Introducing Demián Flores Cortés, ethnographer

Demián Flores Cortés (1971) was born in Juchitán, a town of regional importance in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca and of national and historical importance as the last home of the Zapotec people as they withdrew from their original lands under attack from the Aztec culture fighting the Guerras Floridas in order to provide sacrificial material for their gods.

Nine of the ten works of art provided by the artist for exhibition and sale in this country use highly popular sports as their central theme. The works were originally created to supplement two distinct series: Novena, which uses baseball imagery; and Arena Mexico, that of all-in wrestling. Although equal integral stages of a well-planned career in art, towards the aim of clarity and precision in the description of fact and interpretation, it is beneficial to consider these series separately. The tenth engraving comes from a third series, Monte Albán, which does use elements from these earlier two series and therefore its inclusion will broaden the present discussion.

Novena means 'ninth' in English, as the title of this series of work it signifies the last of the nine innings which, theoretically, comprise a baseball match when played in the traditional manner.

The oldest elements of the Novena series were shown as part of a summary of the work created by this artist during a one-year residency at the Cité internationale des arts, Paris in 2002; and as part of Home Run, shown at the Abel Raum für Neue Kunst gallery in Berlin, also in 2002. The completed Novena series was first shown in its entirety at the Eduardo Vasconcelos Baseball Stadium in the city of Oaxaca as the axis of a special multidisciplinary event involving the invitation of a group of writers from Mexico City to Oaxaca in order to participate in roundtable discussions, a program of cinematic presentations and a exhibition of stamps; all in the name of celebrating baseball. A number of the pieces were later incorporated into Playbol!, an exhibition shown in July 2004 at the Casa Lamm gallery in Mexico City, indeed one of the engravings available for direct analysis here, beisbol (2004), is supplementary to this later series.

The exhibition was held in a specially-constructed space within the baseball stadium and included reproductions of some of the strongest elements of the work in various locations throughout the park itself and its structure. These images, including the enormous wall drawings shown in Appendix I, have been left for the aesthetic pleasure of Guerreros fans and stadium visitors until they are removed by time and weather.

The siting of the inauguration of Novena, its immediate and continued future use as public art in addition to host and instigator of a week of related cultural events reveal as much about the motives and objectives of the artist responsible as do other innovative constituent parts of this series. Even after the initial stimulus of thirty-feet tall drawings on external walls, entrance to the gallery space further delighted those present due to Flores' cunning alteration of baseball paraphernalia which became appropriated and highly significant ready-mades. The objects in question were altered baseball bats and baseball caps, in the 2004 Playbol! series, baseballs themselves were also manipulated.

Novena and Playbol! ready-mades

The baseball bats, shown in Appendix I, were designed by Flores and made by a traditional bat-making carpenter in Mexico City. The traditional shape of a baseball bat was altered in seventeen different ways, including: incorporating the shape of traditional Mexican kitchen utensils, an extremely vicious spiked end instead of a hitting end, a bat with a u-bend around the hitting end where the ball would normally be struck, a 'double-bat' with matching 'double-bat' hanger representing love and relationships and a double-length bat vertically mirroring the shape and length of a normal bat.

The baseball caps were simple, solid colour, cotton caps stamped with famous commentators' catchphrases, please see Appendix I. The catchphrase embossed here reads "Player without audacity is a hook without bait," attributed to Pedro "Mago" ('the magician') Septien, it refers to the complex nature of the relationship between players, especially that between the pitcher and the batter. This statement could refer to any players in any sport or social situation in which human beings confront each other in a competitive manner; it reveals the natural desire to 'wipe the smile' from a confident opponent's face.

Flores demonstrated his celebrated evolution to painting through a profound exploration of graphic arts media by screen-printing on to white leather which was then cut and hand-sewn to make the baseballs for the Pelotas Patrias ('Patriotic balls') work included in the Playbol! series. Collections of balls adorned with the faces of historically famous Mexicans, such as presidents, comprised some pieces, and well-known images and icons used in some of his other series, (including all-in wrestlers from Arena Mexico), comprised a final one. The function of these objects is to be hit as hard as possible, over and above a simple act of patriotism, is Flores implying that this would be a deserved fate for the personalities pictured in the earlier of these works and the spreading of a positive message if carried out conceptually to those in the second series, which include Mexican revolutionaries and the common Mexican expletive "¡Pinches gringos!" (Bloody yanks!) amongst other designs? A seemingly confusing approach, this could reflect the blurring of patriotism and humanism in the former PRI government's use and discussion of these political figures, their motives and their achievements throughout their 71-year reign over an independent Mexico.

Even before seeing the paintings, the presence of these objects in the exhibition created an air of expectation for each visitor, brilliantly coercing him or her to adopt an 'all is not as it seems' awareness that would greatly reward closer inspection and consideration of the canvases themselves.

The prints

The Novena and Playbol! engravings in question range in image size up to 25cm by 19.5cm, and were created using silkscreen and dry-point techniques, respectively. All six engravings present a predominant figure or figures of baseball players in an action pose as the central element in the darkest of the colours used: black. The players shown appear as images taken from baseball textbooks, a notion supported by one of the images showing a batter with the Strike Zone marked out in front of him as in a teaching aid or rule-book. Since his formal training in printmaking, Demián Flores had used almost exclusively monochromatic imagery in his work until opting to incorporate coloured elements in Sedimento (1999), his first foray into painting.

The elements of the bottom layer of each composition are arranged in a grid. This layer is made up of catalogue information for the purchase of goods, one of which is sport-related and others selling do-it-yourself tools which together suggest a 'pastimes' theme. The bold colours used fill certain areas of this tabulated grid, they provide symmetry to complement the irregular shape of the baseball player(s) while simultaneously underlining it at as the focal point of the print. The fourth colour is a light beige and appears as highlighting tool for the images' focal point: the players. This highlighting seems to combine the effects of fantasy movement lines, shadows and perhaps floodlights that bring the sportsmen more to life. No other elements in the engravings are highlighted in this way and, as described, they do not depict humans. Black is used again on the 'top' layer of the aesthetic content as small dots that act to randomly obscure the composition although in some engravings they respect the solid colour areas of the 'background' grid and in others cover the entire image. As these dots appear to represent a splatter of liquid, it is for the viewer to determine what liquid this splatter would represent and why it is sometimes so well controlled and others not. Consistently present throughout these engravings, these splatters could represent blood; a gory nod to the sacrifical rituals undertaken by Flores' ancestors or the violence used by the Spanish to conquer them.

Interpretation

Even though these engravings consist of complex individual layers: the pastime catalogue information arranged in a grid; the solid primary and secondary colour blocks complementing the catalogue's grid; the baseball player(s) and the splattering of black dots, they are, like his recent painting "open and airy" (Gomez Haro 2000) which forces the viewer to consider each element individually in addition to the pictorial and conceptual relationship between them. The first issue raised by the work in the Novena and Playbol! series is "Why baseball?"

Baseball is a very popular sport in Mexico having been imported from the United States of America for the simple reason of geographical proximity. Even though a bloody war in 1846 did result in Mexico losing the territories of California, New Mexico and Texas, the country itself has never been formally colonised by the United States in political or physical terms as have the other countries that a popular American misconception believe make up the baseball fraternity. However, the consumer capitalist conditions pressed upon it in recent decades by the globalising superpower have left Mexico depending on its northern neighbour for internal and external economic well-being. It is not for Demián Flores to ponder and pick up the pieces of the Old World's trashing of his native country and indigenous culture but to realise and advertise the on-going and potential damage of this new threat.

Here, we arrive at what many writers and curators believe is the crux of Flores' work. It is best to quote the curator of Novena, Antonio Calera-Grobet, to properly introduce the concept:

"between tradition and modernity, the treatment applied by the artist to baseball converts it to a personal laboratory for analysing the concepts of territory, memory and identity that as surtidores of inexhaustible feeling they continue to build a clear and dear trinomial in Flores' trajectory"

It has been traditional for Mexican cultural producers, and therefore Mexican culture itself, to endlessly grapple with basic analysis and synthesis of the original racial and cultural mestizaje ('mixture') caused by the Spanish conquest. Above, Calera-Grobet uses "tradition" to refer directly to that indigenous Mexican-ness so ruthlessly butchered by the conquistadores, but this word also invokes the continuous calamitous debate that the conquest has left behind. The traditional regurgitation and rewording of this debate is an enormous hurdle to the evolution of a nation undeniably rich in natural, spiritual and cultural resources that progress and civilisation has never allowed it to exploit, export or enjoy on its own behalf.

Calera-Grobet goes on:

"Thanks to the hybridisation of local and foreign identities, those of the Oaxacan past and those belonging to a present modernity both metropolitan globalising, thanks to the invisible darning of said worldviews, the artist demands an eclectic or amphibious disposition on the part of the viewer … not the dissection of elements but to the fusion that constitutes us."

Clearly, Calera-Grobet understands Flores' ethnographic motivations and creative direction, as the godfather of the artist's daughter this comes as no surprise, but, more importantly, he can confidently recognise and support the proposal that the all-encompassing notions of globalisation and postmodernity are the principal preoccupations of contemporary thinking and its expression. The colonial history and contemporary migration and economic issues that define modern Mexico create an individual example of cultural mestizaje that necessitates a multi-layered investigation if one is to determine its effects on cultural identity.

Many writers have discussed how Flores achieves such clear discussion of these notions. Firstly, Flores presents a wide range of media, from the caps and bats described above, to video shorts and graphic animations. His now "open and airy" compositions in painting display a collage technique that is no longer based on mixing materials as he had done in the Arena Mexico series based on all-in wrestling, but is "purely iconographic" (Galvez 2000). The time-frames, meanings and the huge range of sources of his elements interact physically and conceptually in the same way as "cultures overlap, mix with, transfigure and commit violence against each other" (Galvez 2000), revealing Flores' driving ambition.

Here, this discussion must return to what was early labelled this "new threat." What can be loosely labelled Western popular culture and the mass media marketing processes that are used to disseminate it, are two corners that combine with the third, postmodernism, to create a triangular model, or perhaps represent the collective energy source, for the influential forces within contemporary Western societies and the nature of their influence and colonisation of others. Demián Flores, as a Mexican born, brought-up and living in the stage of history so dominated by this triangle, has had this domination rammed-home to him by life in the world's largest conurbation and its near-neighbour status to the triangle's creator. The power of this omnipresent form of popular culture to enforce consumerism has therefore shape modern living in to something that bears so little resemblance to the popular culture that dominated indigenous, colonial and post-colonial Mexico. The self-reflexivity of modern life is both cause and effect of Flores's use of popular culture to dissect contemporary culture. Globalising mass media mean this dissection is of both local and global significance as the iconography that uses him to consume and that he uses to be consumed, exist and operate in identical forms both locally and globally. Arguably the first Mexican artist to successfully achieve an intelligent discourse both visually and conceptually using iconography and content of this nature: this is greatly due to the personal and racial cross-cultural study to which he has been forced to commit since his childhood, regular return visits and home-life based in or on the last??? Zapotec settlements of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec that contrast so highly with his Mexico City home. A direct and powerful off-shoot of this cross-cultural journey through life is the exploration of time evident and fundamental to his work.

Secondly, Flores takes images and icons from the various cultures he sees being mixed before him: the urban sprawl of Mexico City; the Zapotec villages in the state of Oaxaca and the larger-scale appropriation enforced by globalisation: the Americanisation of everyday life through popular culture and mass media marketing. The catalogue information used as a background in the engravings discussed here promotes products with English-language brand names but their specifications are explained and described in Mexican Spanish using international references in their categorisation. A good example is "pinzas para cortes ingleses" (English-style cutting pliers), which is now commonplace in Mexican society and is used in innumerable cases across nearly all fields of industry. This tendency reflects the New World's anxiety to be more European or whiter, and now of course since discovery, consolidation and rise of the USA, to be more North American. From the example given of FUD hot dogs, where 'fud' is exactly how Mexicans pronounce the English word 'food' to the image shown ????? of the bottle of extremely cheap hair conditioner which for now reason or with any truth uses the label 'French style' in English. Giving Mexican children English-language first names is a trend prevalent in the North of Mexico, and is gradually increasing in the South as Americanisation spreads further from the source. These names, similarly to the adulteration of 'food' to become 'fud,' are more often than not spelt incorrectly as parents use a phonetic version of the English name and are not aware of the correct English spelling. This phenomenon is more prevalent in the naming of baby girls, likely due to the lack of female apostles and therefore women's names in Catholic and Mexican society; some examples of young Mexican women's names are Sheyla, Joana (with a single 'n' confusing with the more traditional Spanish name Juana) and Nanci. A related concept is that of 'Aniderev'; a name given to boys who are born on the anniversary of the end of the Mexican revolution. Following the Mexican tendency to name boys after the patron Saint of the day they are born, parents traditionally consulted the calendar to name their sons. Not aware that this word was an abbreviation of the term 'Aniversary of the end of the revolution,' peasant farmer and working class urban Mexican parents would, and still do, name male heirs born on this day 'Anivderev.'

A brief but potent introduction to the problems of cultural identity that Mexicans must suffer from their past and present lives and to which Demián Flores regularly alludes:

"where sport, more than an iconographic context, functions as a matrix that organises and glues together signs ... in my work of recent years, the topics of identity, memory and origin are utilised relating elements that define identity with sport ... from this theme I reflect on the social and the mechanisms that create identities: sport is a symbolic manifestation of the society to which it belongs, deep-rooted to that determined region and is a reflection of its identities."

The figures of baseball players used in the paintings of the Novena and Playbol! series more often than not appear with interchanged heads, anything from the universal traditional clown get-up to the infamous MAD magazine logotype.

A medium so suited to expressing a discourse involving multiple layers of meaning, the Novena engravings exemplify how Flores' presents elements unrelated as much in real time and space as much as they are within the surreal space they inhabit on the paper. The speed at which human beings in developed societies now live gives them little or no time to analyse and investigate what is happening to them as individuals, cultures, nations or as a race. Flores forces the viewer to take the time to define and link each element by providing only the most subtle of visual clues to the code needed to decipher their relationship and discover the meaning of his discourse. The subtlety of these clues and the fact that an initial viewing of Demián Flores' expressive visual language cause European and North American observers to assume that his is the work of a standard Pop Artist pinpoint the nature of his development as human being as a Mexican, Oaxacan artist who grew up and lives in the world's largest city. Moreover, this indicates an important aspect of the task he and those around him must undertake in the near and mid-term futures to assure that the originality of his stance and the direction of its meaning are not lost in a perhaps pasé commercial milieu of similar, older and better-known cultural product.

It is a mistake to label Flores' output as Pop Art or compare it directly with that of those more commonly known as purveyors of this aesthetic style. As Lisa Pasquariello has written about the work of Pop Artist Ed Ruschka (19--) Flores' work is conspicuously not Pop or non-Pop as she describes Ruschka - as the objects are interchangeable as they have meaning and direct reference to the visual and conceptual content of each piece. Furthermore, Ruschka and Flores' objects have visual and conceptual reference to the historical time in which the pieces they inhabit were created. In this sense, such as produced by these two artists is the clearest reflection of the distinctly Pop times in which they have been conceived and concretised.

Demián Flores is Mexican and is from Oaxaca but could not paint or create in ways more different from those characteristic of traditionally successful Oaxacan painters, his predecessors: Tamayo, Morales and Toledo; or those of similar age to him (who he refuses to consider contemporaries) who deliver canvases embossed with an almost totalitarian use of imitation of these said founders of the controversially-described Oaxacan School . Considered the present epicentre of contemporary Mexican art, Oaxaca carries the baton for Mexico in international terms. This is of utmost importance in the diagnosis of Demián Flores and his work. He, like English, Spanish, American and Japanese artists of his generation, has grown up in the greatly over-hyped, consumer-driven marketplace of unrelenting urban surroundings under the continual barrage of marketing campaigns. His world is not one which fits the image comprising abundant fauna, magic, fantasy and dreams that are some of the characteristics of Oaxacan art that Robert Valerio so neatly lists in his 'seminal' work and so rightly claims are the effect of the same European and North American market demand that makes of the New World a "paradise that Europeans deny losing."

Referred elsewhere by Valerio as one of the "dissidents" of Oaxacan art, the work of Demián Flores fills the criteria of the late Rodolfo Morales:

"For another painter from my {Mexican} state to attract attention, they will have to do the contrary to what we {Tamayo, himself and Toledo} do."

It is therefore no surprise that Selma Holo, appointed director of the brand new International Museums Institute (intitially working bilaterally between the United States and Mexico) writes the following in her 2004 text, Oaxaca At The Crossroads:

"Clearly Flores, who is now receiving prizes and international residencies, will be a top artist in Oaxaca in coming years. His way of representing the world, both old and new, makes him an artist from Oaxaca who both acknowledges his roots and transcends them in the manner (potentially) of a Tamayo, Morales or a Toledo."

Concluding

Even though similar to many other instances of postcolonial mestizaje, Mexico's continental location as the poor nearest neighbour to a world superpower and therefore unwitting test bed for experiments in globalisation make it a unique and important case-study. Intra-continental free trade agreements and agricultural policies have done little or nothing to improve the Mexican economy, have created large rises in rural ufonemployment and in the numbers of Mexicans forced to accept positions that pay starvation wages. The Mexican people have been hoodwinked in to believing in commercial success and the promise of development through investment. This perceived success has been fashioned by the same global consumer giants that have ceaselessly bombarded Mexico with uncompromising and unregulated direct marketing and advertising tools over the past decades.

This capitalist hoodwinking with the now inextricably intertwined fields of economics and politics as its source has the weak and vulnerable market of the conquest-shocked and poverty-ridden Mexican people as an easy target market.

One interesting feature of this marketing and consumer popular culture bombardment of Mexico is the difficulty encountered when using celebrities or the newly name celebrity culture which is so powerful and almost fundamental in the marketing and advertising-deopendant environments of the United States and now Great Britain. The fantastically strong ironic, probably unique and definitely bare-faced but also harmless style of piss-take culture prevalent in Mexico pervades all sectors of society and especially the mass media's treatment of show business. An extremely active gossip culture also exists at every level of society and this is represented in the mass media through peak time gossip shows and high-profile and very risqué monitoring, analysis and even photographic evidence of celebrities' bad, sexual or risible behaviour in the magazine and gutter written press publications such as Oorale!. Much of this banter, which can lead to public bickering and even legal action as in the case of Pati Chapoy who won a case that supported her claim that her daily, early evening gossip show, consist of constructive artistic criticism when accused of????? Is based on the bitter rivalry between Televisa, the Mexico-based, Spain-founded, Latin and Southern states of America-dominating media enterprise and TV Azteca, a similar, much younger and much smaller operation of equal target market and ambition. CF oorale scans, translations CF za za za-tigres del norte piece CF pati chapoy details CF Televisa history - el tigre story TV Azteca history - Paco Stanley story

On an issue that interested voices and radical stances are rapidly reducing to an unintelligible amalgam that is easy to disregard, Demián Flores is founding an authentic channel of communication on historical fact and contemporary thought.