Crossing Borders: the Installation Art of Lourdes Cué

First of all, in the interest of full disclosure I must say that not only have I been the occasional asistonto of Lourdes Cué for almost twenty years, but her husband for most of that time as well, so I make no pretence about being objective or dispassionate in what I have to say about her work.

Cué has recently finished a large installation,"Endangered Species," in Rice Recreation Center on the east side of St. Paul, Minnesota, under the aegis of Public Art St. Paul and the St. Paul Parks Department. The piece consists of three large earthworks respectively of a polar bear, a loggerhead tortoise, and bactrian (two-humped) camel, with details made of granite and gneiss. Each beast measures about 8 m. long by 3 m. wide by 2 m. high: huge fauna from the far corners of the world that rise out of the park grounds in this working class neighborhood. One of the things that has always amazed me about Lourdes is the time and patience required to finish her work: in an era of instant imagery where everyone with a cell phone or a digital camera can be a producer or a creator, taking literally dozens or hundreds (or thousands)of images in a matter of moments (it's no coincidence that "art" and "artificial" and "artifice" are all related terms),Cué utilized some 6 months (2 in the design phase, which included workshops with area youth, and 4 in construction) to execute this one sole installation, working 8-10 hours a day 5 or 6 days a week. And in the media of the visual arts I don't know what rivals carving stone in terms of pure physical labor. The downside of the computer-driven society (well, one of the MANY downsides), whose primary driving force is speed,is that instant gratification has become such a possibility. I wonder how many artists (let's put filmmakers aside) in their twenties or thirties would work half a year to make one work of art. As Jim Morrison said a while back, more than ever the mantra of today, "We want the world and we want it now." That includes the way art is produced. To create a work that develops over a long period of time, relatively, is a whole other realm of existential, aesthetic experience. Despite working with huge grinders and sanders and hammer drills and chisels, this sculptor's work is very meditative, quiet, introspective. I think it was Sartre who said existence preceeds essence, and that is manifest in the very process of installation art. "Endangered Species" shows this clearly, and I think of other work of hers such as "Windows on the Sea," on the Scottish coast facing the North Sea, or "Water Islands" that sits on the banks of the St. Lawrence River in Montreal: mammoth stone and water works that bare the traces and scars of their creation yet settle with a kind of quietness into the landscape: modern steles and monoliths that show us the memory of the landscape.

Two of the principle visual metaphors Cué has utilized over her career are water and the boat, that great vehicle of movement and transportation/transformation. As Michel Foucault wrote in his essay "Of Other Spaces," the boat is "a floating piece of space, a place without a place that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea...In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up..." For this Mexican artist, boats bring together a variety of themes: crosssing borders, migration, globalism, the commodification and reification of human beings. The boat motif has in recent years--such as work like "Dias liquidos" ["Liquid Days"]in which a huge paper boat made of hundreds of pages of books by Latin American writers rests upon a wave of sand that takes us back to the ocean waters and that first via rupta of the foot upon the land, the sculptural object set before a screen that shows a video of the Mississippi River flowing, accompanied by sounds of the Pacific Ocean the artist recorded on a trip along the coast of the Mexican state of Oaxaca, and "Mar de historias/Historias del mar" ["Sea of Stories/Stories of the Sea"],a tryptich of nets that hang from the ceiling and walls, holding bottles filled with paper boats--this concrete symbol of movement has been readily apparent. In "Water of Stone," a tryptich of full-scale granite canoes (located in Franconia Sculpture Park, just north of the Twin Cities), the improbable contrast between material and represented object reveals the difficulty of the journey, whether real or metaphysical. Tracing her family back to Cuba and the Canary Islands and Spain, and her own life forward to the United States and back to Mexico, the boat is emblematic of her status as a migrant who continually travels between two worlds.

Up here in the mountains at Casa Tobala, Cué continues a long project, another tryptich, of three large-scale container ships entitled "La Nina, la Pinta, y la Santa Maria," each made from hundreds of cans and other metal containers that have been printed on, the elaborate lines and patterns dissolving into Coke cans or bottle caps or old olive oil containers upon closer look. Another piece she contemplates in drawings and models involves hauling wood and carrizo, a heavy cane used for building fences, into the mountains near here and building a ship that would be set in a dry river bed at the edge of what in the rainy season is a roaring cascade we gaze at across the valley. An ephemeral work: destined to be washed away during the first big rains. I'm not sure whether she wants the metaphor to be transcended or destroyed.

To see the installations and sculptors of this artist, go to www.lourdescue.com.

American Gothic: Cormac McCarthy

My first experience with Cormac McCarthy was All the Pretty Horses, a novel I imagine was the introduction to his work for many readers, a nice romantic story of young cowboys riding the open ranges and meeting swarthy young women south of the border. Part of his "Western Trilogy" that includes the lesser novels The Crossing and Cities of the Plain, All the Pretty Horses utilizes a sparse diction and economy of language perfectly suited to the taciturn young hero. It got made into a mediocre movie directed by Billy Bob Thornton, and even the casting of my heart throb Penelope Cruz didn't raise the work much in my estimation. No Country for Old Men takes place in the US/Mexico border region, with a good old boy sheriff hunting down a Eastern European hitman, who is searching for some poor dope who stumbled upon the aftermath of a shootout between drug dealers and wanders away with a suitcase full of money. The Coen brothers (a shoutout to my paisanos from the Twin Cities) turned it into a film good enough to win the Oscar for Best Picture. Fargo set in the deserts of the Southwest instead of the icy frozen north of Minnesota.

I think you need to read McCarthy's last work, The Road, and a couple of his earlier novels to comprehend the importance of this writer (objectively recognizable: McCarthy has won among other awards a Pulitzer Prize, a fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Guggenheim and MacArthur grants, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award, so I guess he has that going for him).

Blood Meridian (1984) and Suttree (1979), both written before the Western trilogy, manifest a kind of American Gothic that comes directly out of William Faulkner (much as does, say, Toni Morrison's Beloved) or even Mark Twain (in whose work, among the most important literature our country has produced, not far below the ironic humor lurks a brutal world view). I read Blood Meridian last summer, a truly harrowing work about a heart of darkness, or many hearts of darkness, in the scorching sun of the Mexican desert where bounty hunters maraud like a plague of the Apocalypse. McCarthy has said he likes precise declarative sentences and it is the minute, detailed descriptions that render this book so powerful. The cold lens through which we see the violence puts everything into the sharpest focus (Roberto Bolaño uses this stylistic device so successfully in a similar way in 2666). To leave the emotion, the decrying, the breast-pounding, the judgment out of the narrative makes the reader confront precisely reality (whether fictional or not). Joseph Conrad said fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing.

Suttree, a novel some twenty years in the writing, takes the author back to the city where he grew up, Knoxville, Tennessee, and the Tennessee River. The protagonist is a fisherman who lives in a wretched shantyboat and wanders among the dregs of society (like that fisher of men, Christ): the homeless, conmen, drifters and grifters, whores and thieves, alcoholics and drug addicts and vagabonds of all kinds, preachers and perverts. He inhabits a narrative world not far from Huck Finn's and his observations of the comedie humaine are not so far different. The flotsam of the river reflects the people he encounters, filthy refuse, stinking and rotting, what Twain would have called the damned human race. But McCarthy, like Twain, always leaves open the possibility of discovering in the end man's humanity to man.

Recommended activity: Today, this lucky Friday the 13th, starts the 29th Feria Internacional del Libro (International Book Fair) of Oaxaca, downtown on the Alameda near the Cathedral, running through November 30. There will be tables with books for sale as well as a wide-ringing calendar of events and discussions. For more information go to http://www.vivelalectura.com.mx/.

Recommended reading: Papeles inesperados, by Julio Cortázar. Hetereoglossia, anyone? A compilation of little known stories, articles, deleted chapters, interviews, letters, and...by one of the masters of modern Latin American literature. A lot of the texts hit and miss, but some true gems ("Manuscrito hallado junto a una mano," "La fe en el Tercer Mundo," "Acerca de Rayuela," "Entrevista ante un espejo"). I'm working on a review of it for the book review Rain Taxi that should be done in the next couple weeks.

a few shots of culture

Café Tacuba's "Unplugged" playing on this warm Oaxaca morning in the Sierra Juárez. Mexico has a tremendous cultural heritage, music and performance and literature and painting all parts of people's everyday lives. One of the jewels of the nation is the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de México (UNAM), located in Mexico City (in fact it is its own "ciudad universitaria"). An ongoing project UNAM is developing is Descarga Cultura (http://www.descargacultura.unam.mx/), a website that offers access to lectures, conferences, music, theater performances, etc., from classic to contemporary works. Especially interesting are authors reading from their own works, like Elena Poniatowska, Monica Lavin, Eduardo Lago, among many others. The site has links to radio stations and programs, the arts and culture magazine Revista de la Universidad de Mexico, as well as a variety of physical and social sciences pages. Check out Descarga Cultura and you'll understand how UNAM was awarded this year the prestigious Prince of Asturias Prize in Communications and Humanities.

Book lovers in Oaxaca, please visit Amate Books, a wonderful independent bookstore downtown on Alcalá. It has a great selection of Latin American literature in English, lots of books on regional and national art, architecture, and cuisine, and many unique titles. Owner Henry Wangeman frequently hosts readings and discussions and was kind enough to let me talk about literary translation a couple weeks ago to a full house (though I imagine most people came for the free mezcal). Amate also has some very cool folk art and handicrafts for sale. There are some kites designed, and signed!, by Francisco Toledo hanging from the walls that are themselves worth the visit.

Recommended reading:
Ficciones de la revolución mexicana, by Ignacio Solares (Mexico City: Alfaguara, 2009).
What would have happened to the nation if some of the great events in Mexico's revolution had turned out differently? Ignacio Solares, author of La invasion (Yankee Invasion, Scarletta Press and Aliform Publishing, 2009), puts figures like Madero, Carranza, Zapata and Huerta in stories that depart startlingly from the official versions. These kinds of parallel universes (Pancho Villa conquers a town in the US, for example) put the heroes and villians of the Mexican Revolution into some new and unexpected lights.

This Sunday, 15 de noviembre, in Oaxaca at the Auditorio Guelagetza, Los Discipulos are going to open for Café Tacuba. Sorry, my beautiful niece Blanqui, who keeps me apprised of culture going around about town, doesn't know what time.

Reading novels

I'm on sabbatical this year and one of the advantages is the opportunity of reading what I want to, not what I have to (well, there is some of that, too, to complete my sabbatical project). But what's become interesting is not only what I read, but how--the luxury of reading for hours, even days, at a time. It's not the same experience at all to read a half hour here or there, or before going to sleep or sitting on the bus between stops. Things like narrative structure and most importantly style only truly come across once the reader is literally sumberged in the text. I just finished 2666 by Roberto Bolaño (my vote for best world writer born in the second half of the 20th), a thousand-page journey through the violence and corruption of modern Mexico that I finished in 3 days. It's a "page-turner," and the relentless way the author catalogues the murders of young women in Ciudad Juárez (especially pertinent now that the state attorney general whose office proved so apathetic in the investigations has just been named the nation's attorney general) has to be read in a relentless way as well--you can't turn away from what's happening.
[Recommended reading by Roberto Bolaño: The Savage Detectives]
I also read one of the most remarkable works of contemporary US fiction, David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, another phonebook-sized novel (with 100 pages of footnotes in tiny font) I read in a short time (about 3 weeks, which must be some kind of world record for that book). Reading is always a kind of "reader response":there is either a connection or not, and that connection is ultimately physical, sensatory, sensual. This book is truly a work of (tortured) genius, so many voices, so many layered trains of narration, so many interruptions, lapses, hollow spaces, empty discourses..it's not hard to understand how a person who wrote such a work could have committed suicide. What a loss for literature, but what gifts left behind.
I've just started a book by my favorite contemporary US writer, Cormac McCarthy, Suttree. Heir to William Faulker (and by extension Gabriel Garcia Marquez) and Joseph Conrad, McCarthy writes the lushest descriptions imaginable, even when that lushness comes from broken glass and rusty metal. Thanks to my beloved sister-in-law Blanca Cue for lending me this work, and so many others.
And as I start this blog (something I never could have imagined doing a year ago, Luddite that I am; but it is this Thoreau-like solitude up here in Casa Tobala in the mountains of southeastern Oaxaca, the Sierra Juarez, that allows for all the time for reflection), I wish to thank a few people who have led me down this path: first of all my father John Miskowiec, the most prolific reader I've ever known, who from the time I was a kid taught me the wonders not only of literature but of books themselves, those precious objects one may hold; Eduardo García Aguilar, my friend and mentor for half my life, and one of Latin America's great writers, who taught me how much literature is a living thing, that it is made from life itself, and has allowed me to translate his work, including The Triumphant Voyage, Mexico Madness, Luminous Cities, and Boulevard of Heroes; Carlos López, director of the independent publishing company Praxis in Mexico, whose generosity has in many ways made possible Aliform Publishing; Gregory Rabassa, professor emeritus, who did as much as anyone to bring modern Latin American literature to a US audience, my dissertation supervisor who became my friend and colleague as I've published to date four of the maestro's translations. And finally to the person who has fed my creativity through all our years together, Lourdes Cué, artista extraordinaria.

CHECK OUT:
http://www.aliformgroup.com/ for the best in contemporary Latin American and world literature in translation
http://www.lourdescue.com/ to see this Mexican installation artist's website

Event with Ignacio Solares

This past week I spent a few days in the great city of Chicago and participated in an event at Loyola University co-sponsored by its Department of Modern Languages and Literatures and the Consul General of Mexico, that presented Aliform Publishing's newest title, co-published with Scarletta Press, Yankee Invasion. This novel by Mexican author Ignacio Solares recounts the US invasion of Mexico and Mexico City in 1847--highly recommended for those interested in understanding how past history has led to contemporary US/Mexican relations. The next time anyone complains about illegal immigrants from Mexico, remember they didn't cross the border--the border crossed them.

See more about Yankee Invasion at
http://www.aliformgroup.com/
http://www.scarlettapress.com/