Remixed Blessings - photographer Miguel Gandert

Nuevo Mexico Profundo: Rituals of an Indo-Hispano Homeland

by Miguel Gandert

National Hispanic Cultural Center of New Mexico

Albuquerque, New Mexico

October 21, 2000-May 27, 2001

Nuevo Mexico Profundo: Rituals of an Indo-Hispano Homeland

Photographs by Miguel Gandert

Foreword by Helen Lucero

Essays by Ramon A. Guttierez, Enrique R. Lamadrid, Lucy R. Lippard and Chris Wilson

Santa Fe, New Mexico: Museum of New Mexico Press

177 pp./$50.00 (hb), $29.95 (sb)

Miguel Gandert's exhibition "Nuevo Mexico Profundo: Rituals of an Indo-Hispano Homeland" forms an inaugural statement for the new National Hispanic Cultural Center of New Mexico. The center opened on October 21, 2000, with three concurrent exhibitions, and Gandert's extensive show of photographs offers a commendable beginning. "Nuevo Mexico Profundo" consists of 114 images from eight different series of rituals, dances, performances and pilgrimages that take place along the Rio Grande corridor from Colorado to Mexico. Gandert's mission has been to meticulously document these dramatized expressions of a neglected Indo-Hispano culture, and he has chosen the familiar aesthetic of gritty black and white documentary, complete with the black edges of full-frame negatives, to record the boisterous performances of a living history. The tension between a dying mode of faithful representation, which the authenticating trademarks of documentary photography have come to represent, and the annual revitalization of a cultu re in evolving historical plays makes this exhibition both problematic and rewarding. Dust stirred up by dancing feet has perceptively settled in the monochrome grain of representation, and this contrast between choreographed passing and statuesque presence extends to the fundamental possibilities of cultural formation. Shaped by participants and audiences on multiple levels, the dynamic interface of remembrance and realization within the staged dramas of documentary photography and ritualistic performance found at play in this exhibition merits some further reflections.

The Indo-Hispano subjects performing to the beat of Gandert's shutter belong to a group of people with a mixed heritage. When Coronado traveled north along the Rio Grande from Mexico in 1540, he was followed by a steady trickle of Spanish Mexican settlers, and these occupants of conquest would gradually be influenced by the cultures they sought to transform. Interbreeding of customs and genetic stocks evolved into the unique cultural expressions Gandert has labeled "Indo-Hispano" to account for a blend of Indian and Hispanic ancestry. United by the hyphen that testifies to its complex origin, this offspring of historical movements along the Rio Grande has been largely ignored for the sake of racial purity and cultural uniqueness. When Edward Curtis toured New Mexico as the chronicler of a vanishing race in 1907 and 1913, he sought the exotic subject of an original Indian to build on the idealized myths that support our tourist industry to this day. Coupled with the degradation of Hispano culture following th e American annexation of 1848, the stories of Indo-Hispano descent threatened to corrupt the ethnocentric desire for a "noble savage" with what was deemed an inferior influence. Caught within these opposite connotations, Indo-Hispano became the subject of a necessary silence. "Nuevo Mexico Profundo" seeks to breach the mute status of a cultural conglomerate where any notion of origin and identity is inextricably caught up in centuries of domination and repression.

Against this extensive backdrop, it is perhaps not surprising that Gandert's combined opus of cultural events encompasses everything from horseback battles between Christians and Moors to Commanche raids enacted in the northern villages around Taos. Most aspects of the beliefs and customs that might conceivably constitute an Indo-Hispano culture have successfully been brought into play. In image after image captured along the Rio Grande Valley, from the steeple on the horizon at Alcalde to the long processions of Apache dancers filing through Juarez, the anticipated variations of native costume and Christian customs recur again and again to reassert the collective spirit of an Indo-Hispano identity. Collected in such a uniform statement, however, this near perfect blend of binary nomenclature seems to reiterate the operational principle that initially repressed (just as it continues to purposefully ignore) the overwhelming existence of cultural and genetic crossovers. Seen as an edited whole, the exhibition explicitly both presumes and suggests that race and character, or the scientifically evolved fusion of genes and behavior, are intertwined with a biological determination that forces bodies to act in genetically prescribed ways. Through select symbolic acts brandishing the feather and the cross in eight distinct exhibition sections, Gandert has sought to give the IndoHispano culture a recognizable face with the same features that Edward Curtis was seeking in his own portraits. Curtis followed the eugenic trail on his rescue missions for a vanishing breed by documenting what he believed to be rapidly depleting genes. By carefully orchestrating an expressive surface, he perceptively salvaged the internalized characteristics and secured them for posterity through the act of photography.

Faced with his appointed predecessor's decision to pursue a native genome project through inventive dress code, Gandert declines to address the tremendous significance of these decisions and copies them with the same paternal discretion on behalf of a reproductive stalemate. According to the exhibition labels, four larger portraits made with a large-format camera (such as Linda Elena, Talpa, 1995) are purposefully emulating the Curtis style to "document what Curtis overlooked." Where this returning gaze meets to address a blind spot with the same questionable vision, subjects preserved generations apart enter into the same genealogy; they stop performing the past at annual intervals and become mannequins for a timeless destiny bestowed upon them through an investment in silver deposits. Once removed from an evolving embodiment, the revolving dialogue of a historical narrative enters an expanded present less prone to mutation and more conducive to framed definitions. Gandert seems to have forgotten that docum entary photography always aims to repress a complicated and mixed presence in favor of a persuasive unity comprised of subject and object, flesh and coated paper, or an apparent meaning and its formal devices.

The intertwining dialogues here are repeatedly crossing the territory controlled by history and its representation, and Gandert presumably sees his photographs as the confluence of a continuum where these entities meet. It is perhaps inevitable, then, that every photograph in this exhibition is an expressive vehicle departing from certain equations of difference. As Indo-Hispano processions file by in photographs to recover the events and characters of a genealogical lifeline, there is a repeated wish to reconcile a trajectory from the past with a present direction and collapse the dichotomies of haunting that constitute both enterprises. In a picture like Alegria de los Matachines, Picuris, 1996, we see venerable headdresses crowned with a cross dancing next to an animated cartoon and a pair of Nike shoes keeping pace with the action. Here the modes of representation cover ritualized context, a caricature of analogy and intractable reality in a single eventful moment, so the desire to distill a unique and u nified experience from such mixed signals is finally only contained by the last rites of a black border. Documentary photography as exemplified by this exhibition offers a pragmatic solution to the dangerous fluidity of life and identity. Usually seen in black and white, it is a practice rooted in preservation, but it also assigns what it aims to vitalize a deadening function of the past. From the outset, it is hopelessly caught up in the future anterior of the photograph, and Gandert is certainly not free of the remorse descending with the veil of his shutter curtain as subjects vanish.

The returning solution to this sober disappearance lies in the proven methods used to animate vision and beliefs. There is an innocent transparency to both photography and the biological anchoring of culture in "Nuevo Mexico Profundo" that seeks to restore a legible subject. Whether the conditioned choices that generate remedial connections belong to cultural symbols portraying a gene pool or the trusted hallmarks of documentary delineating a subject, the repeated move toward an uncomplicated unity is somewhat at odds with the hyphenated Indo-Hispano theme. The mediation of this mixed identity is arguably based upon movements of domination and repression, migration and settlement, integration and conflict, but Gandert chooses to represent it on terms that seek to collapse such a dispersed account in elementary statements. His intended critique of an exclusive history, which resists the recognition of complexity and hybrids to maintain its lineage of linearity, consequently ends up as a tacit endorsement of t hat precise structure.

One is consequently left with a curious image of Gandert trawling the Rio Grande bloodline. Of Indo-Hispano-Euro origin himself, it is somewhat surprising that the appeal for a closed and ultimately comprehensible identity has once more provoked the repression of complex roots. To achieve a heightened sense of familiarity, Gandert has effectively turned the documentary camera on himself. Part photographer and part ethnographer, he is both an insider and an outsider when differential lines are drawn between the subject of study and the objectives of representation, and this introvert impulse by the heralded community photographer has become a trusted reversal for the influential sciences that once put an exotic other on display in the guise of transparent photographs transcribing knowledge. If a subject can somehow deliver itself to the discourses that circumscribe it (a movement where anthropology connects with autobiography), the lasting premise of a self-identical presence can more easily be resolved. Most efforts circulating under the documentary canon these days seem to have forsaken the shutter for the self-timer, but only occasionally do the minority voices of these media productions threaten to disrupt the prevailing order and its epistemological claims. When Gandert accepts the dominant heritage of visual anthropology in its documentary guise without serious adjustments in framing, he neglects to address the defining role images play in the conception of his subjects and in the construction of their histories.

The overriding purpose of "Nuevo Mexico Profundo" hinges instead upon correcting certain exclusions from our present records without realizing or addressing why such omissions, primarily by photography but more importantly in a cultural and political sense, occurred in the first place. Every superficial exercise of documentary tradition seen here is once more pursued to replace a measure of difference with an impression of intimacy: the photographer flaunts a short focal length lens to get "close" to his subject, and prints are made with the black border to recall the negative and a preceding or "original" state. Conciliatory gestures have always been considered admirable pursuits, but the relatively recent influx and popularity of the community photographer can be seen as the logical extension of a trajectory that always unites in order to recall its postulate of division. The photographic frame forms a unit in a larger grid, and the question is ultimately if subjects can radically reshape themselves within it, or successfully inject themselves as a forceful part of it, without fundamentally distorting the greater matrix that both supports and sunders. Gandert has somewhat slavishly attempted to fit the prevailing picture without fully acknowledging that the immense value of complex and mixed narratives like "Nuevo Mexico Profundo" lies in the imaginative power they have to corrupt the boundaries that maintain and promote exile.

This exhibition professes that culture knows no borders, and the migratory patterns it captures over time weave a complex web of relations to erode historical markers along the Rio Grande. Instead of promoting another watershed, however, "Nuevo Mexico Profundo" forcefully enters a whirlpool of lineage to swirl in its own seductive performance of historical embodiments within the exhibition space. The depicted dancers might have come to a contorted halt, but the tension of their suspended movement in a static suite of photographs is in the end a productive, albeit awkward, position. Caught off balance, as it were, they appear to be temporarily seized in a pivotal moment about to overturn the status quo and leave the frame with a few inventive steps. While the critical undercurrent of this review has largely focused on the murky waters of documentary photography and biological acculturation, there is an ebb and flow present that involves a marriage of photography with performance and the mutual adoption of one culture by another. If there is an enduring legacy left to discuss, it must contend with this fluctuating promise of change introduced when one body of knowledge is exposed to the possibility of contesting positions. From a western point of view, the writing of history is predominantly perceived to be a question of representational accuracy. Criticism therefore often limits itself to complaints about discrepancies in the styles and modes of portrayal and doubts about the exactitude of description. Participation hence comes after the fact, writing takes on the function of editing, production is always secondary to consumption and history presents itself as removed from the succession it perpetually traces. Photography has of course been instrumental in shaping these perceptions, and this review is undoubtedly a victim of this state of affairs.

Confronting the recurring "Abuelo" (translated "Grandfather") character in Gandert's photographs brings another momentum to the remembrance and realization interface of historical movements. Seen in Malinche y Abuelo, Picuris, 1995, this personification of chronological narratives takes on the wrinkled appearance of a rubber mask just released from the supermarket mold. Possibly picked from the bargain bin as a leftover from Halloween, the masked identity of history as a haunting metaphor reveals itself to resemble the scary lead in a low-budget Hollywood movie. But the starring role in question is far more complex and demanding in the combined rituals of "Nuevo Mexico Profundo" than these modest special effects suggest. Next to the comically grotesque "Abuelo" in his boiler suit, a little girl in an embroidered white dress shines in her ornate crown with a translucent veil. One obviously just left a pageant, while the other returned from manual work, and this contrast is quite fitting to serve as an analogy for the historical embodiments echoed by photographs and subjects in this exhibition. Gandert's pictures are heavily customized by style and meticulously, prepared for display in a state-administered venue supported by corporate sponsorship (the Proctor & Gamble Gallery within the National Hispanic Cultural Center). His granular mestizaje, on the other hand, indulge in eclectic rituals that borrow extensively from ordinary life to put on distinctly vernacular shows in the dirt plazas of local villages. In the pair pictured at Picuris, then, we recognize the beauty and the beast of a traditional struggle between the epic and the everyday in historical accounts, once more repeated by the juxtaposed references in clothing to monarchy/papacy and industry. This seems to be the core conflict that is exacerbated by "Nuevo Mexico Profundo" and its elaborate assimilation of collective memory, so let us not forget that the couple involved in these ceremonies is further tied up in the marriage of photography and performance. There are more than two stories being told here, and "Malinche" in her pristine, white dress belongs to the official script of the "Matachines" play (a Spanish display of conquest), while the "Abuelo" character in his soiled cloak constantly interjects from the periphery with irreverent comments and corrections to the narrative. On the crudely enhanced merits of his mythical age alone, "Abuelo" seems to claim an involved eyewitness account of history that fundamentally differs from the transparent view of the past offered by photography. A similar dialogue is put in place by Gandert's photographs within "Nuevo Mexico Profundo." His documentary icons and paraphrased views on biology and culture might fail to bridge current crossings in time and sp ace, but in close collaboration with the hereditary actions of his Indo-Hispano subjects, this exhibition composes a profound statement. Identity, in the sense of any meaningful embodiment, is continuously negotiated by "Nuevo Mexico Profundo" in an inclusive orbit that always returns to multiple story lines as a redeeming factor of lived experience to define a hyphenated point.

Like every history lesson, this one comes with a textbook in the form of a lavish catalog. Named after the exhibition, or vice versa, it features glorious tritone reproductions of Gandert's photographs and four insightful essays by Ramon A. Guttierez, Enrique R. Lamadrid, Lucy R. Lippard and Chris Wilson. In addition to a detailed history of demographic movements in the region, the publication provides a valuable account of cultural frameworks and an expansive context for the images. Given the multifaceted nature of its contents and diverse points of view, this richly illustrated chronicle of "Nuevo Mexico Profundo" certainly offers a contemplative mix.

ARE FLAGAN received his MFA in photography from the University of New Mexico in 2000, and he has since continued to write and photograph.

COPYRIGHT 2001 Visual Studies Workshop
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