1 00:00:03,630 --> 00:00:05,540 Good evening, everyone. 2 00:00:05,540 --> 00:00:22,290 This week and talk about monuments and ruins, surrealism and Ortho's in the new world that is in the Americas and starting with the other side, 3 00:00:22,290 --> 00:00:29,830 which in a sense is, well, I'm not going to be talking about this is on the left. 4 00:00:29,830 --> 00:00:35,940 So cheque move at the bottom sculpture from the Toltec city of Tula. 5 00:00:35,940 --> 00:00:40,350 And above it, a fragment of one of the serpent walls from Tula. 6 00:00:40,350 --> 00:00:49,080 And beside that, Henry Moors reclining nude from 1929 at Leeds City Art Gallery. 7 00:00:49,080 --> 00:00:56,700 And of course, he famously based that reclining figure on a chat room that is in the British Museum, 8 00:00:56,700 --> 00:00:59,880 which is obviously not the one to love, is very similar to it. 9 00:00:59,880 --> 00:01:05,380 That is a figure lying on its back, clasping something on its front. 10 00:01:05,380 --> 00:01:13,710 Well, this is very interesting. This is this is in a way, not actually the kind of thing I'm going to be addressing today, 11 00:01:13,710 --> 00:01:21,660 but I want to make it my starting point in a slightly negative way. 12 00:01:21,660 --> 00:01:30,870 William Rubin organised an exhibition for Primitivism in 20th Century Art in 1984. 13 00:01:30,870 --> 00:01:34,750 This is a monumental and stunning exhibition visually, 14 00:01:34,750 --> 00:01:43,090 but it was quite controversial in its approach to the problem of what constitutes the primitive, what constitutes the primitive. 15 00:01:43,090 --> 00:01:54,810 It inspired the primitivism of the 20th century artists. Now, in an effort to enforce a stylistic coherence to this slippery and value laden term, 16 00:01:54,810 --> 00:02:01,770 Rubin decided to distinguish what he called pre Columbian court styles such as the Aztec, 17 00:02:01,770 --> 00:02:11,220 Olmec and Inka from tribal art that is African, Estonian, northwest coast of America, Eskimo and son. 18 00:02:11,220 --> 00:02:15,180 And I quote in their style, character and implications, 19 00:02:15,180 --> 00:02:25,320 the pre Colombian court and theocratic arts of Mesoamerica and South America should be grouped with the Egyptian, Javanese and Persian. 20 00:02:25,320 --> 00:02:31,860 They could no longer, in his view, be called primitive, although, of course, they had been in the 19th century. 21 00:02:31,860 --> 00:02:36,840 So this led to an exclusion in his catalogue of, for example, 22 00:02:36,840 --> 00:02:44,060 a discussion of Henry Mors transformation of the Toltec Chapel in his replanning figures. 23 00:02:44,060 --> 00:02:51,240 And that only Rosalind Krauss in the exhibition catalogue defined the interdiction not to talk about pre Columbian 24 00:02:51,240 --> 00:03:00,300 civilisations and thoroughly discuss Giacometti in relation to Mesoamerican art and to baptise ideas of the primitive. 25 00:03:00,300 --> 00:03:00,450 Well, 26 00:03:00,450 --> 00:03:10,440 I'm not primarily concerned with the formal borrowing's and the visible affinities between the modern on the non smartest and fascinating as it is, 27 00:03:10,440 --> 00:03:20,400 but rather with the critical movement of thought in the context of surrealism that place new vang's on non Western societies. 28 00:03:20,400 --> 00:03:26,520 This took different forms from aesthetic appreciation of the objects right through to the scholarly 29 00:03:26,520 --> 00:03:38,250 research into the art and literature of the lost civilisations of the Americas and the Somalis themselves. 30 00:03:38,250 --> 00:03:47,810 Of course, no notice of the end of the art of the distinction that Rubin draws between the people, I mean civilisations and tribal art. 31 00:03:47,810 --> 00:03:56,610 And they were just as interested in Greek statues like this Aztec Corke heatwave, which I shall come back to again, 32 00:03:56,610 --> 00:04:06,000 as in the mosques of the northwest coast with the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939. 33 00:04:06,000 --> 00:04:09,180 Many of the surrealists went as refugees to America. 34 00:04:09,180 --> 00:04:20,540 Lettow Arnst Matter and Duchamp's to New York Pepé Remedial Svara, Wolfgang Aleece Palin, Elenora Carrington, amongst others to Mexico. 35 00:04:20,540 --> 00:04:31,260 And this led to an intensification of their interest in a knowledge of the indigenous and pre Colombian civilisations as well as their acquisitions. 36 00:04:31,260 --> 00:04:34,590 And I want to divide this talking to into two parts. 37 00:04:34,590 --> 00:04:43,980 First part I'm just going to be looking at quite broadly at their what what they exhibited and what they acquired in the 20s and 30s. 38 00:04:43,980 --> 00:04:58,040 And then I'm going to be looking at the wartime experience in 1940s and there would be a brief interlude in the middle on European ruins. 39 00:04:58,040 --> 00:05:11,300 In the first sort of manifesto on rebuttal comes up a place where he and his friends live and work, a castle which is not necessarily all in ruins. 40 00:05:11,300 --> 00:05:16,380 The snow never made a secret of that taste. The darker side of romanticism for the Gothic. 41 00:05:16,380 --> 00:05:24,600 It's uncanny for past where the marvellous took different forms and where past and present come together in a flash. 42 00:05:24,600 --> 00:05:37,380 And I'm I'm just I want to look briefly at this collage by Max Ernst as an example of the dissolution of of of historical periods, 43 00:05:37,380 --> 00:05:44,320 the appearance of the Sphinx beside a railway carriage with the bird headed man in it. 44 00:05:44,320 --> 00:05:53,730 It's an extraordinary collage made a 19th century engravings. An artist also frequently included Easter Island statues in his collages. 45 00:05:53,730 --> 00:06:00,300 And I quote from Britain's preface to Max Spense La Femme Soffit. 46 00:06:00,300 --> 00:06:07,560 He describes arts colleges as veritable slits in time, space, customs and even beliefs. 47 00:06:07,560 --> 00:06:13,550 History itself, he writes, falls outside like snow. 48 00:06:13,550 --> 00:06:19,380 Do leaks the disorientation displacements produced by Anse magnificently haunted brain. 49 00:06:19,380 --> 00:06:26,140 Amongst other things, dispatches. And he says that in order to be truly displaced, the statue had to have once lived. 50 00:06:26,140 --> 00:06:33,530 The conventional statue like statue life and a conventional statue place. 51 00:06:33,530 --> 00:06:42,290 So the artists treated, treated the past and treated other civilisations with great freedom at the same time. 52 00:06:42,290 --> 00:06:50,300 The surrealist poets and writers very often did considerable research on to the 53 00:06:50,300 --> 00:07:05,290 myths and on to the the the societies and cultures of quicklime in America. 54 00:07:05,290 --> 00:07:12,940 One of the very early exhibitions at the gallery Sue at East in Paris in 1927, opened in 1925, 55 00:07:12,940 --> 00:07:23,650 was of Itogi and American objects and one of the sculptures reproduced, which is the catalogue, and that was on show. 56 00:07:23,650 --> 00:07:27,410 There is a version of the Carkeek way. 57 00:07:27,410 --> 00:07:33,880 Let's give them a different name. Karriem Meechie. But you can see it is based on the same form, 58 00:07:33,880 --> 00:07:47,590 which is it's based on an accumulation of ideas associated with a particular deity, the called Earth Goddess. 59 00:07:47,590 --> 00:07:56,290 She had the seventh cert and the figure is wearing a sentence that she is wearing a mix of hands and hearts. 60 00:07:56,290 --> 00:08:05,030 The centre there, as you can see in the skull and the head, is two serpents which rise out of the neck. 61 00:08:05,030 --> 00:08:08,450 And in a sense, the sculpture will see it in more detail. 62 00:08:08,450 --> 00:08:20,650 Little is wrong is is actually incorporating several aspects of the myth of the birth of the Aztec board, which is the push. 63 00:08:20,650 --> 00:08:30,400 Now, there were other objects there in British Columbia, New Mexico, Mexico, Colombia and Peru from the smallest collections. 64 00:08:30,400 --> 00:08:40,750 It's interesting to look at the 20. This is an example of the 1927 Pogi world at large painting, which is also a landscape. 65 00:08:40,750 --> 00:08:45,780 I don't think the surrealists were trying to make any particular connexions, 66 00:08:45,780 --> 00:08:57,520 but they were talking really about about the imagination and the potential to create new landscapes like these strange landscapes of tongas, 67 00:08:57,520 --> 00:09:07,150 which are very often unclear about whether you are underwater or whether that whether there is a division between the different elements, 68 00:09:07,150 --> 00:09:22,730 between the sky and of water and the creatures in them, which often cast shadows or incense themselves and invented objects. 69 00:09:22,730 --> 00:09:35,310 The 1931 there was a very large sale of the collections of little and anywhere not. 70 00:09:35,310 --> 00:09:42,100 And this was the same year as the enormous colonial exhibition in Paris. 71 00:09:42,100 --> 00:09:50,620 Now, the surrealists were involved with the French Communist Party in mounting a campaign against the Clinton exhibition. 72 00:09:50,620 --> 00:09:55,270 They distributed to attract or visit the permanent exhibition. 73 00:09:55,270 --> 00:10:02,290 But at the same time, I think I'm afraid they did take advantage of the interest to so that collections. 74 00:10:02,290 --> 00:10:08,500 And here we see on the left some of the Haida masks from Britain's collection. 75 00:10:08,500 --> 00:10:13,510 Other objects from the north west coast and on the right's right hand page. 76 00:10:13,510 --> 00:10:15,130 Top left. 77 00:10:15,130 --> 00:10:27,400 It's not very easy to see, but it's a tiny little Omec figure that is from one of the earliest of the civilisations on the Gulf Coast of Mexico. 78 00:10:27,400 --> 00:10:36,230 There's also a Costa Rican figure and there's other things that there were over 300 objects in this cell in 1931, 79 00:10:36,230 --> 00:10:45,670 so had been collecting very, very actively for the previous five or six years. 80 00:10:45,670 --> 00:10:52,870 And the the anticolonial demonstration took place. 81 00:10:52,870 --> 00:11:00,940 It was those a pamphlet. There was also an exhibition of which these two photographs are taken, which attempt, 82 00:11:00,940 --> 00:11:10,990 in a sense, to to reverse the notion of the fetish of the colonial colonial culture. 83 00:11:10,990 --> 00:11:20,530 That that was being celebrated in the big exhibition and it was attacking French federal policy and also in the sense of, 84 00:11:20,530 --> 00:11:33,250 say, reversing the gaze and labelling European products like the virgin and child in the left hand side as European fetishes. 85 00:11:33,250 --> 00:11:39,890 And there's of a lot of people that oppresses others. 86 00:11:39,890 --> 00:11:53,400 The matter itself, the freedom and the mystery is very, very active in their political opposition to French colonial policy. 87 00:11:53,400 --> 00:12:01,360 Now, the first major exhibition of pre Columbian art in Paris took place in 1928. 88 00:12:01,360 --> 00:12:05,800 Accompanied by a flurry of publications, including this one. 89 00:12:05,800 --> 00:12:14,530 It's a special issue edition of the CIA, which anticipates with with an essay by George Bettye called Lenna Dispell, 90 00:12:14,530 --> 00:12:26,150 who vanished except America and I quote, The life of the civilised peoples of America before Columbus is prodigious for never anywhere. 91 00:12:26,150 --> 00:12:32,820 Unglue has a bloody eccentricity being devised by human madness. 92 00:12:32,820 --> 00:12:38,590 Bettye notes that historians have been struck by the hideous and grotesque forms taken by gods 93 00:12:38,590 --> 00:12:47,110 like [INAUDIBLE] Kathy Poca and without a disconcerted Bettye detected as well as the terror, 94 00:12:47,110 --> 00:12:54,430 a kind of black humour. This is Cathy Poker from the Borgia speedboat. 95 00:12:54,430 --> 00:13:02,320 And he is. 96 00:13:02,320 --> 00:13:05,580 All well, a tick, tick, tick. 97 00:13:05,580 --> 00:13:15,930 The intellectual lecture that he is entirely surrounded by, the 20 signs which constitute the calendar and other forms of counting. 98 00:13:15,930 --> 00:13:29,580 In Mexico, it's a very complicated, extremely, extremely fine page from one of the very few surviving screen phones in Mexico. 99 00:13:29,580 --> 00:13:39,250 So that's how he was hypnotised by pop sacrifice and by the joyful celebration of death in a city, as he says, as beautiful as Venice. 100 00:13:39,250 --> 00:13:47,260 Its authors covered in flowers. But I dismisses both romantic admiration for the formula, aesthetic brilliance and originality of comfort, 101 00:13:47,260 --> 00:13:52,560 civilisation's and nerveless ethnographic studies in favour of the recreation 102 00:13:52,560 --> 00:13:57,090 of a violent world in which horror played an astonishingly cheerful character. 103 00:13:57,090 --> 00:14:02,820 And I quote, Mexico is not only the most flowing of human abattoirs, but also rich city, 104 00:14:02,820 --> 00:14:09,300 a veritable Venice with canals, painted temples and very beautiful flower gardens. 105 00:14:09,300 --> 00:14:14,270 So the artistic capital, Tenochtitlan, combines slaughterhouse and flowery luxury. 106 00:14:14,270 --> 00:14:18,170 It is not difficult to see here the Origin Bhatti's document dictionary entry, 107 00:14:18,170 --> 00:14:26,970 an abattoir in which he contrasts the original temples of all religions, really as places which with sacrifices. 108 00:14:26,970 --> 00:14:36,360 So both killing and religious ritual. And he contrasts that with the contemporary fear of blood and violence and 109 00:14:36,360 --> 00:14:41,850 the way that present day abattoirs a quarantine well away from city centres. 110 00:14:41,850 --> 00:14:52,950 Not only that, for the Aztecs able to confront death with joy, but xed it all time a spectacle for the pleasure of their gods, such as Kathy Pooper. 111 00:14:52,950 --> 00:15:02,520 And this is a page from another scream whose compas vote but which was reproduced in the magazine Denge I should come back to. 112 00:15:02,520 --> 00:15:06,930 And it shows a victim of heart sacrifice. 113 00:15:06,930 --> 00:15:15,210 Lying overboard is actually a peace sign that this is the kind of thing that I was talking about. 114 00:15:15,210 --> 00:15:19,950 But Amy suggests that the Arctic succumbs so swiftly to the Spanish conquest 115 00:15:19,950 --> 00:15:25,010 because it was like the final act of this repeated sacrificial performance. 116 00:15:25,010 --> 00:15:29,700 Now, his essay clearly has more to do with Betty's own state of mind, 117 00:15:29,700 --> 00:15:36,870 with the struggle of a religious sensibility in a godless world than with any historical accuracy. 118 00:15:36,870 --> 00:15:40,890 He was enthralled as well as repelled by the hard sacrifices and following the document, 119 00:15:40,890 --> 00:15:49,860 period actually formed a small group around the world who SFL, which discussed the possibility of sacrifice in the modern world. 120 00:15:49,860 --> 00:15:58,440 Recently, though, that House article belongs to the debate at the time amongst archaeologists and ethnologists 121 00:15:58,440 --> 00:16:05,970 around the question of the extinction or survival of pre Colombian civilisations. 122 00:16:05,970 --> 00:16:17,460 And I just want to refer to another essay from the same from the Senate issue of Kaixi by Alfred Mittel, who a very distinguished ethnographer. 123 00:16:17,460 --> 00:16:21,120 But at this time, 1928 was was in his early 20s. 124 00:16:21,120 --> 00:16:31,320 But he lays out this question very succinctly and I quote, The destruction of the former American civilisations was rapid and brutal. 125 00:16:31,320 --> 00:16:40,860 But in many respects, parfum, the Spanish wiped out the ruling classes, exterminated the clergy, destroyed the towns and temples, 126 00:16:40,860 --> 00:16:50,650 the manuscripts, and broke the ideas that the American earth has preserved the pottery, cloth, art objects and simple tools. 127 00:16:50,650 --> 00:16:54,020 Most beautiful buildings have survived, though derelict, 128 00:16:54,020 --> 00:17:00,960 and they resisted earthquakes as archaeological studies develop and these remains accumulate in museums. 129 00:17:00,960 --> 00:17:06,060 The day will come when they would allow us to reconstruct the early history of the American continent. 130 00:17:06,060 --> 00:17:12,810 Perhaps he would also be able to penetrate, which is still mysterious about the flowering of the great empires of Mexico, 131 00:17:12,810 --> 00:17:18,540 Central America and the Andes, and the conditions for the study of the American past. 132 00:17:18,540 --> 00:17:27,750 Mitra wrote Better the European prehistory. The ruins of the great civilisations were still inhabited less than 400 years ago. 133 00:17:27,750 --> 00:17:32,820 There's a vast literature in Spanish and even the books of the Mexicans and Maya. 134 00:17:32,820 --> 00:17:40,160 The Mexican books are in the process of being deciphered, but so far all attempts to read them on Harrogate's have been in vain. 135 00:17:40,160 --> 00:17:48,180 What he's writing in 28, when I first started working on pre-K Lambin often teaching Knesset's, 136 00:17:48,180 --> 00:17:55,400 which is back in the early seventies, there was still, in theory, parfum, one edge of my unhurriedly writing. 137 00:17:55,400 --> 00:18:00,960 I kept this page up because I left. There is a drawing of. 138 00:18:00,960 --> 00:18:11,400 One of the mines stelae showing a block of hieroglyphs done right hand side and at the top, and now they are almost completely deciphered. 139 00:18:11,400 --> 00:18:22,590 And as a result, our picture of mine, civilisation of the classic man's civilisation of the first millennium has completely transformed. 140 00:18:22,590 --> 00:18:33,510 We even have the names of artists. We have the names of the rulers. We have details of the of the governance in a sense of hope in my area. 141 00:18:33,510 --> 00:18:43,830 So it's the whole the whole picture in that sense, which Metal foresaw has has indeed hasn't been transformed by by reception. 142 00:18:43,830 --> 00:18:51,090 Actually, the Mexican only four of the books, the codices, 143 00:18:51,090 --> 00:18:57,990 the painted books with the inscriptions have survived out of libraries and libraries of mine books. 144 00:18:57,990 --> 00:19:03,180 And very, very few also of the Mexican books have survived. 145 00:19:03,180 --> 00:19:12,130 And they're actually proving in some ways more difficult to decipher than than the Mayan. 146 00:19:12,130 --> 00:19:19,660 And what about today's inhabitants of America? They're about to move to, again, quoting, little people usually think they disappeared, 147 00:19:19,660 --> 00:19:24,460 exterminated by the Spaniards or absorbed in the new race formed after the conquest. 148 00:19:24,460 --> 00:19:30,490 Nothing, he says, could be further from the truth. There are still Aztecs, Maya and Peruvians who speak. 149 00:19:30,490 --> 00:19:38,200 The language is that their ancestors for the surrealists and the ethnologists and historians in the 20s and 30s. 150 00:19:38,200 --> 00:19:45,910 The question of continuity from the apparently lost civilisations of the Americas and the present day inhabitants was absorbing possibility, 151 00:19:45,910 --> 00:20:00,040 a move that informed both the archival research of Benjamin Pay and the wilder romantic ideals of Benjamin after and after and after. 152 00:20:00,040 --> 00:20:10,570 By this point had really sit with the surrealists, but who always remained in on the fringes of the movement. 153 00:20:10,570 --> 00:20:18,250 He arrived in Mexico in February 1936 and in July he wrote a Mexican newspaper, al-Nasser Now. 154 00:20:18,250 --> 00:20:25,150 So I have my idea of the Mayan culture. But Toltec culture, the Zapotec culture. 155 00:20:25,150 --> 00:20:31,420 What interests me now is to find again in Mexico today the lost soul of those cultures 156 00:20:31,420 --> 00:20:37,090 and their survival as much in the way of life of the people as if those who govern. 157 00:20:37,090 --> 00:20:45,360 While I was in Mexico City, after I wrote a lecture to earn some money, he was actually extremely poor. 158 00:20:45,360 --> 00:20:51,580 And he met the painter Maria Iskander, who used to feed him and whose work he then championed. 159 00:20:51,580 --> 00:20:55,460 And this is her flush called Allegory of Work. 160 00:20:55,460 --> 00:21:07,390 1936. Now, commentators have been quick to emphasise Auto's disappointment at finding only the cause of European culture, Mexico. 161 00:21:07,390 --> 00:21:15,470 But this wasn't quite the whole story. Writing about his KEDO in August 1936. 162 00:21:15,470 --> 00:21:21,500 His desire to find the lost Indian so colours his understand he was scared, his paintings. 163 00:21:21,500 --> 00:21:27,170 He was yet to make his fateful visit to the land. The Tarahumara is and to experience the peyote ceremony. 164 00:21:27,170 --> 00:21:33,080 There's still controversy about whether he actually did or whether he took his description of it from another ethnographer. 165 00:21:33,080 --> 00:21:39,080 But he certainly went to the Tarahumara. And he wrote a book called The Voyage The Thai Romanos. 166 00:21:39,080 --> 00:21:45,250 So he came to Mexico in search of indigenous art. He thought that rather than witnessing the resurrection old world, 167 00:21:45,250 --> 00:21:50,900 he was seeing its final end or he found imitations of European up with one exception, 168 00:21:50,900 --> 00:21:55,760 the painting of Maria Escoto, which has a truly Indian inspiration. 169 00:21:55,760 --> 00:22:00,260 But her painting, although spontaneous, he says, is not pure. 170 00:22:00,260 --> 00:22:08,090 It's often influenced also by Europe. The modernity and I think you can very clearly see here that she has been very interested in 171 00:22:08,090 --> 00:22:14,570 William Blake and she's so borrows these great striding legs from from Blake's watercolours. 172 00:22:14,570 --> 00:22:27,260 And the reference, I think, to a cosmos that the ruins and the volcanoes and the woman that suddenly after thought belonged very much to Mexico. 173 00:22:27,260 --> 00:22:33,110 He was deeply moved to encounter, as he put it, naked indigenous figures trembling amongst the ruins. 174 00:22:33,110 --> 00:22:40,520 They were performing a kind of dance of the ghosts, ghosts of a life that disappeared, and then someone exploring, 175 00:22:40,520 --> 00:22:48,020 reading one of her paintings in which an ancient symbol of speech is made to cancel out the modern mechanical world. 176 00:22:48,020 --> 00:22:58,220 And just to try to show you, I mean, this is a little bit you'll see that this is a fragment from a mural painting it to through AKAM, 177 00:22:58,220 --> 00:23:02,090 probably from the second or third century A.D. Now, 178 00:23:02,090 --> 00:23:07,190 the point is that the little figures who are dancing about and possibly aiming for the 179 00:23:07,190 --> 00:23:15,080 paradise have scrolls coming out of their mouths which indicate speech or song or prayer. 180 00:23:15,080 --> 00:23:24,050 The mission. And so this is in black and white, but I don't have a kind of side of it. 181 00:23:24,050 --> 00:23:33,040 So this this throughout central Mexico going back nearly 2000 years, war paintings of terror to a calm and continuing animistic monastic. 182 00:23:33,040 --> 00:23:39,430 Scheinfeld is the sign of speech or song was was a curve Sacro issuing from the mouth. 183 00:23:39,430 --> 00:23:44,360 An artist sees this sign transformed in his head is Knewton violin. 184 00:23:44,360 --> 00:23:49,160 He sees it in the smoke, out of the chimneys here. 185 00:23:49,160 --> 00:23:50,840 And I quote, 186 00:23:50,840 --> 00:24:00,170 An Indian dude sings before an open window and the clouds of smoke from a nearby factory rise in spirals as if they were coming from the mouth. 187 00:24:00,170 --> 00:24:04,670 These votes are respiration itself, the living breath of the singer. 188 00:24:04,670 --> 00:24:07,960 But the canvas draws in a double idea. 189 00:24:07,960 --> 00:24:15,800 Murray is ghetto's uses these clouds of smoke that symbolise machine civilisation of Europe as if she would like to cancel them out. 190 00:24:15,800 --> 00:24:19,970 She doesn't necessarily. Alter says Klimt saw this for herself. 191 00:24:19,970 --> 00:24:32,900 But the spirit of the Indian race speaks through her. And I think what Michael might link this to D.H. Lawrence writing in in very romantic 192 00:24:32,900 --> 00:24:41,510 terms about some revival of some of the native of the native chief in Mexico. 193 00:24:41,510 --> 00:24:47,510 Octavio Paz described my scareder as being looking something like a pre Hispanic goddess. 194 00:24:47,510 --> 00:24:58,810 And she didn't she didn't object to that or torture. Very happy to be identified with with the indigenous cultures. 195 00:24:58,810 --> 00:25:03,080 I'm just showing you this to perhaps to emphasise the Navy SEAL. 196 00:25:03,080 --> 00:25:11,510 Clearly, the scrolls come out of the mouths and monocles codex. 197 00:25:11,510 --> 00:25:17,390 Now and Escoto went on to have a very successful career. 198 00:25:17,390 --> 00:25:26,480 This is a typical painting of hers in which she combines still life and landscape to see the ruins of of a Mexican town, 199 00:25:26,480 --> 00:25:39,930 very typical of the postrevolutionary period. These these blank minus Dallas walls, contrasting with the extraordinary richness of the oak, 200 00:25:39,930 --> 00:25:47,550 the squashes and the angst and the fish in the foreground. She always wanted to have a career as a muralist, but that failed. 201 00:25:47,550 --> 00:25:56,720 Though she was a she was a feisty person. And she she she attempted several times to get no permissions. 202 00:25:56,720 --> 00:26:02,930 But I think she's an extremely interesting painter and needs really more more work. 203 00:26:02,930 --> 00:26:10,790 Come on now. I'm having to start shifting to the wartime period. 204 00:26:10,790 --> 00:26:24,940 And I want to talk briefly, more generally about ruins, starting with this extraordinary essay by Benjamin Pepé called Ruinous Ruin Ruins. 205 00:26:24,940 --> 00:26:33,620 This appeared in the final issue of the socialist journal Minotaur in Paris in 1939. 206 00:26:33,620 --> 00:26:40,880 The same issue as a blowtorch as souvenir Dimmick Seek and Seligman's conversation assume. 207 00:26:40,880 --> 00:26:50,360 And there's a real sense of the impending cataclysm in Europe of the inevitability of the war was about to come. 208 00:26:50,360 --> 00:26:55,280 And Perry talks about different types of ruins. 209 00:26:55,280 --> 00:27:04,610 He uses his point inspired by two things by the photograph here by Alvarez Bravo of a Mexican ruin, 210 00:27:04,610 --> 00:27:13,010 an extraordinary photograph which and which turns the women arch into into a dog. 211 00:27:13,010 --> 00:27:26,300 But he was also inspired by it, by photographs, fossil fossilised photographs by phone who back up the ruins that Perry reproduces. 212 00:27:26,300 --> 00:27:34,240 There are all of mediaeval structures or that all the Mexican ones except for the photographs. 213 00:27:34,240 --> 00:27:44,390 You back. And he talks about mediaeval ruins as about one set of ruins to the wiping out another to the ruins of the mediaeval ruins. 214 00:27:44,390 --> 00:27:47,780 Former kind of lava over ruins. 215 00:27:47,780 --> 00:27:57,710 He completely ignores what we Patronus familiar with in terms of celebrations of ruins from the 17th to the 18th century, 216 00:27:57,710 --> 00:28:06,410 such as Pyrenees, his views of Rome. There's nothing of that kind. There's nothing classical at all in this article. 217 00:28:06,410 --> 00:28:19,900 And he he ends his hat, his article by musing on what kind of spectacle the ruins of old modernity, 218 00:28:19,900 --> 00:28:27,800 born of enlightenment in the French Revolution will leave for the future. And I quote him, the world through their side. 219 00:28:27,800 --> 00:28:32,630 The common ditch is sugo to disappear in its term. What ruins would it leave? 220 00:28:32,630 --> 00:28:35,750 The exploitation of poets from another age? 221 00:28:35,750 --> 00:28:43,490 Now, the churches that have survived the past only is the complement of prisons or the banks without which neither the formal survived. 222 00:28:43,490 --> 00:28:49,670 But perhaps one day they will find again when its memory would have been effaced from human recall. 223 00:28:49,670 --> 00:28:58,340 The gigantic fossil of a unique animal life would have perhaps some great station long deserted, 224 00:28:58,340 --> 00:29:06,390 will see its rails covered in buttercups and has lived in their burrows, will seek a home in the abandoned booking office, perhaps to the gorge. 225 00:29:06,390 --> 00:29:11,870 Bethlehem, the river reclaiming its rights, will traverse the opera from wings to entrance, 226 00:29:11,870 --> 00:29:17,180 bloated with crests and Arrison crosshatch Kingfisher's and the A Bible walks along. 227 00:29:17,180 --> 00:29:22,970 Its seeking a forward catching sight of this ruin, bristling with brambles and chirping birds. 228 00:29:22,970 --> 00:29:28,250 We'll remember that once upon a time they performed silly things that luxuries addressed dead. 229 00:29:28,250 --> 00:29:34,600 And we'll say What a lovely spring the opera is in flower as never before. 230 00:29:34,600 --> 00:29:39,740 And these extraordinary photographs of fossil buildings. This is the opera. 231 00:29:39,740 --> 00:29:48,460 The previous one is the Eiffel Tower button back. We made by a process called inversion and montage inversion, 232 00:29:48,460 --> 00:29:53,420 and the negative is placed on its transparency while continuously maintaining a slight 233 00:29:53,420 --> 00:29:58,880 shifting between the two plates so as to obtain the impression of slight relief, 234 00:29:58,880 --> 00:30:01,280 giving the print the appearance of an impress. 235 00:30:01,280 --> 00:30:10,490 So there's a kind of fossils of future fossils of buildings, and in a sense, the ruin of the building is matched by the ruling. 236 00:30:10,490 --> 00:30:14,080 The photograph, the destruction, the photograph. 237 00:30:14,080 --> 00:30:27,110 And I think there is a very interesting study to be made of of ruins and the medium in a particularly amongst surrealist artists. 238 00:30:27,110 --> 00:30:42,120 Britain linked by the book, the ruins that are overgrown ruins that are beginning to sink into nature. 239 00:30:42,120 --> 00:30:52,040 One example for the tomb of of convulsive beauty and I put up here a quotation from Beauty will be convulsive from Minitel, 240 00:30:52,040 --> 00:30:55,720 the word convulsive, which had used to qualify. The only beauty, in my opinion, 241 00:30:55,720 --> 00:31:04,240 has any point which is all meaningful me where it conceived within movement rather than at the precise expiration of that movement. 242 00:31:04,240 --> 00:31:10,990 There can be no beauty, convulsive beauty except in the affirmation of the reciprocal relationship that links the object in question, 243 00:31:10,990 --> 00:31:15,730 in movement and at rest. I'm sorry I couldn't use his illustration. 244 00:31:15,730 --> 00:31:21,550 The glorious photograph of a locomotive that had been abandoned for years. The delirium of the virgin forest. 245 00:31:21,550 --> 00:31:27,730 It seems to me that the magical aspect of this monument of victory into disaster could have clarified this idea. 246 00:31:27,730 --> 00:31:35,290 This is a photograph that he was that he'd been hoping to use, which never again used to illustrate. 247 00:31:35,290 --> 00:31:42,310 His essay called Nature Devours Progress and as it well goes beyond it. 248 00:31:42,310 --> 00:31:46,650 And this is the locomotive that was abandoned to the virgin forest. 249 00:31:46,650 --> 00:31:56,140 And I think this is another important side of the fact that the surrealists romanticism was the, 250 00:31:56,140 --> 00:32:05,470 in a sense, watching, watching progress visibly decay. 251 00:32:05,470 --> 00:32:15,970 And I think it's it's interesting to link that to paintings by Max Ennis from the late 20s and early 30s, like this one for the entire city, 252 00:32:15,970 --> 00:32:23,290 in which it seems like Beck's process of the traffic inversion, which produces suus fossils, 253 00:32:23,290 --> 00:32:28,030 but it's similarly, as it were, destroys something which has been there before. 254 00:32:28,030 --> 00:32:33,220 This is a painting using a car technique that is heat spread, 255 00:32:33,220 --> 00:32:42,290 a canvas with oil paint needed over a textured surface, and then scraped the paint off, producing what he could get. 256 00:32:42,290 --> 00:32:49,500 Cash and images like this one, which some look partly like a ruined city, 257 00:32:49,500 --> 00:32:55,280 putting like rocks and the vegetation, the foreground, as with a locomotive in. 258 00:32:55,280 --> 00:32:59,360 That seems to be growing over it. And I think that. 259 00:32:59,360 --> 00:33:10,800 So the notion the room is is somehow inscribed through so many so many surrealist works, 260 00:33:10,800 --> 00:33:21,950 both at the end of the ring were in ruins and bluffton's s.a of souvenir in Mexico when the final issue of mine at all. 261 00:33:21,950 --> 00:33:25,240 In addition to the cover, which is by Andrei Muscle, 262 00:33:25,240 --> 00:33:38,410 which shows you another sort of parfum ruin and labyrinth, which is within the head of the Minotaur. 263 00:33:38,410 --> 00:33:42,820 And this is the we're going back to the Koiki play that I mentioned at the beginning, 264 00:33:42,820 --> 00:33:53,860 which you saw in a in a small version in one of the early surrealist exhibitions, like I saw this when he visited Mexico. 265 00:33:53,860 --> 00:33:59,440 He probably saw it just going to it for a long time. 266 00:33:59,440 --> 00:34:07,960 It was. This is 1885. This is when it was installed outside in the garden of the museum. 267 00:34:07,960 --> 00:34:16,380 And here it is in this in the cellar of monoliths, where it was until about nineteen thirty nine. 268 00:34:16,380 --> 00:34:21,370 So poss probably he saw it here. You can see it from the back view. 269 00:34:21,370 --> 00:34:36,500 In this case, if you look at the head, you can see that the head is the same in the front in the back and the head there. 270 00:34:36,500 --> 00:34:40,930 There's a skull fast. The southern belt of the back. 271 00:34:40,930 --> 00:34:47,110 And then there's a tail down the back of it. 272 00:34:47,110 --> 00:34:53,770 And here you see more clearly what I was talking about in relation to the first one with the NICUs of hands and hearts. 273 00:34:53,770 --> 00:35:02,140 The gap in the middle of the chest where the heart has been removed. And this quite Lakeway. 274 00:35:02,140 --> 00:35:06,100 This, this, this this goddess is not really a single goddess. 275 00:35:06,100 --> 00:35:14,650 It's a whole set of ideas and a complete myth. She put that in a sense she she encompasses. 276 00:35:14,650 --> 00:35:19,950 She was the mother of Whitsun and possibly a very interesting. 277 00:35:19,950 --> 00:35:30,490 Another example of parthenogenetic birth. She can see from born feathers that that that appeared in her in her breast one day. 278 00:35:30,490 --> 00:35:37,440 And she gave birth to two possibly, who was often associated with the eagle as a son. 279 00:35:37,440 --> 00:35:42,790 God. And you can see at the base of the statue, you will see Eagle's claws. 280 00:35:42,790 --> 00:35:49,150 So it it encompasses the whole myth. And this is what what I actually took some souvenir of Mexico because she 281 00:35:49,150 --> 00:35:55,790 quickly understood that it was not just it's not an effigy of a single thing, 282 00:35:55,790 --> 00:36:05,530 a figure. It is a complete compilation of miss. 283 00:36:05,530 --> 00:36:14,170 Cities like Teotihuacan, which have also visited in ruins, 284 00:36:14,170 --> 00:36:27,700 were once thought just to be richel cities and it's now known that they were actually large, thriving urban districts say up to this point. 285 00:36:27,700 --> 00:36:34,810 But that is an example of what we're doing because of the court society of the era. 286 00:36:34,810 --> 00:36:45,760 And the service really took no notice at all of that distinction between the high civilisations and the tribal, so-called tribal areas. 287 00:36:45,760 --> 00:36:48,490 We're just as interested in both. 288 00:36:48,490 --> 00:36:58,640 This is Seligman's article, a conversation that's in Shahn, since Young is one of the groups in the northwest coast of Canada. 289 00:36:58,640 --> 00:37:02,020 And you can see on the right hand side of the photograph on the left, 290 00:37:02,020 --> 00:37:12,120 you got a bit of one of the cemeteries in the cemetery and on the right, a totem pole that has been abandoned and overgrown. 291 00:37:12,120 --> 00:37:20,610 And again, this is this is an example of the ruin of a room. 292 00:37:20,610 --> 00:37:32,940 The roots and mixed good in New York were actually engaged in quite active ethnographic energy research. 293 00:37:32,940 --> 00:37:45,000 Pele himself was the first to publish a French translation of the Mayan book The Chilean Chimayo in 1955. 294 00:37:45,000 --> 00:37:50,260 And this is a small. So I did think it's it's not his translation. 295 00:37:50,260 --> 00:38:01,900 It's I think it's very interesting that he was concerned with literatures, all stories from the entire continent. 296 00:38:01,900 --> 00:38:10,030 By contrast with Claude Libbey, Strauss, who was only interested in mosques that came from the long literate, 297 00:38:10,030 --> 00:38:16,200 as it were, those those cultures without writing, without literature. 298 00:38:16,200 --> 00:38:23,800 He was interested in both. So he was concerned not with the violent past of America, but its literature and poetry. 299 00:38:23,800 --> 00:38:29,560 So much of which had been lost. And so the continued presence of indigenous peoples. 300 00:38:29,560 --> 00:38:36,340 He spent years gathering material for his anthology, Myths and Legends of America, Mutilation and Dennehy. 301 00:38:36,340 --> 00:38:44,590 And his letters from the 40s are many collections begging people to send him material that he wrote to his father in Lima, 302 00:38:44,590 --> 00:38:52,690 for example, saying, please send me some of the stories from the income Priyanka Past. 303 00:38:52,690 --> 00:38:56,740 This book was finally published the year he died in 1959, 304 00:38:56,740 --> 00:39:03,100 but his introduction that in Mexico was published by the surrealists under the title that pedal it up. 305 00:39:03,100 --> 00:39:12,860 It's up to Peter to speak in New York. In 1943, it was considered an essay of central theoretical importance. 306 00:39:12,860 --> 00:39:16,570 And there's a double interest in the anthology, which Peter explains, 307 00:39:16,570 --> 00:39:25,450 and I quote from the beginning of the of the introduction, This anthology has as its ambition to represent in its totality. 308 00:39:25,450 --> 00:39:31,300 So it has no this thought. He has no ambitions to sentence, to tell Kitty the literary, 309 00:39:31,300 --> 00:39:37,300 primitive and popular production of the American peoples from pre-K Lumbee in times to the present. 310 00:39:37,300 --> 00:39:43,360 It only wants to present as gripping an image as possible of the poetic work of these peoples 311 00:39:43,360 --> 00:39:48,100 by revealing the most characteristic text dispersed amongst the chronicles of the conquerors, 312 00:39:48,100 --> 00:39:53,770 travellers and missionaries on the one hand, and then the work of ethnologists and folklorists on the other. 313 00:39:53,770 --> 00:40:01,120 There was no intention of trampling on the domain of the ethnographer because the only criterion that is govern the choice of text. 314 00:40:01,120 --> 00:40:11,680 This anthology is that of poetry, and this murder selection shows clearly that poetic thought has been present since the dawn of humanity. 315 00:40:11,680 --> 00:40:17,800 Birds fly. Fish swim. A man invents for a loon in nature. 316 00:40:17,800 --> 00:40:24,610 He is gifted with an imagination, always alert, always stimulated by constantly renewed needs. 317 00:40:24,610 --> 00:40:32,050 So he talks about the way it's the human imagination that is constructed, the great collective myths of the past in all kinds of different religious, 318 00:40:32,050 --> 00:40:40,110 technological and social conditions in societies, nomadic, hunter gatherer and agricultural and and pet. 319 00:40:40,110 --> 00:40:48,130 His other theme is the absence of myth in the contemporary world and the miserable existence to which the mass of the population is reduced today. 320 00:40:48,130 --> 00:40:53,340 Remote from any poetic thought, although the need for poetry is still latent. 321 00:40:53,340 --> 00:41:02,000 And I think that this the notion that there might be a new myth information is something that grips. 322 00:41:02,000 --> 00:41:11,420 The surrealists, both as in New York, who were writing in the magazine, V.V. and those in Mexico. 323 00:41:11,420 --> 00:41:22,000 This is one of the mosques that was in on Britain's selection from the northwest coast. 324 00:41:22,000 --> 00:41:28,260 It's it's it's truly a combination of a face and fish. 325 00:41:28,260 --> 00:41:33,050 It might be it might have a sort of shamanic meaning. 326 00:41:33,050 --> 00:41:40,790 Many of the mosques did. That is they referred to a particular relationship between man and animal that the man could 327 00:41:40,790 --> 00:41:51,020 take on some of the of the par and the the potential of an animal could move move between them. 328 00:41:51,020 --> 00:41:54,980 Very often the mosques have to do with with asking for help. 329 00:41:54,980 --> 00:42:00,920 The hunting, help with fishing. It's a it's a but it's what is not yet known. 330 00:42:00,920 --> 00:42:07,650 McCabe only and the other one of the other areas that this food is collected. 331 00:42:07,650 --> 00:42:18,470 Well, the Katrina dolls from the south southern United States, from the hoopy areas, New Mexico. 332 00:42:18,470 --> 00:42:28,430 This is one of them. This belonged to Max Elst, I think, and photographed by Bernice Abbott. 333 00:42:28,430 --> 00:42:35,240 And this is one from Purple's collection with a postcard on the right hand side 334 00:42:35,240 --> 00:42:42,850 with a key to the two to the symbols that are painted on the Katrina dolls. 335 00:42:42,850 --> 00:42:45,410 And he he was interested to find out more about them. 336 00:42:45,410 --> 00:42:58,310 He was just so dazzled by them, by the extraordinary evidence of the of the human imagination in Mexico. 337 00:42:58,310 --> 00:43:13,620 Often Palin, who also moved there from Europe, started a magazine called Dinn, the way in which he photos as a kind of as well post surrealist. 338 00:43:13,620 --> 00:43:21,330 And he wanted to start a new movement, which he called Didden dynamism, and he wrote a farewell to surrealism. 339 00:43:21,330 --> 00:43:25,790 It's rather vague and and and high flown. 340 00:43:25,790 --> 00:43:35,180 But he has the idea, I think he he considers it surrealism is not actually sufficient interested in scientific discoveries, 341 00:43:35,180 --> 00:43:44,600 and it's turning too much towards a mystical, mystical interest in the world. 342 00:43:44,600 --> 00:43:51,020 This is an example of one opponents paintings in which he attempted to capture 343 00:43:51,020 --> 00:44:00,620 something of the sort of vigour of the invisible physical energy in the world. 344 00:44:00,620 --> 00:44:07,910 So there was a there was a kind of rivalry and slipped between Dean and the New York magazine's VVA view. 345 00:44:07,910 --> 00:44:18,920 But after the war, Poland became close again to the surrealists and the photograph on the left I've taken from the Post or magazine medium, 346 00:44:18,920 --> 00:44:24,830 which shows Poland leaning against one of the great Omec heads in Vera Cruz. 347 00:44:24,830 --> 00:44:31,850 And you can see two other photographs by gists on the right hand side. 348 00:44:31,850 --> 00:44:40,320 Show one of these heads in the process of excavation and the enormous size of it. 349 00:44:40,320 --> 00:44:51,530 One interesting thing about the story of the archaeology of Middle America is that at this stage in the 1940s, 350 00:44:51,530 --> 00:44:57,890 there was considerable disagreement about who the Omec were. 351 00:44:57,890 --> 00:45:10,240 The North American archaeologists said that they were a late offshoot of the Maya that they dated from some time post 800 A.D. 352 00:45:10,240 --> 00:45:14,300 The Mexican villagers said, no, no, they're actually much earlier than that. 353 00:45:14,300 --> 00:45:25,940 These these are remains that go back to 800 B.C., 2000 B.C. And there was a large round table meeting, I think, 1943. 354 00:45:25,940 --> 00:45:31,040 And eventually evidence was brought forward to prove that indeed the Mexicans were right. 355 00:45:31,040 --> 00:45:34,760 And the Omec, because they were known there, we didn't really call. 356 00:45:34,760 --> 00:45:47,870 Well, actually, the first of those, it were the first great organised civilisation in Mexico. 357 00:45:47,870 --> 00:45:54,620 Devoted one of its issues to the Amerindian cultures. 358 00:45:54,620 --> 00:45:55,970 This is the cover. 359 00:45:55,970 --> 00:46:06,170 And it included some wonderful photographs of Inca architecture, which Moreau commissioned from the photographer of Martin Mountain Chumby. 360 00:46:06,170 --> 00:46:16,880 And it shows you one of the these these these stone buildings are constructed with extraordinary precision and brilliance, 361 00:46:16,880 --> 00:46:22,410 not usually in concrete or any kind of filling tool. And that's the stone. 362 00:46:22,410 --> 00:46:35,600 All right. The there has so many angles in it that it provides an extraordinary stable 363 00:46:35,600 --> 00:46:40,820 centre for these walls which which actually don't fall down in earthquakes. 364 00:46:40,820 --> 00:46:45,520 This is another pair of football sets of women at the top. 365 00:46:45,520 --> 00:46:56,020 And these were accompanied by an article by Morrow celebrating the Inca architecture of the immediate prete Spanish period. 366 00:46:56,020 --> 00:46:59,750 And I think they were also one of the influences on the painter. 367 00:46:59,750 --> 00:47:05,430 I'm going to finish with good gets in. 368 00:47:05,430 --> 00:47:14,270 Who is he in Mexico now? So this is now coming to an end. 369 00:47:14,270 --> 00:47:24,280 This is a work back home to get. So who has been almost exclusively exhibited and commented upon in the context of Mexican 20th century art? 370 00:47:24,280 --> 00:47:31,010 And within that, as a pioneer of abstraction, whisking the abstract Mexican modernism. 371 00:47:31,010 --> 00:47:40,400 And the article to get so is the title of the largest exhibition so far dedicated to his work and get so was born in Mexico 1915, 372 00:47:40,400 --> 00:47:49,790 spent much of his youth in Switzerland, was a stage designer in Cleveland, Ohio, returning to Mexico frequently in 1940 when he finally settled there. 373 00:47:49,790 --> 00:47:56,810 Well, he is a set designer during the golden age of Mexican cinema for the surrealist Lewiston, well, amongst others. 374 00:47:56,810 --> 00:48:06,910 And he was painting his spare time he found dedicated himself to painting in nineteen sixty two and he was denied his paintings for purely abstract. 375 00:48:06,910 --> 00:48:12,760 People have said I'm an abstract painter. I believe my paintings are very realistic. 376 00:48:12,760 --> 00:48:17,440 They're real because they express precisely who I am today still. 377 00:48:17,440 --> 00:48:24,890 I am a surrealist. What I do as a species of abstract surrealism and these early paintings very frankly, 378 00:48:24,890 --> 00:48:32,750 announced that surrealist influences like this one is a very violent painting called El Disquiet about or the quoted. 379 00:48:32,750 --> 00:48:40,050 And this is reproduced in V.V. V in February 1944. And like Messing's paintings of this period. 380 00:48:40,050 --> 00:48:48,890 It Fredman it fragments, figures and creatures, minotaurs, horns, claws, booms in the landscape. 381 00:48:48,890 --> 00:48:56,550 This is a painting by get so of the little group of surrealists in Mexico City, 382 00:48:56,550 --> 00:49:02,180 Elinor Carrington, who is the who is the half naked figure raised up on the left, 383 00:49:02,180 --> 00:49:11,830 Remedios Varro wearing a mask and Pepé himself and get says it's all anecdotal show that 384 00:49:11,830 --> 00:49:17,150 it gets shared service passion for the art and architecture of prickling in America. 385 00:49:17,150 --> 00:49:26,630 In Mexico. Like his friend, the artist in caricaturist Miguel Colvert, UBS, he collected carvings and pottery figures from two telco. 386 00:49:26,630 --> 00:49:32,000 And you can see them here from Veracruz. 387 00:49:32,000 --> 00:49:39,860 I think Beadle's underneath the painting. His painting, that's called Apparition. 388 00:49:39,860 --> 00:49:45,670 And it was the buildings of Reconquest America that had the most profound impact on Getz's painting. 389 00:49:45,670 --> 00:49:53,700 He visited it so that it was accurate. Can I just say that this painting is not slash like a full time? 390 00:49:53,700 --> 00:50:01,050 It the whole thing is is painted. The whole thing is an illusion. 391 00:50:01,050 --> 00:50:03,130 It's a visit to the old cities like Lebanon. 392 00:50:03,130 --> 00:50:13,700 Chichen Itza named paintings after them as mules that used photographs such as those my Champi that we saw just now. 393 00:50:13,700 --> 00:50:17,850 And it wasn't just the structures of these walls and buildings that fascinated to get, 394 00:50:17,850 --> 00:50:22,900 but the tragic past and hidden present of indigenous America, of which they had done. 395 00:50:22,900 --> 00:50:33,370 Witnesses just put the first line of a poem by a pity called The Swell of Dust, which was written in Mexico. 396 00:50:33,370 --> 00:50:47,980 And Perry put this this sense of the of the pain dead past when stones slammed their doors as a sign of despair. 397 00:50:47,980 --> 00:50:52,150 And this is a photograph that he certainly knew. It's by another of the surrealist root quote. 398 00:50:52,150 --> 00:50:59,760 It is. And it's also the Great Pyramid. But the ruined my city of Bushnell. 399 00:50:59,760 --> 00:51:11,140 It's it's a it's don't photograph that. The temple is it's darkly framed with unyielding shadows at its entrance and gets it once said to Rita, Ayda, 400 00:51:11,140 --> 00:51:17,830 when you try to look into one of my paintings, you always run into a wall that keeps you from going any further. 401 00:51:17,830 --> 00:51:22,720 It will stop here with the brilliance of its light. But the back there's a black plain. 402 00:51:22,720 --> 00:51:31,510 It's fear, fear wrought with the dark, the ghosts of the past of the dead in their ruins, 403 00:51:31,510 --> 00:51:39,070 or the repressed, supposedly archaic present that confronts modern Latin America at every turn. 404 00:51:39,070 --> 00:51:43,780 The book The business brilliantly captures this fear which myths and intellectuals 405 00:51:43,780 --> 00:51:49,600 represented as a metaphysical threat is the labyrinth of solitude by gets his close friend, 406 00:51:49,600 --> 00:51:54,640 the poet, critic and surrealist Octavia. Pass the ambiguity. 407 00:51:54,640 --> 00:52:03,100 At the heart of the labyrinth is solitude is between we, the modern Mexican seeking to hold a fully modern society and then peasants, 408 00:52:03,100 --> 00:52:11,490 Indians and I quote, We struggle against imaginary entities, vestiges of the past that we've engendered. 409 00:52:11,490 --> 00:52:15,580 Those ghosts and vestiges are real, at least for us. 410 00:52:15,580 --> 00:52:21,420 Those goes to the vestiges of past realities. They originated in the conquest, the colony. 411 00:52:21,420 --> 00:52:31,000 The peasants are removed Saturday archaic and their men are addressing and speaking since everyone except for themselves, they embody the occult, 412 00:52:31,000 --> 00:52:40,720 the hidden ancient wisdom hidden in the folds of the earth past romanticises the bitter reality of an indigenous present incommensurable, 413 00:52:40,720 --> 00:52:47,530 he believes, with the former civilisations, those who built Bushnell sets of one, etc. 414 00:52:47,530 --> 00:52:55,750 But in his secondary poem, he suggested that surrealism helped Latin America to come to terms with an overlapping eras for the 415 00:52:55,750 --> 00:53:04,300 coexistence of pasts and presence that refused to conform to the normal given periodisation history. 416 00:53:04,300 --> 00:53:14,380 And I quote from Paz's poem Surrealism pass will pass through Mexico far away in Mexico. 417 00:53:14,380 --> 00:53:19,040 Not this one or the other. Ever buried, ever living. 418 00:53:19,040 --> 00:53:22,863 Thank you.