Evolution of Mexican landscape in painting

José María Velasco. Valle de México. Internet download
Rufino Tamayo. Paisaje con rocas. Internet download.

Chicano painting from Cheech Marin´s collection. Downloaded from Marin´s web page

The concept of landscape was born in Europe, in the Modern era, as opposite from the free nature. The earliest evidence of this concept was the landscape painting, sometimes with the intention of giving shape to wetlands and unexplored lands.
The landscape is not only the complex system of elements such as air, water, soil, plants, it is mainly the scenario for human activity. Though many authors defend the universality of aesthetic preferences, the heterogeneity of issues and theoretical orientations in anthropological studies on the landscape have far avoided a cross cultural applicability.
In Europe, the concept of landscape was born with modern times (Renaissance), when man freed himself from the tight bonds of Nature.
Now, particular attention is given to approaches focussing on the relation between nature and cultures, historical imagery to identity, as well as landscape cognition and finally globalization.
The earliest evidence of this process is the birth of landscape painting. In Mexico, after the European Schools of the Colonial times, with their religious themes, there were two major representative figures of the XIX century Mexican national landscape painting, Eugenio Landesio and Jose Maria Velasco.
It is interesting to see that as the multiple theories on cultural landscape developed along the years, they paralleled in its artistic representation, reflecting a new approach, specially in the Chicano painting.
The classical one point of view landscape, with no more connotations than a photograph, gave place to a reformulation of the multi perspective space, first in the surrealism of artistic vanguards (ex. Rufino Tamayo’s paintings) and nowadays in a kind of figurative abstractism-pluralism emphasized with the addition of daily objects representing folk art in themselves.
The folk art is spread in the back yard, where one of its forms is the utilization of recycled objects as car tires, painted cans and chicken pots, etc. This practice may originates from the poverty, but once the objects have the plant inside, they look very attractive.

A new European plaza in Bellflower??

Both pictures are from Bellflower Downtown. www.yesterdayla.com/midcities.html

The original legal title for Bellflower city in Southern California dates back to 1784 with one of the first Spanish land grants on which the herds of livestock were grazed. Bellflower developed on a piece of land bordered by three ranchos: Santa Gertrudes, Los Coyotes, and Los Cerritos. In 1869, the area known as Somerset Ranch, was comprised of 4,000 acres of what would later become Bellflower.
With a general store, a school, a post office, affordable lots, and ready access to Los Angeles, the population of Bellflower rose rapidly, increasing from an estimated 100 in 1908 to 1200 in 1912, and so did the support shops on Somerset Avenue.
During the 1970s, several Southeast Los Angeles cities were taking the benefits of bringing regional auto and shopping malls to their communities. Bellflower, however, opted to court the smaller Mom and Pop stores that had sustained it for decades. Rather than being part of a national chain, the mom and pop store offers a shopping alternative in a single location, to consumers who wish to deal with businesses that are native to a given city or town, and where the owners of the business are established members of the local community. Every small town contained a business district that was anchored around a locally owned general store. Today, the mom and pop store still thrives in a number of forms. Some of these corner stores are found in neighborhood business districts and are intended to meet consumer needs for a limited geographical area. The consequences of shopping mall and auto dealers rejection are explained in Bellflower’s web page:
“However, as retail shopping centers caught on, Bellflower’s choice to focus on smaller businesses left the community with no formal redevelopment plans and, worse still, no federal redevelopment funding. As a result, the City’s revenue streams dwindled, and in the early 1990s, the City sat on the verge on bankruptcy. Through fiscal conservatism and the establishment of a redevelopment strategy, the City today continues to make strides to play “catch up” with surrounding communities by attracting new businesses to town, improving business facades and upgrading infrastructure such as roads, medians, sidewalks, and public facilities”.(bold is mine).
My related story is about a friend of my husband, good and wealthy Bellflower citizen who bought a retails property in a corner of the historic street. He was painting the façade in the usual stucco palette, when the City stopped the works. He called my husband and asked him to have a meeting with the planner assigned, to see what the problem was and what was expected from him. I couldn’t avoid join the meeting.
We asked the planner why the City stopped the painting and he said this particular street was the historic street. And I could remember only the Theatre, because the rest was only a few old mom and pop shops, with no special historical characteristics, at least under my point of view. Then, we asked, what the City expects here?
And the planner took out a wide book from his plentiful library, a book of beautiful European plazas. We examined some pictures, and understood the idea was to build a fountain surrounded by landscape, in the mere corner of my husband’s friend, to propose a social space. All of this has to be paid by the retails’ owner.
Anyway, the idea was quite a temptation. We explained to the retails’ owner the situation, and I was so ingenuous to give as an example an orange tree patio inside a Museum in Buenos Aires, it would be nice, the planters, the fountain, the clay pots with the fragrance of the orange trees… I think everybody was dreaming except for the interested party. He asked us where the existing parking in the wide sidewalk would be relocated, if he built the plaza, (literally) “do they want me in bankruptcy?” “What do we do if the cars cannot park any more or only a few at the back?” “And orange trees? Do you want people eating oranges and throwing the peel in the sidewalk?” (It never occurred to me!).Community meetings? In a corner with retails? Oh, let’s call it loitering”.
This European plaza was never built, up till now. Though the City has initiated a wide range of community beautification projects throughout Bellflower, converting dilapidated lots into public parks, that have nothing like the Europeans ones in the planners’ book. It was just an illusion, the cars reality do not fit in this plaza.
And, there is something else. Do Bellflower need a European plaza? Why not a Mexican plaza, if after all the race & ethnic origin per 2000 Census was:
Hispanic 43.2%
White 46.1%
Black 9.7%
Asian 9.7%
Native American 0.9 %
Other 25.1%
All these races dispersed in the city, except for the white that are strictly concentrated in the City Council J
And the percentage of Hispanic has been increasing, considering Bellflower is too close to Latino majority of Downey, where they have the new shopping malls and the Film studios.
It is only one year for me to wait to 2010 Census and post again the new ethnic plaza I would suggest for Bellflower, but next time, please pick up a vacant lot!

Roofleaves as the Olinkas´God

Drawings of African huts. Internet download

Round African huts. Internet download.

Parallelly to the works of Rapoport, the works of the ethnologist and architectural anthropologist Nold Egenter were based on the posture that the architecture is characterized fundamentally to be a meta-language. Their procedure spreads to an universalism of the architecture, what the man builds in a wide sense, is not primarily related with the aesthetics, but with the man. Universally, the architecture would mean all that has been built by the man and possibly for its predecessors.
A reconstruction like this, as an anthropological continuum brings much more complex considerations that mere aesthetic judgements.
The biggest difference with the posture of Rapoport, is that the anthropological architecture is not based on aesthetics or culture, but in the man, whose constructive behavior in the habitat doesn't come from standardized necessities inside a productive process, but rather it is immersed in theoretical reasonings inside the field of the architecture from the beginnings.
“...man -as always- not only perceives, but integrates the spatial structure defined by buildings and reproduces this structures in other contexts, thinks with it, works with it. If we manage to show that this type of spatial structure, generated by buildings, influences man along an anthropological continuum and lives in our language, in our thoughts, keeps the arts living and even supports originally metaphysical ideas, then in new ways we could reconstruct cultural history on the basis of the “object architecture”.... architectural anthropology thus constructs a new macrotheoretical approach”. (Egenter, 1992).
This way, the initial perception of the material would be united to a spiritual approach. If the architecture is a human general phenomenon that extends synchronously on individual cultures, then diachronically, it includes all the cultures. In consequence, the investigation in the architecture of several cultures can be carried out through analogies.
Egenter corroborates its foundations starting from the roots of sub-human conditions. The primitive stadium was represented by the use of fibrous organic materials that could only be worked with the hand. The original cabin would have been built by observation of the constructive behavior of the simians, when carrying out its nests. The theory passes the corroboration test in the scientific environment, since the construction-nests are practiced by the orangutans of Borneo and Sumatra and the gorillas and chimpanzees of Africa, and it has been verified that it is an acquired ability. When urging a baby simian raised up in captivity, to build a nest, these animals show appropriate motor movements, but they cannot manipulate the material firmly. In general it is the mother who teaches them this task, and the learning process can last three years.
The first shack would be a vegetable bundle, with a dome form that would raise its branches to the sky. The space is defined like a precondition of the religion, and it would be developed jointly with the architecture. This time the transcendental order is symbolic, the symbolism comes from the sky -that would be the dome-, the extended canopy on the man. Therefore, the current recognizable shape of a dome doesn't imply a roof, neither the limits of a space, but rather it would imply a sign of a sacred place.

I’d like here to remind one of the letters from the book “The Color Purple”, by Alice Walker. Though the story is fictitious, Walker provides us a very interesting example of huts, roofs and religion. To explain this, I’m setting aside the most important issues for sociologists and anthropologists, that is the African women struggles in the tribes, the habits, the consequences for cultural behaviour.
In page 156, Nettie has just arrived to Africa and meets with the people of the Olinka tribe. …”Coming out of little round huts with something that I thought was straw on top of them but it was really a kind of leaf that grows everywhere. They pick it and dry it and lay it so it overlaps to make the roof rainproof”.
The tribe people then is ready for the roofleaf ceremony and they recite the story that it is based upon. A long time ago, the chief took more and more of the common lands to make abundant crops. He also began to cultivate the land where the roofleaves grow. “But then there came a great storm during the rainy season that destroyed all the roofs on all the huts in the village, and the people discovered to their dismay that there was no longer any roofleaf to be found”. The storm destroyed the huts and most people died. It took five years to the leaves to grow back again.
“On the day when all the huts had roofs again from the rootleaf, the villagers celebrated by singing and dancing and telling the story of the rootleaf. The rootleaf became the thing they worship”. (excerpt p. 160. The word used here is rootleaf instead of roofleaf).
This story is a clear example of the adoration of a roof element, that is part of the Architecture but also part of Nature. The leaf became the God of the Olinkas. Religion, Nature and Architecture have been developed together, conforming one single space.

Urban sprawl in California

Example of American urban sprawl. Internet download.
The freeways' knot. Download from Cyburbia.org

Cars in the American freeways. Internet download.

By august 28th, 2008, LA Times published about a revolutionary bill that would reverse the increasing California urban sprawl. “The number of miles Californians drive is growing almost twice as fast as the state's population, as housing developments sprout farther and farther from commercial centers. Not only does this urban sprawl put upward pressure on gasoline prices, it creates freeway gridlock, worsens air pollution and makes fighting global warming next to impossible.” .. “The bill wouldn't eliminate suburbs, but it would provide more choices for people who are forced to live far from their workplaces because they can't afford a home in the city”. To reach these goals, planners would provide incentives to impose smart growth, it means to build houses with a bigger density, close to urban centers and public transportation corridors. In exchange, builders who construct projects closer to public transportation will be graced with lighter requirements for environmental studies.
There were concerns, as the cost of housing would be automatically increased, the Cities would lose the right to determine the use of its land, and there was fear that California would not grow, but the bill was ultimately supported by environmentalists, local governments, and builders.
Those identical condominiums can be built thanks to car culture. Though the gasoline prices have increased in the last years, a recent study found that 68 percent of Americans haven't altered their cars’ habits, and that only 7 percent use public transportation. The reason seems to be that Americans live further away from their schools, jobs, malls. But I can tell that there is not enough public transportation to produce a radical change. You do not have a car in California, you can’t move, or at least just travel in a few restricted areas.

The bill, aims to strengthen the National Landscape Conservation System (NLCS). This protects more than 850 parcels of federal land scattered across the American west from urban sprawl. But some groups are concerned by the exclusion of a New Hampshire-sized portion of the California Desert Conservation Area. Omitting this land would allow utilities to build power transmission lines and open it up to energy development.
A lot is said against urban sprawl and it won’t be easy to find a solution, though California lawmakers have tried for decades to keep sprawl under control. Up till now, my worst impression was at the 5 freeway, a few miles South from Silicon Valley, were a multitude of identical houses have been built, clearly to provide dwellings to many international employees. Because they are destined to temporary immigrants from India, China, Japon, Israel, Pakistan, Philippines, among other nations. It is difficult for me to understand, why planners accepted immense condominiums with repeating styles and patterns ad infinitum. I’m wondering, for example, how a Pakistani feels compared to a Chinese living in the same habitat, having as main distinction the apartment number. My conclusion, they all work with numbers, they are treated –in consequence- like numbers. Not like people with different back grounds, culture and habits.
As a moral, I’d like to bring up the subject of a short story I’ve read a few days ago. It is “Twice Around the Block”, by Lawrence Treat.

It is a mistery story, a man had the perfect alibi to kill his wife and stay with her lover, Velma, who was his neigbor. I did not enjoy the story because when Lawrence described the sprawled neighborhood with the identical houses, well, I saw it coming.
“He never could understand why a woman like Velma had landed in Sunny Hills, where even the small, neat houses were so monotonously alike that you hardly tell them apart”.
And at last…he was a mistaken assassin:
“Harry straightened up, and stared unbelievingly at his wife. A quick, hard lump seemed to rip at his stomach, and he grabbed the doorway for support –the doorway that was identical with Velma’s”.

Further readings:

http://www.cyburbia.org/aggregator/sources/311
http://articles.latimes.com/2008/aug/28/opinion/ed-planning28
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19726483.200-california-desert-omitted-from-conservation-bill.html
http://www.hybridcars.com/oil-dependence/gas-prices-continue-decline-0820.html

Cities like brains: the scaling laws issue

Concept city tower in Shangai. Internet download.

Concept towers in Shangai. Internet download.

There is a publication, in Science Daily, dated September 19, 2009, regarding a new study by researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute: cities are organized like brains, and the evolution of cities mirrors the evolution of human and animal brains.
“Just as advanced mammalian brains require a robust neural network to achieve richer and more complex thought, large cities require advanced highways and transportation systems to allow larger and more productive populations” …
It means that as brains grow more complex, in the chain of species, and with the human brain on top, they modify their structure and organization in order to achieve the right level of interconnectedness.
Mark Changizi explained “As with brains, interconnectedness is also a critical component of the overall function of cities”. “One couldn’t put together three copies of Seattle (surface area of 83.9 sq. miles) and expect the result to have the same interconnectedness and efficiency as Chicago (surface area of 227.1 sq. miles). There would be too many highways with too few exits and lanes that are too narrow”.
In his research, Changizi found evidence linking the size of a city or a brain to the number and size of its supporting infrastructure, which would scale up as the surface area of brains and cities increase. And he mentions a number of mathematical exponents that would reflect the scaling rule.
I understand his conclusions could apply to some important cities in U.S.A. But I cannot avoid remembering that some “freeways” (well, they are not “free” ways, a payment has to be done) built by the Junta Militar in Buenos Aires, simply cut the city in slices and without extensions or infrastructure to support them. They are just “freeways”, ending somewhere in the South.
I would make an exception if we go up North, as the Autopista del Sol was built outside Buenos Aires downtown, in open areas, and further constructions including public and private buildings, routes and avenues supported it, the further, the less support, just the minimum needed for the rural neighborhoods.
And it comes to my mind another situation. The scaling laws mentioned here are related to fractality. And for mathematical models, the theory usually applies to extended cities, as the examples mentioned above. My question is, what happens if the city is extended high, let’s say, in one point, with a huge tower (for example the futuristic projects for Shangai) where the tower has fractal Dimension D=0 (seen far from the sky), but it still has all the properties of an extended city, only that concentrated. I am wondering how Changizi’s formula would apply here, also supposing the tower could be completely isolated. If the tower is a city in itself, and depending on its design, it could probably not comply with fixed scaling laws. I think there could be findings of partial scaling laws. Let us remember a city can be studied as a living biological organism, but it does not work as a real one, every situation has to be particularly analyzed before releasing universal rules.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/09/090903163945.htm

Installations and urban memories in the work of Ilya kabakov

"The Toilette" Kabakov, 1992. Internet download Exterior view of "The Toilette". Internet download.

Detail from "My mother's album", 1993. One of the corridors with the landscape pictures. Internet download.

Some of the more prominent artists of the “Perestroika”, among them Ilya Kabakov and Eric Bulatov, had been associated with the shows of “unofficial art” from the Soviet Union which were seen in Western Europe in the late 1970’s. Though political journalists received them very well, Western Arts critics dismissed them stating that these authors were simply imitating outdated artistic manifestations. In the ‘80’s, however, they realized that Russian artists were not following the Avant-garde in the West, but they had produced encoded expressions of the Soviet official art. It means, in order to understand the new Russian art correctly, the spectator had to see the artists’ love-hate relationship in the retoric of Soviet official art.

The Soviet way of life has been present in Ilya Kabakov’s series of provocative installations in the field of Visual Culture. This academic subject usually includes some combinations of cultural studies, art history, critical theory, philosophy, cognitive science, neurology, image and brain theory, anthropology, etc., by focusiong on aspects of culture.

By using fictional biographies, inspired by his own experiences, Kabakov has attempted to explain the birth and death of the Soviet Union.

At the end of the millennium, it was fashion to speak about the "end of history" and the "end of art," without saying anything about the end of the world. The philosopher, arts critic, essayist, Boris Groys, has commented that Soviet civilization was the first modern one whose death we have witnessed, and there are more to come. Kabakov's work fits in well with this theory where Art is remaining as a therapy of survival. He utilizes the museum not merely as an institution, but as a personal refuge, building his “own” museum, changing walls, ceiling, floors, and lighting, the totality of the installation is always precarious; but there is always an empty space, a white wall where artist and visitor can find their escape. Kabakov's installations are in direct relationship with architecture, habitat, and urban memories in the shape of temporary homes. For example, “the toilette” reminds me the poverty of post wars, the poverty of refugees, conventillos overcrowding, the simple accomodation for the first immigrants anywhere…And there is so much more to evoke.

“Labyrinth (My Mother's Album)” is a large-scale installation consisting of a series of narrow corridors in the dim light of bare bulbs. The viewer enters the installation through a door and is lead through progressively shorter corridors at right angles until he or she enters a small space in the centre of the labyrinth. This room, only a square metre in size, contains bits of wood and other debris. The corridors are constructed to resemble the interior of a shabby Soviet apartment block or civic building, with grey and brown boring walls interrupted by some pine doors at irregular intervals, the dirty floor is made from grubby wooden boards and the ceiling is supported by cheap, unpainted timber frames. In dispite of this, the sad urban memory contains the happy memories of freedom, in the black and white photographs hanging on the walls, taken by Kabakov’s uncle; they are a clear allusion to the Russian love of Nature, which survives even in the worst urban conditions. Kabakov has described his personal memories of corridors in these words ‘Numerous corridors have persecuted me all my life – straight ones, long ones, short ones, narrow ones, twisted ones, but in my imagination, they are all poorly lit and always without windows, with closed or semi-closed doors along both sides ... All the corridors of my life, from earliest childhood on, have been connected with [the] torture of endless anticipation’ (Kabakov, ‘“The Corridor (My Mother’s Album)” 1988’, The Text as the Basis of Visual Expression, p.369).

The psychological importance of a door

Magritte's painting. "Surprise Answer"

Some years ago I accompanied my husband to see a house in Riverside. First time for me to go to Riverside, and could not imagine the trip would be so terribly long if we took the 91 Freeway at 3pm. A trip that would take 1 hour for us, took five hours, only to arrive at the mountains, and from there, we were driven somewhere in the dark, uphill. Considering we had to stay approximately one hour, then go back, (maybe it would take two hours), I found it reasonable to ask the homeowner permission to use the restroom. She offered me to use the master bathroom. To my shocking surprise, the master bathroom had a huge beautiful jacuzzi, but only a tiny curtain separated the toilette from the master bedroom. What was worst, there was somebody watching tv in the bedroom. My first reaction was to get away from there, directly, that was it. But the rational area of my brain, ordered me to be polite, I love anthropology, I love to study about people and habitat, culture, etc., I couldn't be so silly. And I wouldn't make it if it took hours to get down the mountain and find at least a gasoline station.

It is very common in California that the regional parks do not have doors in the stalls. To avoid drugs consumption and whatever bad acts you can imagine, but a private toilette...that was weird for me.

Now, if I analyze the facts, a standard interior hollow wood door is not sound proof; it covers the opening the same way as curtain. At last, it is the same concept with different materiality. What was the problem then? The habits, the memory of certain objects and their strict functionality. When the problem is exposed so brightly as Magritte did, I feel happy that somebody else has shared my concern about doors and privacy.

Immateriality in Painting and Architecture

Fig. 01. Internet downloadFig. 02. Internet download

Fig.03. Internet download

Immaterial architecture is more a state of mind than a tectonic quality. Architecture theory leans towards abstraction, virtuality, immateriality, the representation of what is not tangible; while the practice of it remains based on materials properties. The term is also related to the architecture in a state of “disappearance”, a building simplified and reduced to its essential elements; lightness, transparency. In Architecture and painting, since the advances on digital painting in the 90’s, the term recalls an analogy between software design and architecture; even virtual reality as a reduction of the physical and immaterial worlds. But this is not the rule….
There are many possible representations for the purposes exposed here, but we recur to two paintings and one picture only, as they are very significative.
René François Ghislain Magritte (November 21st, 1898 –August 15th, 1967) was a Belgian surrealist artist. His work frequently displays a juxtaposition of ordinary objects in an unusual context, giving new meanings to familiar things. In Magritte’s paintings, the rose (fig 01) is realistically painted, but suddenly the object is denied when we understand the clue: it is too big for this room, it reminds us the almost complete occupation of the interior space, the room is there, but is hidden; the rose is highly sensitive for the viewer, in its color, texture, and smell. It becomes so important that the room loses significance except to emphasize the rose’s huge scale. These Magritte’s domestic objects (fig 02) are out of context too, what immerses us in uncertainty; they invade the space we suppose interior, but we are not sure, as exterior view is superimposed to the interior; the walls are the sky, or even better a representation of it, given the corners and the ceiling are materialized showing a certain kind of techtonics. A similar situation is shown on Robert Mottar’s picture, New York 1959 (fig 03). The construction provides the frame and people provide the materiality. This conjunction allows us to consider “a building” in itself. In a strict sense, the building has no materiality. People is the building’s soul. Without people, this building would be nothing else that the configuration of a structure.
It seems to me that in the examples shown, we have an invitation to “look at”, but not to look at any specific thing, we have to ignore all particulars to appreciate the total gestalt. An element could dominate the scene, but it is impossible to reduce the artistic and architectural concepts to that specific picture. This is a kind of “apperception” of space.