Enrique Chagoya

(St. Anthony Village, 2008)

Very few artist's lectures have made me want to make new work.  The presentation that Enrique Chagoya gave tonight at the Regis Center for Art at the University of Minnesota (go gophers) was just one such occasion.  Chagoya showed us a chronological survey of his drawings, prints, and books that utilize appropriation as a means of critical analysis of American culture.

I'm reminded of Julian Stallabrass' book, Art Incorporated, in which contemporary art's parallels with mass consumer culture are analyzed and refuted.  Ultimately, Stallabrass notes that one way art is able to maintain its autonomy from pure consumer culture is through self-reference or visual intertextuality.  

I've always had a gooey sometimes nauseous feeling about art that references other art.  By doing so, I feel that artists lose agency and their ability to actually critique... reality.  (social, psychological, personal, aesthetic... whatever).  

Chagoya's work has made me completely change my opinion.  Instead of a feelings of masturbatory superfluousness, his work draws a biting critique of visual culture... by using visual culture.  I loved the way he described one of his pieces as "a thesis/antithesis -- points where humanity crashes against itself." 

His work embodies the belief that history is written from an ideological standpoint. Consequently, it is the task of the artist to try to intervene and understand what might have happened... if say... the Aztecs had colonized Europe or if Modernism's fetishistic obsession of the "primitive" is laid out to be what it really is: a cannibalistic fascination with consuming/controlling/destroying culture.