There is nothing more to be said about Frida Kahlo that hasn’t already been said, except that, thankfully, she wasn’t satisfied with becoming just a modern Symbolist and/or Surrealist painter. She was also Mexican in her dress, her life, and her painting. Instead of imitating the European look, she used the Mexican folklore, Mexican plant life, Mexican costumes and Mexican shapes, colors and myths that evoked her history. Today young artists race off to join the newest art movement, reinventing their expression in new styles and isms, instead of making it their own by using the power of our past, the pull of the familiar, which is what Frida Kahlo spent her life doing. It made her art more personal and distinctive, in no way old-fashioned.
Now that modernism has shrunk the world, having a national style in art seems dumb. Let’s face it, a dead humming bird hanging from Kahlo’s neck is some how more meaningful that a dead cell phone or a stuffed surfboard. Thomas Hart Benton tried to record Americana and Wayne Thiebaud makes us feel homey with just pastries and streets, but where is our past now? Where is the celebration of what makes us American… was it staring at us in the humorous straight forwardness of Neil Jenning’s early art? Is it crouching in the poignant vulgarity of Eric Fischl’s early work? Or is it discarded like Michael Kelly’s pathetic rag dolls, the great democracy decaying into a military complex of garbage and bullshit. Where are the new versions of Hopper’s lonely shadows…Evangeline, Evngeline, where are you.
Great civilizations of the past preserved their history and beliefs in their art, so they wouldn’t loose themselves, but we worship the new by treating the past like a plague. From Pollack on there is no such thing as “American” art – instead there is modern art, as if we invented it, oblivious to the fact that the term modern does not always mean American. Modern means new, which seems to pressure artists into coming up with entertaining ideas and gimmicks (don’t get me wrong, I loved Schnabel’s plate paintings). History is no longer passed on, it’s outgrown, when it should be remembered lest it be repeated. In our frenzy to be modern, we still endure the emptiness of minimalism. Pop Art is all about the present. Warhol is obsessed with fame, the only afterlife modernly acceptable.
By recalling the past Kahlo makes it powerful again…maybe too powerful, because real revolution cannot happen unless the people wake up and remember who they are? Being a paranoid person, I wonder if the government fears that power – is that why Art schools no longer require art history…so students believe art starts with a toilet bowl by a Frenchman who was actually only making a comment on art, not an art movement. Or is it that we just can’t afford the integrity of something like Art Deco in the Jazz age because it cost too much, and the Modernist Mantra, Form Follows Function, is just a cover for cheaper is better? Ikea is really cute but I would rather have a humming bird called Evangeline.
Artillery Magazine Vol 5 no. 4 March/April 2011