Four Voices for Marta Palau

Marta Palau’s artwork as well as her work as a cultural promoter mark her as one of the artists who has most eagerly contributed to the expansion of the field of creative endeavors in Mexico today. From the early stages of her career, she defied orthodoxies, clans, fashions and the pressures of the market. She even went contrary to the principles laid down by her own generation—the so-called “intermediate generation” following that of the Ruptura, the artists who had broken with Muralism. Since the 1960s, Marta Palau has been one of the pillars of Mexican art, distinguished by the organic character of her sculptural language and by the intuitive way in which she has approached other cultures and traditions. An heir of Catalan Informalism, she took part in the annual Salón Independiente exhibitions of the late 1960s; she is also a main exponent of fiber arts and one of the emblematic figures of the new ritualism whose roots are spreading throughout the great cultures of Latin America.

The Mexico City art scene in which Palau emerged in the late 1960s displayed two tendencies. On the one hand, a kind of formalism, based above all on geometric abstraction and the painterly gesture. On the other, different forms of figuration whose point of reference was new humanism and whose maximum expression was the movement known as Interiorism from the early years of that decade. In both cases, painting and drawing were conceived as autonomous and self-sufficient practices, though some work transgressed the conventional boundaries between the disciplines. Moreover, as a result of criticism voiced at what was known as the Mexican School, any consideration of myth, origins or identity was discarded. The assumption was that belonging to Western culture made these issues irrelevant in concrete terms, in view of figurative artists’ supposed “humanism” and abstract artists’ “universality.”

In these circumstances, the real departure lay in transgressing art-making disciplines and also in questioning identity, myth and the peripheral condition of the arts in Mexico. Palau’s ephemeral installation at the Salón Independiente of 1970 was ahead of its time in the way it made use of the public’s interaction, kinetic art and site-specific sculpture. It was among the most radical experimental Latin-American artworks due to the fact that it proposed that the viewer live in (and indeed transform) its spatial structure.

While Mexican art continued to follow formalist principles, Palau combined formal experimentation with a search for identity, both of these based on investigating concepts of race and origin. Paralleling the interest generated by contemporary movements like Land Art, in the 1970s Palau traveled through Mexico in search of leaves, seeds, branches and various types of fiber; she soon radicalized this method of research by using tapestry as a means of exploring the relationship between nature and culture. The use of this technique is no accident. On the one hand, weaving is often used as a metaphor for the fiber arts tradition as a whole, above all when the attempt is made to lend it a primordially female character. On the other, the intertwining of fibers is used as a figure of speech referring to organization and coherence (“network,” “web,” “weft and warp,” “social fabric,” “this and that thing interwoven,” etc.), and Palau used this organizational metaphor to transgress the boundaries between traditional forms of painting, sculpture, printmaking, ceramics and fiber arts. This paradox lent her works at once an ironic and strangely evocative tone.

Palau’s poetics were tied to the disruption of a conventional metaphor in order to allude to complexity, perseverance, loyalty and time. Based on a technical mastery of the medium, Palau understood that experimentation no longer had to respect the limits between academic genres of visual art, and that the intermingling of different disciplines could be achieved in an intuitive manner without supposing a final integration under the aegis of an architect.

This is how in the mid-1970s Palau reinterpreted with fibers the concept of the “soft sculpture” in order to subvert the medium’s premises. Her pioneering installation The Cascade (1978)—made with white nylon stockings and shown at Mexico City’s Museum of Modern Art—can be seen as a true challenge to the architectural tradition of modernist sculpture. This lyrical construction can be considered today in retrospect as akin to the poetics of such contemporary artists as the Brazilian Ernesto Neto.

Palau’s tapestries from the 1970s made of wool and other sorts of fiber manifest the emergence of a characteristically Latin-American sense of materials that, through handcrafting, entered into dialogue with modernist sculpture but also with the creative output of indigenous American cultures. In this respect, the cave paintings of Baja California—the region in which Palau’s emotional world is rooted—provided an endless repertoire of forms. Her body of work has added much to the definition of Mexican art along the lines of what Rufino Tamayo has suggested: dealing with the traditions of the Other as a project of modernity.

With her yarn Fetishes and Warriors made of amate paper from the late 1970s, Palau was one of the first artists to examine the relations of Latin-American culture with mystical tradition and the indigenous mythological world. Along with artists such as Francisco Toledo, Cecilia Vicuña and Ana Mendieta, Palau set a direct precedent for the new multicultural investigations of art from the 1990s.

The workshop that Palau hosted in Havana in the early 1980s—one that focused on working with natural materials drawn from one’s immediate surroundings—inspired several artists of the Cuban avant-garde. This was especially the case of Juan Francisco Elso, whose work, based on the use of natural materials and contact with Cuban Santeria, dealt with identity and values and transcended the sphere of Latin America art.

Palau has taught numerous courses and received important awards (as one can see from her extensive résumé). But she is also a prestigious cultural promoter. We need only mention her organization on several occasions of the Salón Michoacano International del Textil en Miniatura (International Exhibition of Miniature Textiles in Michoacán) and her extraordinary and necessary work at the Centro Cultural Tijuana where she organized the International Standards Exhibition (now a biennale) which broke with the cultural isolation imposed on this remote region by involving artists from all over the Americas and serving as a launching platform for various local artists.

We should also mention her work as an instigator of artistic dialogue on a global level with Five Continents and One City (1998–2000) —an exhibition of ambitious scope that was her brainchild and that put the Mexican public and art world in contact with international artists and outstanding curatorial projects. Her ability to convene a wide audience, her organizational skills and her understanding of what is going on today in the visual arts became manifest in this exhibition which was presented on three occasions and accompanied by well documented catalogues.

Finally, we should mention how Palau has outspokenly reasserted a female sensibility rooted in the organic character of her sculptural language as well as in the intuitive way with which she has approached other cultures and traditions. Palau is exemplary among a generation of Mexican women that affirmed their spiritual and vital independence confronting hegemonic male cultural models. Given her generosity, she has been a figure that has served as a bridge between various generations. She has also enriched the country’s cultural panorama by creating and opening sites of cultural action outside of the central control structure and serving as a liaison for meetings between artists from all over the world.

We must conclude by saying that Palau is an artist characterized by her energy and sensibility, who continues to surprise us with her ability to recreate herself and with her critical gaze on the condition of art. Few bodies of work have opened so many new roads to images and to the Mexican imaginary.

written by:

Rita Eder

Renato González Mello

Cuauhtemoc Medina

Francisco Reyes Palma