuated in the commercial as well as the political
realms. A montage of contemporary text and pre-Hispanic drawings, European colonial
representations of indigenous populations and nineteenth-century political cartoons,
civil rights movements and high-tech science fiction machines serves to link
contemporary border politics and xenophobia with a much longer history of economic
inequalities. It is from such details that the multiple voices in the text emerge
as a chorus—someone has blood on his hands. Indeed the primary visual
trope that flows throughout the flawlessly printed text in black and scarlet
is that of blood, from the red fingerprints that mark the pages to the drips
and flows that stain the bodies of a slaughtered indigenous population, to the
hands, fists and footprints of the cartoon super heroes, to the body of Christ
(serving as an ambivalent, iconic trope of colonization and Catholic conversion
on the one hand, and as an image of suffering and martyrdom on the other). Blood
is even added to the pre-Hispanic images of indigenous populations in conflict,
exaggerating the European images of violence that continue to plague contemporary
interpretations of these early civilizations. Less concerned with historical
accuracy than with a poetics of the imaginary, Gómez-Peña and
Chagoya take an artist’s liberty with many sacred sign systems—even
those of the academy and of the history of art itself. Their goal, however,
is not iconoclasm in any traditional sense, nor is it a simplistic post-modern
gesture. Rather, the work can be understood as a kaleidoscopic vision of those
historical moments of violence that fall together into a repetitive and overlapping
pattern to structure contemporary human relations. As a work of contemporary art, the CODEX ESPANGLIENSIS is an unusual hybrid artifact. Rather than mimicking the latest 1990s technophilic, glossy, computer-generated, synthetic look, the CODEX reaches back into the past, to create historical effects within a surprisingly seamless montage of heterochronic signs. The artists have offered their audience a new visual discourse that reveals, through an iconography of the past, a revised topography of the present. Jennifer González |