Last week Francisco Toledo wrote his final (for now) piece in the “Toledo Lee” column he’s been doing since August 2016 for the Mexican magazine Proceso. Maestro Toledo is a Zapotec artist (drawing, painting, photography, printmaking, sculpture) and oftentimes community organizer and activist, mostly around issues of ecological conservation and cultural patrimony. Following last year's earthquakes, he helped open dozens of public kitchens and dispensaries to help with community recovery work across the state. And since the 80s he’s also worked diligently to found, fund, and develop over half a dozen different public art workshops, studios, gallery spaces, museums, libraries, and other programs and initiatives in Oaxaca. Now pushing eighty, he’s arguably Mexico’s most important and respected living artist.
I think one of the things I’ve enjoyed most about his “Toledo Reads” column is how it has also been a way to understand his work as a kind of shaman of sorts. He is a teller, keeper, curator, and creator of stories (graphically and otherwise), especially ones that recognize and explore our profound, wonderful, and strange, even taboo relationships with other creatures in this world, now and deep into our collective memory and past. The premise of this column has also been to explore and promote books available to the public for checkout at the Instituto de Artes Gráficas de Oaxaca (IAGO) library, which he founded decades ago.
Here are some examples:
His last column of the
series, “Otro recuerdo de infancia” (“Another childhood memory”) starts with a
perfectly bizarre account from Tlatelolco (neighborhood of
Tenochtitlan/Mexico City), almost 50 years before Spanish conquest, involving
turpentine, cactus juice, talking vaginas, and other precolumbian scandals in
the royal court of Axayacatzin. I could go on here to paraphrase what Diogenes has to say
about fish, or what John Donne says about the flea, but I won’t spoil it for
you.
In
“Mitos y leyendas de América Latina,” he recounts a Brazilian origin story for
the Southern Cross, a Bolivian one for the Milky Way, and one from Pima country
about blue birds and green coyotes.
And
in “El pulpo” (“The Octopus”), he brings in other old mythologies, like “The
Kraken” from Borges’ Book of Imaginary
Beings:
“The Kraken is a Scandinavian version of the zaratan and of the sea dragon,
or sea snake of the Arabs. In 1752 the Dane Erik Pontoppidan, Bishop of Bergen,
published a Natural History of Norway,
a work famous for its hospitality or gullibility. In its pages we read that the
Kraken’s back is a mile and a half wide and that its tentacles are capable of
encompassing the largest of ships. The huge back protrudes from the sea like an
island. The Bishop formulates this rule: ‘Floating islands are invariably
Krakens.’”
And from Victor Hugo’s The Toilers of
the Sea:
“To believe in the octopus, one must have seen it. Compared with it, the hydras
of old are laughable.
“At certain moments one is tempted to think that the intangible forms which
float through our vision encounter in the realm of the possible, certain
magnetic centres to which their lineaments cling, and that from these obscure
fixations of the living dream, beings spring forth. The unknown has the
marvelous at its disposal, and it makes use of it to compose the monster.
Orpheus, Homer, and Hesiod were only able to make the Chimæra: God made the
octopus.
“When God wills it, he excels in the execrable. All ideals being admitted,
if terror be an object, the octopus is a masterpiece.
“The whale has enormous size, the octopus is small; the hippopotamus has a
cuirass, the octopus is naked; the jararoca hisses, the octopus is dumb; the
rhinoceros has a horn, the octopus has no horn; the scorpion has a sting, the
octopus has no sting; the buthus has claws, the octopus has no claws; the ape
has a prehensile tail, the octopus has no tail; the shark has sharp fins, the
octopus has no fins; the vespertilio vampire has wings armed with barbs, the
octopus has no barbs; the hedgehog has quills, the octopus has no quills; the
sword-fish has a sword, the octopus has no sword; the torpedo-fish has an
electric shock, the octopus has none; the toad has a virus, the octopus has no
virus; the viper has a venom, the octopus has no venom; the lion has claws, the
octopus has no claws; the hawk has a beak, the octopus has no beak; the
crocodile has jaws, the octopus has no teeth.
“The octopus has no muscular organization, no menacing cry, no breastplate,
no horn, no dart, no pincers, no prehensile or bruising tail, no cutting
pectoral fins, no barbed wings, no quills, no sword, no electric discharge, no
virus, no venom, no claws, no beak, no teeth. Of all creatures, the octopus is
the most formidably armed.
“What then is the octopus? It is the cupping-glass.
…
“These animals are
phantoms as well as monsters. They are, because they exist; if they were not,
reason would be justified. They are the amphibia of death. Their improbability
complicates their existence. They border on the human frontier, and people the
region of Chimeras. You deny the vampire, the octopus appears.”
Jeepers.
In “De peces,” Toledo gets
into Sergei Eisenstein’s observations on the four-eyed (anableps) fish of the
Tehuantepec Isthmus, and a Tibetan monk who drank a kettle of hot fish broth
and then promptly pissed the live fishes back into a passing river.
In “De peces II,” he tells the following story:
“My father had a grocery
store and sold canned goods, on the labels of these I saw the fish, the
sardines, tuna, and salmon. Somehow seeing this influenced my work because they
were the first samples of art that I saw. The cans came from different parts of
the world such as Portugal, Spain and Denmark. You could say that my first
artistic education comes from these products.
“Another of the labels I remember is the ‘Scott’s Emulsion of Cod Liver Oil,’ because of how horrible it tasted. We always had it in front of us at lunchtime, because some doctor or someone had recommended to my mother to give it to us to drink, She bought it in some pharmacy, and we were forced to take it, because supposedly we would grow up healthy.
“Another of the labels I remember is the ‘Scott’s Emulsion of Cod Liver Oil,’ because of how horrible it tasted. We always had it in front of us at lunchtime, because some doctor or someone had recommended to my mother to give it to us to drink, She bought it in some pharmacy, and we were forced to take it, because supposedly we would grow up healthy.
“In this collaboration the image of the label is reproduced; in it you see a man with a big fish, a cod. The image struck me, marked me. …
“In the background, my family's life was between tradition and the new; everything my father ate came from Juchitán, but at the same time at our table there were many things that were not traditional, like the ‘Scott’s Emulsion’ and all the stuff we ate when we did not like what they had cooked.
“We ate the traditional and at the same time we were changing our diet, because my mom read in magazines—or who knows how she was informed about all this food—and she started to give us ‘Chocomilk’ instead of traditional chocolate.
“All the labels on the cans were very important for my training as an artist, I saw them with great interest and at that time I did not think I could be a painter.”
Also worth a look: “Three ways to view an aquarium” and “Portrait of the artist as a dung beetle.”
More about Francisco
Toledo in this excellent 2000 interview with George Mead Moore for BOMB Magazine.
Although it’s not easy to choose just one passage, my favorite part of the interview would probably simply be Toledo's honest attitude about the work:
Moore: Now that we’re entering a new millennium, it’s commonplace to speak of the effects of globalism and technology on communication between the margin and the center—or between the so-called first world and the so-called third world. We all know that the planet is communicating via fax, modem, TV, tourism—increasing exposure to different ways of speaking, dressing, eating, but also promoting a kind of universal sameness. You are an artist with an international reputation who has lived and worked in New York and Paris, but who returned to Oaxaca to pour your time, money, and creative energies into libraries, museums, and archives—all hallmarks of civilization in Oaxaca, a place that for various historical reasons has resisted many of the effects of globalism. If globalism continues its march into the next millennium, what hopes do you harbor for Oaxaca and for Mexico in general?
Toldeo: I don’t know if you can talk about hope when you speak of civilization—nor do I think there is necessarily hope for globalization, such as it is. Perhaps I’m being negative, or pessimistic, but I don’t think there is much of a chance of survival for anyone or anything—for globalization or for a response to globalism—that would include conservation, not even of nature. There is such a drive toward total destruction; I don’t think anything can stop it. The costs of civilization are so high. In Mexico people are cutting down all the trees, destroying forests, so then you have the earthquakes, the rains, the mud slides, and everything gets washed away.
Moore: Is your public work an attempt to do something about this?
Toledo: I do what I do without any hope of a lasting or significant effect. I do these things because I feel it’s my duty and because I have the means to do them at this moment in time. You have to understand that I don’t have any illusions that anything lasting will come from it. I don’t do it out of a conscious design to change society. What will happen will happen no matter what I do. What we do by day to conserve gets erased at night by TV or movies or radio. So to talk of hope is somewhat in vain.
Although it’s not easy to choose just one passage, my favorite part of the interview would probably simply be Toledo's honest attitude about the work:
Moore: Now that we’re entering a new millennium, it’s commonplace to speak of the effects of globalism and technology on communication between the margin and the center—or between the so-called first world and the so-called third world. We all know that the planet is communicating via fax, modem, TV, tourism—increasing exposure to different ways of speaking, dressing, eating, but also promoting a kind of universal sameness. You are an artist with an international reputation who has lived and worked in New York and Paris, but who returned to Oaxaca to pour your time, money, and creative energies into libraries, museums, and archives—all hallmarks of civilization in Oaxaca, a place that for various historical reasons has resisted many of the effects of globalism. If globalism continues its march into the next millennium, what hopes do you harbor for Oaxaca and for Mexico in general?
Toldeo: I don’t know if you can talk about hope when you speak of civilization—nor do I think there is necessarily hope for globalization, such as it is. Perhaps I’m being negative, or pessimistic, but I don’t think there is much of a chance of survival for anyone or anything—for globalization or for a response to globalism—that would include conservation, not even of nature. There is such a drive toward total destruction; I don’t think anything can stop it. The costs of civilization are so high. In Mexico people are cutting down all the trees, destroying forests, so then you have the earthquakes, the rains, the mud slides, and everything gets washed away.
Moore: Is your public work an attempt to do something about this?
Toledo: I do what I do without any hope of a lasting or significant effect. I do these things because I feel it’s my duty and because I have the means to do them at this moment in time. You have to understand that I don’t have any illusions that anything lasting will come from it. I don’t do it out of a conscious design to change society. What will happen will happen no matter what I do. What we do by day to conserve gets erased at night by TV or movies or radio. So to talk of hope is somewhat in vain.
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