Enrique Chagoya

Homage to Orozco #2, 2010
Sumi ink on paper and wall
Wall drawings executed by Enrique Chagoya in collaboration with Duncan Tonatiuh (Parsons, BFA 2008) and Tatiana Istominà (Parsons, MFA, 2011)

Like Orozco, Chagoya is a great caricaturist. And like Orozco, Chagoya was inspired by the works of Mexican master printmaker and political satirist, José Guadalupe Posada (1852-1913) as well as the political works of the Spanish master, Francisco de Goya y Lucientes (1746-1828). Add comic strips, Aztec iconography, art historical and pop culture references to the mix, stir it with irreverence, humor and biting sociopolitical satire, and you will begin to get a sense of Enrique Chagoya’s unique take on history or what has been referred to as his “reverse anthropologies”.

When asked to participate in a re-imagining of the Orozco New School frescoes, Chagoya wrote: I didn’t want to make a black and white version of Orozco’s murals. Orozco himself was critical of “lefty” artists and activists. In his paintings and cartoons, he even poked fun at Zapata, the revolutionary, as well as pre-Columbian looking indigenous characters. He was neither aligned to the Communist party nor, unlike Rivera and Siquieros, to any political directives. Orozco was a realist and the most anti-dogmatic artist that I know among the political artists of his time. That makes him my favorite muralist and role model. Rivera once said that Orozco was not a muralist but a cartoonist. This infuriated Orozco. I would have taken it as a compliment.

In this large-scale drawing, Chagoya appropriates the imagery from Orozco’s well-known lithograph The Masses, 1935, in the depiction of the sea of huddled legs, mouths and flags. In the central figure of a writhing, snake-headed, part-human monster stepping in as a symbol of hyper-capitalism, he riffs on Orozco’s El Diablo drawing from the 1945 La Verdad series and virtually “pumps” the creature up—El Diablo on steroids.

Among the masses, Chagoya includes the figures of Lenin and Gandhi from Orozco’s Struggle in the Occident and Struggle in the Orient and comments:

Lenin and Gandhi are two of my heroes (in spite of everything that went wrong in the former Soviet Union and India). I feel that their ideas were betrayed, often by institutionalized revolutions, turning their science of change into ideologies for maintaining power. Their eyes recall a Disney cartoon, but that is how I feel they were distorted. Here they are with the masses, confronting the bloodiest, greediest, and most irrational elements of capitalism. I wanted to destroy the cult of personality and ideology. For me, change will come out of necessity, not out of ideology…or else we collapse into an end of our own making.

Centered on the south wall of the original mural cycle, Table of Universal Brotherhood comments on the utopian ideals of the League of Nations that was established after World War I and was a precursor to the United Nations. It also invokes the Delphic Circle, a New York based literary salon from the 1930’s that championed utopian visions of peace and universal brotherhood through the marriage of Eastern and Western (particularly Greek) philosophies.

Introduced to the Circle by Alma Reed, his New York art dealer, Orozco became a frequent visitor to the salon during his New York years. Some of the figures whom Orozco seated at the table were also members of the Circle: Lloyd Goodrich, a Whitney curator and art historian, Leonard von Noppen, a Dutch poet, Reuven Rubin, a Jewish artist from Palestine, and Paul Richard, a French philosopher. (Sarojini Naidu, not seated at the table, but one of the few women depicted in the mural cycle prominently situated next to Gandhi, was also a member of the salon. A celebrated poet and freedom fighter, Naidu accompanied Gandhi in his famous Salt March and was the first woman to become the President of the Indian National Congress in 1925.) Orozco also chose to depict anonymous figures representing various races: two Asians, a Sikh, a Tartar, a Mexican-Indian and an African-American. In his autobiography, Orozco writes:

The Negro presiding and the portrait of Lenin were the occasion for the New School’s losing a number of its richest patrons, a serious loss to an institution dependent upon gifts. To make up for this, on the other hand, it gained the support of numerous other patrons. I had been give absolute freedom in my work: it was a school for investigation, not for submission.¹

¹ Orozco, José Clemente, 1962, An Autobiography, trans. R. C. Stephenson, p. 144. New York: Dover Publications.

Re-Imagining Orozco: Table of Universal Brotherhood 2010

Motion Graphics and Animation

Collaborators:

Original music composed and performed by David Lopato, Faculty, The New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music.

An “Orozco Animation Seminar” was created by Anezka Sebek to explore Orozco’s Table of Universal Brotherhood from a contemporary perspective. Students were asked to imagine who might be seated at the table today, or if such a table was relevant in the twenty-first century. The result of their intensive collaboration is the animated short, Re-Imagining Orozco: Table of Universal Brotherhood 2010. While the design process for the overall piece was a collaborative effort, each scene reflects the distinctive voice of the individual animation artist. A narrative of the film follows, as described by the collaborators:

This animation is an endless cycle that begins and ends with Orozco’s original version of The Table of Universal Brotherhood. To us, Orozco’s figures seemed not to be communicating with each other. We decided that nothing has really changed in the twenty-first century. There are only new versions of war, suffering, religious strife, and lack of clear communication.

We begin with the tearing apart of Orozco’s theatrical set. It is turned upside down as the original figures fall out of their seats. The book on the table flies toward us revealing the scenes of a moving table where a series of prominent artists of the world are seated, replaced by a group of celebrities. We then sink into a hot, hellish landscape where there is pain, violence, war, suffering, religious persecution and, finally, a nuclear bomb. The flames are doused with a gentle rain that falls from an “Orozco sky”. A table of powerful authors and other world leaders flips like a Transformer toy; the tabletop replicating itself and revealing new configurations of well-known figures, from prominent women to peacemakers, until all the tabletops explode into millions of tables connected through an electronic grid.

In the final segment, we focus in and find modern world leaders caught in a re-enactment of Aesop’s Fables, our tribute to Orozco's love of myth. Satirizing a political world run amok, we witness Obama struggling as Sisyphus, Alan Greenspan and Ahmadinejad re-enacting the Fable of the Sour Grapes. The last scene of an endless oil spill blurs into the blank pages of the original book and finds us back where we began, at Orozco’s Table of Universal Brotherhood.

Re-Imagining Orozco Panel Discussion, 2010

Audio Recording 

On April 2, 2010, seated in the Orozco Room, Jeffrey Goldfarb, the Michael E. Gellert Professor of Sociology at The New School for Social Research, moderated a two-hour discussion focused on the meaning of Orozco’s Table of Universal Brotherhood in the twenty-first century. The event brought together panelists, listed below, from The New School for Social Research (NSSR), Eugene Lang College, Parsons Art, Media and Technology (AMT) Department, as well as the University Autónoma de Barcelona in Spain.

The lively discussion addressed three main topics related to the mural cycle: Since Orozco’s time, how have the issues concerning identity and power changed, and how would this affect who sits at the table? What are the pressing differences and conflicts that need to be negotiated today, and ultimately how does a reimagined table address these new conflicts? In an increasing fragmented and polarized culture, has the idea of a salon, such as the Delphic Circle, where conflicting philosophies can be fervently discussed, become obsolete?

Panelists

Banu Bargu, Assistant Professor, Political Science, NSSR
Helena Maria Chmielewska-Szlajfer, PhD student, Sociology, NSSR
Stefania de Kennessey, Chair, The Arts, Associate Professor of Music, Eugene Lang College
Oz Frankel, Assistant Professor, Historical Studies, NSSR
Rezvaneh Ganji, PhD student, Sociology, NSSR
Victoria Hattam, Associate Professor, Political Science, NSSR
Maria Pia Lara, Visiting Professor, Philosophy, University Autónoma de Barcelona, Spain
Lenore Malen, Artist and writer, Associate Professor, Fine Arts, AMT
James Miller, Professor, Psychology, NSSR

Questions posed to the panelists:

1. Identity and Power?
Orozco’s depiction of the Table of Universal Brotherhood, which he notes in a later correspondence as being “presided over by a Negro president,” is as much a reflection of America’s current demographics as it was of global geographic divisions in 1931. Orozco does not openly acknowledge in this mural that what divides us, perhaps more than race, is gender, religion, economics, disability and class. In re-imagining the Table of Universal Brotherhood, what populations would be represented today? Are their needs mutually exclusive? Would all participants be equal in stature? (Orozco clearly envisioned a hierarchy by recognizing a president). Would some populations be advocated for rather than represented? Can heterogeneous populations be bound by their differences rather than their similarities?

2. Diagnosis of the times: then and now?
Alma Reed, Orozco’s art dealer, in an archived letter to a New School administrator, explains Orozco’s “own insistence at the time to interpret history in his own fashion”, “Orozco claimed the right to set down on the four walls of the New School dining room, the factors, elements, and personalities that, in his opinion, were shaping the years ahead. These various elements,” she continues, “are given an impartial, objective presentation on the two side walls, “The Struggle in the East”, and “The Struggle in the West”. He reserved the end walls for his long-range hopes for the outcome of the struggle. This hope is stated on the North end wall as the Brotherhood of Man – men of all races, creeds, and cultures, depicted sitting around the table of Universality in perfect equality—men ready to negotiate possible difference and eliminate conflicts. Orozco’s personal hope for humanity is particularized on the South end wall. There, he depicts the family of the happy worker in an environment of comfort and abundance.” What do you think of Orozco’s interpretation (according to Reed)? In your opinion, what factors, elements and personalities shape the years ahead in the 21st century? What are the pressing differences and conflicts that need to be negotiated at the table today?

3. The future of imagination?
Orozco's Table of Universal Brotherhood was influenced by his membership in the Delphic Circle, which was, in part, a utopian artist's salon espousing pacifist doctrines from Eastern and Western philosophies. In an increasingly fragmented and polarized culture in which people are communicating less and less with their ideological and/or sociopolitical opposites, in a world where there is fascination with memory and skepticism about utopia, imagination and progress, has the idea of a table of universal brotherhood become obsolete?

Orozco bore witness to the Mexican Revolution and chose, in the New School murals, to depict “revolutions revolving around the periphery of the European center”. Which revolutions would you choose to depict on these walls today?

Etchings by students in Bill Phipps’ illustrative print section, Parsons Introductory Printmaking Course, Spring 2010

Left to right: Iain Burke, So Yoon Kim, Jenna Palazzo, Ninia Cayaban, Noemi Biel, Austin Guerra, Qian Wang, Lyejm A. Kallas-Lewis, Unknown, Katie Dunham, Monica Ramos, Mollie Komins, Nadilyn Beato, Dylan Maywood, Megan Yiu, Hannah Lee, Mary Cumming
Grace Moon, Evan Goodman

On the walls, sumi ink drawings are borrowed from Orozco’s prolific output of sketches and cartoons, which lampooned everyone from politicians to prostitutes. Here, Chagoya and his two collaborators “tweak” the images and add their own dose of humor.

Scattered among the wall drawings are etchings that Chagoya selected from a group of prints produced by students in a Parsons sophomore printmaking course. The course, conducted this past spring, focused exclusively on an exploration of The New School Orozco murals.

CODICES

Curated by Enrique Chagoya

Codex created from a selection of lithographs produced by students in Martin Mazorra’s lithography section, Parsons Introductory Printmaking Course, Spring 2010.

Left to right: Mary Cumming, Domingo Sepulveda, Calli O’Connor, Julee Yoo, Crystal Bruno, So Yoon Kim, Nazli Deniz Ayas, Ciara Gay, Dylan Magwood

These digitally assembled codices were chosen from works produced in Shana Agid’s printmaking section, Parsons Introductory Printmaking Course, Spring 2010.

Left codex: Georgia Frank, Many Cumming, Steph Ziemann, Mollie Komins, Annie Sieg, Qian Wang, Kelsie Spann, Jenny Kim

Right codex: Rachel Tonthat, Masuko Jo, Monica Ramos, Saki Hashimoto, Crystal Bruno, Chelsey Pettyjohn, Delaney Gibbons, Jin Ha Lim, Iain Burke

Hand-made books selected from works produced in Parsons Introductory Printmaking Course, Spring 2010.

Left to right: Nina Cabayan, Plant a Tree, Rachel Levit Ruiz, The Educated Gringo, Domingo Sepulveda, Untitled (Seagull)

TOTEM

Curated by Enrique Chagoya
Silkscreen on cotton tote bags

Chosen from a group of works produced in Marie Dormuth’s silkscreening section, Parsons Introductory Printmaking Course, Spring 2010.

From top: Monica Ramos, Domingo Sepulveda, Yasmin Liang, N. Derya Sensoy

Enrique Chagoya

Homage to Orozco, #3, 2010
Sumi ink on paper

In this drawing, I added the “smart dolls” of the Dalai Lama and Karl Marx and placed them in the hands of future generations of the poor. The dolls are perhaps symbols of critical thinking that may be taboo in some mainstream institutions, or they could be interpreted as a mild threat to the ruling elite.

I also left room for other interpretations. The dolls could be seen as a call to revisit the idea of change from two very different schools of thought – the spiritual philosophy of the Dalai Lama and the material philosophy of Karl Marx.

I hope the drawing also reflects the huge distance between classes in today’s world, and poses more questions rather than answers. The “Dawn” soap bottle on the upper left corner is placed as a reminder of the way people were cleaning wild animals in the Gulf of Mexico during the current oil leak, but it can be interpreted as a metaphor for whitewashing class differences.

I am also raising a question here for which I don’t have an answer, and may require collective thinking: What is the alternative? What can we do to effect change without falling into horrible bureaucracies or idealistic, unworkable utopias? Perhaps we will find the answer in the necessity to survive, rather than in the false comfort of ideologies.

—E. Chagoya

Timelines

Lang Public Art Squad, Utopian Timeline, 2010
Inkjet print

Instructor: Conor McGrady
Students: Suzanne Akceylan, Jocelyn Degroot-Lutzner, Ana Gogsadze, Maya Herland-Scott, Amaya Keller, Eliza Lamb, Carolanne Marcantonio, Grace Milligan, Larkin Mohn, Patrick Nicholas, Sorcha Richardson, Alexa Riggs, Herschel Rose, Felicia Urso, Jordan Wolff

These timelines were the product of a seminar taught by Conor Mc Grady at Eugene Lang College in the spring of 2010. They present two subjective sociopolitical chronologies, which begin with 1931, the year Orozco’s New School murals were completed. The first timeline is based on factual events while the second is a hopeful and imaginative invention - a utopian rewrite of history by the Lang students.

Re-Imagining Orozco/SHOP

Have museum exhibitions become merchandizing tools for a consumer driven culture?

What if the museum store was not a purveyor of merchandise but a generator of ideas?

We invited students to challenge the role of the museum store, making it an originator rather than a beneficiary of ideas.

The prototypes were produced by students in Parsons’ Product Design program as their final project in Christian Swafford’s and Kevin Jean’s sophomore Introduction to CAD class, Spring 2010.