Revolutionary relics
Art is influenced by ideology but also what the state lets us see. Visible Ruins, Mónica Salas Landa, by Gavin O'Toole
Visible Ruins: The Politics of Perception and the Legacies of Mexico’s Revolution, Mónica Salas Landa, 2024, University of Texas Press
“Seeing comes before words,” wrote the English Marxist art critic John Berger, “the child looks and recognises before it can speak.”
He added: “But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it.”
There is no better summary of the point of departure for the relationship between aesthetics and politics that goes beyond seeking to account for content or form, alluding instead to the way in which perception itself is intimately shaped by our social condition in a world fashioned by political change.
This is in essence the origin of Jacques Rancière’s philosophy of aesthetics, an important influence on the author of Visible Ruins who, in turn, summarises well what the French philosopher was arguing in one of his most well-known works, The Politics of Aesthetics.
Mónica Salas Landa has used a mural project of the American-born artist Pablo O’Higgins for Mexico’s most important oil-producing centre, Poza Rica in the state of Veracruz, as a means to explore the role of perception in governance in a state celebrated for its revolutionary art.
“Desde las primitivas labores agrícolas prehispánicas hasta el actual desarrollo industrial petrolero” (“From the Primitive Pre-Hispanic Agricultural Work to the Current Oil Development”), O’Higgins’ mural adorning Poza Rica’s Palacio Municipal, is a sweeping, epic vista of the oil city’s local landscape.
If sometimes overlooked in the nationalist pantheon because of its location, this work celebrates decades of state-led industrialisation and modernisation.
At one level then, in keeping with the mainstream nationalist interpretation of Mexican muralismo, it is an instrument of the state to diffuse the ideology of revolutionary nationalism to a public audience.
The mural’s position and narrative content combine to represent Mexico’s revolutionary regime not only as a patron of the visual arts but also as a source of social progress and industrial development—the guarantor of modernity.
This reflected O’Higgins’ commitment to the revolution. An active member of the Mexican Communist Party, he was a regular contributor of illustrations to the Daily Worker—the newspaper of the Communist Party of the USA—who later studied in Moscow on a Soviet scholarship in 1933.
But at another level, Salas Landa argues, the composition represents a contemporaneous record of how the exemplary policies that had granted the revolutionary regime legitimacy and a dominant position in national political life had visibly transformed the landscape.
The author writes: “O’Higgins’s mural, in other words, gives us an indication of how ‘the project of the Revolution’ reordered the social and material landscapes of the region and in doing so conditioned what was and is possible to see.”
This speaks to Rancière. Salas Landa writes: “If we account for O’Higgins’s perceptual choices and omissions, we can then see that ‘From the Primitive Pre- Hispanic Agricultural Work to the Current Oil Development’ lays bare something more than the ‘nationalist aesthetics’ or the ‘aesthetic statism’ of the postwar period (i.e., the normative ways in which government officials used mural art by midcentury to disseminate nationalist ideologies). It lays bare, too, the aesthetic dimension of governance.
“This ‘aesthetic’ dimension, following Jacques Rancière’s understanding of the term, refers neither to the state’s use of art nor to the state’s role in shaping art’s theories or principles. Rather, it refers to the state’s more encompassing authority to envision and then fabricate ‘a common world of perceiving’ through the creation of borders between the visible and the invisible.”
Like other French thinkers, Rancière has been criticised for obscurantist theoretical self-indulgence, yet the point is sound—the state’s ability to shape perception by the very fact of its control over what we see and do not in the first place, what Salas Landa describes as “micropolitical strategies” that divide what is visible from what is not—a visual order.
Through a careful reading of the impact of revolutionary changes and political processes on the lowlands of northern Veracruz in areas such as agriculture, the author examines the aesthetic dimension of postrevolutionary state-making.
She seeks to show how the parameters of the visible are intrinsically political and can persist—in this case as a form of “ruins” long after Mexico’s institutionalised revolution had come to an end and the revolutionary party, the PRI, had lost power.
Salas Landa writes: “Despite its downfall and collapse, the workings of the dominant (even if contested) visual order that ‘the project of the Revolution’ established would continue to affect those living among the many ruins it left behind.”
If you seek to explore those ruins, you would do well to start with the celebrated mural of O’Higgins—a brilliant artist whose profile has arguably been less prominent than many peers, despite his profound influence on Mexican art.
He was, for example, co-founder of the Taller de Gráfica Popular workshop that inspired many leftwing artists and in 1940 was the only non-native Mexican artist included in the “Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art” exhibition organised by New York’s MoMA.
O’Higgins’s role in the revolutionary story and his personal engagement with Mexico in an era of great hope for its people provide, on their own account, another great reason for delving into this fascinating book.