Critic's Notebook: Rhapsody in Cement

Ever since Alamos became a part of the weird world of Telenovela, the town has become self-conscious. So now with some regularity in concert with the local music festival a new bit of statuary appears amongst the derelict vehicles abandoned along its cobbled streets. Last year it was the unobjectionable likeness of a Mexican composer, a bronzed bust in the traditional style.

The latest installation was unveiled just down the street to sedate speeches and muffled applause in a small ceremony (Mexico is a country of ceremony) preceding the current festival. It is a larger-than-life full length of Albert Ortiz Tirado, another native son, the founder of the festival and a late local luminary. Ortiz was a doctor by profession, and the Festival Alberto Ortiz Tirado (FAOT) is his longstanding cultural bequest to Alamos. 

About seven decades ago I went on a school field trip to a museum, a re-creation of an 18th century farm in upstate New York. On display in a shallow open pit was the fabled Cardiff Giant, a crude bit of limestone carved in the 1860s by an upstate farmer and "discovered" by him buried in a field. It was a sensation - a demonstration of the biblical claim that there were indeed "giants in the earth" - and it duly made the rounds of local fairs, carnivals, tent revivals, mall openings and press conferences. Gazing at the crude likeness of El Ortiz I was reminded of my childhood foray.

This latest chunk of  plastic art is a mixed genre - "Brutalo-Impressionism," might serve to capture its various subtleties. It seems cast in cement which lends it a particular stasis, a lack of dynamism, a dearth of expressiveness. An aesthetic hole filled with concrete.

As the eye slides down the slab-like contours, the first thing one notices (after its resemblance to Mussolini in party dress) is the absence of any visible means of locomotion, like an anthropomorphic hovercraft. And of course the large snake clutched to his waistcoat, oddly evocative of some juxtaposed bit of anatomy, presumably a medical reference to the caduceus. Rather than holding it as one might hold a large snake, he is fingering it as though it were a saxophone, the digits spatulate rather than gripped.

The unsettling bit is the fact that the snake has a microphone where its head should be, tucked just at the good doctor's bow tie; an older style of microphone that Harry or Etta James might have tooted or crooned into. This seems an unfortunate mixing of metaphors, a transgression of artistic license. 

The silver lining in this intrusion on my good taste is the fact that it has engaged my civic spirit. If something like this should happen to the memory of Maria Felix, I'll take to the streets in protest.