Mexican Muralism and the Official Public Sphere:

The text begins with highlighting a duality in the presence of mural art, a recurring theme of culture and more specifically pop culture within Latin America. The author describes the palimsest-like qualities of muralism, or the ability to be painted over and reworked by way of either remediation or censorship. The author turns to art critic Alberto Hijar, to negotiate two tendencies within Mexican muralism, who sites both an “institutional muralism and an oppositional muralism” (33).  The author, in regards to understanding the contemporary framing of Mexican muralism, maintains that, “one must first turn away from the dominant officialized mural image of the the present and draw into view instead the prior practical constitution of Mexican muralism as an element of the Mexican public sphere, considering mural production in relation to official discourse and policy both as a publicly significant cultural practice and as an object of public administration” (40). The author goes on to say that , “national identity had been effectively linked to aesthetic form and practice, and consequently the mural image became a field of political contest” (47). Here the dualistic aspects of muralism become more explicitly clear, the space between policalization and aestheticization. We see the mural as both an art object and a mechanism, or tool used in the process of critique, dissent, and furthering of political movements. The positioning of muralism then, inherently becomes political. This is clear within the canon of the Mexican School, yielding the work of “los tres grandes:” Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros. These works contributed the catalyst for revolutionary imagery within mural discourse. The author states, conversely, that their monumentality, “contributed to the eclipse of later mural production in critical  and historiographical accounts of development in Mexican art” (31). This notion works two-fold to acknowledge the significance of the artists within the canon and culture, but also a sort of complicitness in a kind domination. “The question of post-Mexican School mural production is thus complicated precisely by the prior positioning of Mexican muralism within the official public sphere and subject to the formal dominance of Mexican visuality” (32). This text critically looks at the canon of Mexican muralism, the departures of oppositional and institutional muralism, and the instances where the two become frustrated, informed by the other, and perhaps even mutualistic. I will come back to analyzing the Spirit Queen’s Court. The style is quite a bit more cumbersome.