The Marvellous Real: Art from Mexico, 1926 -2011. Museum Of Anthropology at UBC, The Audain Gallery, until March 30. Curator Nicola Levell will tell the story of the creation of the exhibition on Tuesday, Feb. 18 at 7 p.m. at MOA. Free with Museum admission.
Frida Kahlo's art work was like "a ribbon wrapped around a bomb," according to the surrealist poet André Breton, when it was first displayed in Europe in March 1938 at the Pierre Colle Gallery in Paris as part of the Mexique show.
Two years later when the fourth International Surrealism Exhibition opened at the Galeria de Arte Mexicano in Mexico City, Breton included two large-form paintings by Kahlo in what was otherwise a mainly European collection.
Despite this tacit approval of her work Kahlo never felt like she was one of them. "People thought I was a Surrealist. That's not right," her biographer Hayden Herrera quotes her as saying in Frida Kahlo: A Life of Passion. "I have never painted dreams. What I represented was my own reality."
Kahlo's painting "My Dress is Hanging There or New York, 1933" is part of a new exhibition at UBC's Museum of Anthropology which explores what writer Alejo Carpentier called the Marvellous Real. Department of Anthropology assistant professor Nicola Levell, curator of the exhibition, talked to the North Shore News about the new show and how it was put together.
North Shore News: How did the Marvellous Real come about?
Nicola Levell: It really started as an idea six or seven years ago to put together an exhibition that was going to focus on surrealism in Mexico from about the 1920s to the 1950s and then it really lay dormant and was never taken any further until I came across the work of Alejo Carpentier, the Cuban novelist, who coined the term "Marvellous Real."
I was completely captivated by his writing and what he was saying about the Marvellous Real. It was a way of breaking out of the restraints of surrealism and away from this idea that art can be captured and positioned within a historical time frame. It re-ignited an idea of looking at Latin American art in particular that eventually returned as the exhibition progressed to focusing on Mexico through the Marvellous Real. It morphed into something else with different ideas coming into play along the way.
North Shore News: Carpentier's Marvellous Real seems to be a response to and rejection of the European framework of surrealism.
Nicola Levell: Absolutely. He introduced his idea of the Marvellous Real in 1949 initially in one of his novels as sort of an introduction or a preface and then he refined the idea and gave a number of papers. In 1975 he wrote this manifesto, or second manifesto actually, on the Marvellous Real called The Baroque and the Marvellous Real. I think it's important to mention that as the exhibition itself is not only focusing on the Marvellous Real but also on the relationship between the Marvellous Real and what Carpentier called the Baroque Spirit. We have addressed that in terms of the design and the drama as you enter the gallery and the way it's been reconfigured.
To get back to your question, as he was writing, it really was in part a rejection and critique of surrealism, but not just surrealism. At that time across Latin America there was still this embrace by the elites of European culture and it was the beginning of a post-colonial critique with Carpentier saying, "surrealism is a Western construct and this is not true when we actually look at the richness of our culture and our heritage - the idea of the surreal or the Marvellous Real has been with us from time immemorial. It's just part of the way we are, it's part of our reality." In rejecting surrealism he also argued that the Marvellous Real is something that is suffused through everyday life. It's not restricted to the arts and this is why it is not the equivalent of magical realism because it is not restricted to literature but rather it's an aspect, a dimension of the everyday - as an individual person you exist within this marvellous reality.
North Shore News: What was Carpentier's role in the history of Mexican art? Nicola Levell: Mexico was really formative according to Carpentier in his rethinking of Latin American cultures and histories. When he was 21 years old he went to Mexico and he's written this had a great influence on his thinking. He stayed with Diego Rivera and he enountered not only artists but intellectuals who exposed him to their post-revolutionary thinking about what is the strength of Mexican culture. At that time he was really impressed by Rivera's murals and the way they incorporated myths and histories. They covered this broad, broad history and interwoven into that was the politics of the present with mythological figures from the past as well as everyday people. He was really captivated by this idea. He felt that they spoke so much more to what was happening in Latin America than more abstract forms.
Carpentier came to Mexico for the first time in 1926 and our exhibition takes that as a point of departure to look at the Marvellous Real. The first art work dates from 1926 and then we've brought it up to the present. Mexico, he said, was the beginning of his intellectual engagement of rethinking Latin American culture in general.
North Shore News: For a lot of people Rivera and Kahlo represent Mexican contemporary art but the exhibit introduces to a wide range of artistic practice in Mexico over the past eight decades.
Nicola Levell: There are 55 art works in total that were created over this 85-year period by artists living in Mexico - not necessarily Mexican artists but artists living in Mexico and they come from an incredibly broad range of media - not only paintings and photography but prints and film, there are installations with objet trouvé, bronze casting, sculpture and folk art as well. Incorporating folk art from the museum's collection again with the idea of breaking down these artificial barriers that we tend to impose on cultural expression. And also contemporary music. There is a wonderful piece that will hopefully lure you into the gallery by the contemporary Mexican composer Federico Alvarez del Toro. As I mentioned earlier they are all enveloped in this incredibly baroque exhibition setting which includes black fabric walls and wonderful architectural mouldings.
I should mention also it's a bilingual exhibition so we have the text in Spanish and English. Most of the work is drawn from the Femsa Collection and this is the first time that any substantial portion of the collection has ever been seen in Canada. It's a wonderful opportunity to see the creative energies that are at work in Mexico both past and present.
North Shore News: What was involved in researching the exhibit?
Nicola Levell: Often we think of exhibits from a museological perspective being either object or concept-driven - you either start with the objects or you start from the concepts and actually exhibitions are usually a complicated mixture of both of those strains, which is very true in this case, but it was really the idea that sort of sparked everything.
I was so inspired by this way of thinking with his notion of the Marvellous Real and really intrigued by how it intersected with the baroque.
One of the things that Carpentier really forced home was wherever you find the Marvellous Real it is always accompanied by the baroque. And the baroque isn't what most of us understand as the baroque which is sort of a 17th, 18th century European style which usually involves excessive convolutions and scrolls and it's usually quite ostentatious. He said the baroque is a spirit and it cuts across the ages, you can see it at any time, at any moment and so this was also very central to his thinking. I was really interested in this relationship between the two and how the baroque canon is expressed through the Marvellous Real. He used many examples: music, architecture, art, right across everyday life. The Marvellous Real also incorporates the ugly, the beastly, the deformed so you know it has this ability to encompass everything. I had to narrow that down and my thinking was what if you take this idea and reapply it to the arts of Mexico. What does the Marvellous Real look like? It was really an exploration of how the Marvellous Real would find expression and be articulated through art. Art being such a fundamental aspect of human expression that is not purely about the subjective but it also indexes this external reality. It's part of a much broader way of thinking about human nature which is why you would see this kind of exhibition in an anthropology museum. It's a much broader exploration of being human and being in the world.
