HE AIN'T HEAVY, HE'S MY HERITAGE: GABRIEL OROZCO'$ PHOTOGRAVITY.

Photogravity

by Gabriel Orozco 

Philadelphia Museum of Art 

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

October 12-December 12, 1999

Photogravity

by Gabriel Orozco

afterword by Ann Temkin

Philadelphia, PA: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1999

183 pp./$29.95 (hb)

"Photogravity," Gabriel Orozco's 1999 project for the Philadelphia Museum of Art, revisits the modernist appropriation of non-western objects and forms. Orozco's commission, currently touring as part of his mid-career survey consists of a series of large-scale black and white cutout photographic reproductions of pre-columbian carvings mounted on stiff board backings. These boards are in turn supported by playful, biomorphic iron stands that give a sculptura form (at least when viewed from the rear) to the otherwise two-dimensional, photo-derived objects. The images on the faces of these objects fall into two categories. Roughly half represent previous sculptures of Orozco's, among them some of his better-known works: La Ddesse (1993), a Citroen DS sports car with its midsection removed; Yielding Stone (1992), a large plasticine ball bearing the traces and impressions of its having been rolled through the street; and Four Bicycles/There is Always One Direction (1994), an improbable eight-wheeled cycle. The oth er half reproduce objects from the Walter and Louise Arensberg collection of ancient Mesoamerican sculpture that forms part of the permanent collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. By pairing flattened representations of his own work with cutout replicas of these ancient Mesoamerican stones, Orozco interrogates the history of modernism and its relation to non-western aesthetics. The Philadelphia Museum of Art, with its canonical holdings from the Arensberg collection, functions as a politically and historically charged arena in which Orozco may play. The success of his project rests in an ambiguous interrogation directed at the museum space, his own work, the modernist project that he references, the postmodern critique implicit and his own neo-Duchampian practice. But first, to better understand what is at stake here, some background on the Arensberg collection is helpful.

Donated to the museum in 1954, the collection consists of around a thousand objects accumulated over half a century through the aggressive (though intermittent) collecting practice of the couple Walter (1878-1954) and Louise (1879-1953) Arensberg. The larger portion of the collection consists of early twentieth century paintings and sculptures, many from France. Particularly well represented are Constantin Brancusi, Georges Braque, Marcel Duchamp and Pablo Picasso. Other important Europeans (Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Joan Miro, Piet Mondrian) are also included, as are modern artists from the United States (Alexander Calder, Charles Sheeler) and Mexico (Roberto Montenegro, Rufino Tamayo). A smaller number of non-western objects complete the collection. This group includes about 200 pre-Columbian objects, as well as a smaller number of objects, mostly sculptures, from Africa, Oceania and diverse North American Indian cultures. The Arensbergs purchased these "primitive art" objects from pioneering dealers instrumental in the aesthetic reevaluation of non-western sculpture, including the gallerist (and next-door neighbor during their years in Los Angeles) Earl Stendahl, plus the caricaturist, writer and filmmaker Marius de Zayas, who sold the couple their first pre-Columbian piece in 1915. [1]

As an acknowledgment of the acquisition of the Arensberg's unrivaled collection, the Philadelphia Museum published, also in 1954, a two-part catalog, one volume documenting their holdings of twentieth-century art, the other of their pre-Columbian collection. The twin tomes, matching in size, binding and design, acknowledge the two components of the Arensberg donation and establish a sort of equivalence between the two collections. Each volume features black and white reproductions. [2] Orozco's "Photogravity" finds a number of intersections with the Arensberg collection and the two Museum publications that document it. Orozco's choice of black and white photography evokes the images in the catalog; in fact, his pre-Columbian pieces are enlargements of the reproductions from the 1954 publication, that is to say, photographs of photographs. [3] Other elements of "Photogravity" conjure up forms reminiscent of individual artworks, such as the curvilinear iron supports, that echo the lines of the Miro oil paintin gs. The circular rubber attachments that connect the flat photographs with their sculptural supports not only strengthen the evocation of Miro's Female Torso (1931), but recall the multiple discs and circles that occur elsewhere in Orozco's work. [4]

Just as there are echoes of these seminal modernists in Orozco's work, so too are there connections that might b made between Orozco and pre-Columbian art. The exhibition "Soleils mexicains," for example, installed in the "Petit Palais, Musee de Beaux-Arts de Ia Ville de Paris" in 2000, juxtaposed a carved serpent from the ancient Yucatecan Maya site of Uxmal, a human figure (or perhaps divinity with human form) emerging from its open mouth, with Orozco's Serpent (1991). But more than any of these specific links, the central concern of "Photogravity" is the formal equivalence implied between the pre-Cortesian and the contemporary, coupling that evokes the Philadelphia Museum's two catalogs of the Arensberg collection and, more generally, the gesture that brought these ancient objects into the art museum.

Orozco's pairing of contemporary and ancient Mesoamerican objects points backward to the practices of taste-makers like de Zayas and the Arensbergs, who first orchestrated an aesthetic reevaluation of objects that had previously been understood strictly as scientific specimens. Westerners were often reluctant to find aesthetic merit in ancient Mesoamerica, though the reactions were by no means uniform. [5] The beginning of the twentieth century, however, marked a watershed in western perceptions of the material culture for both its former and remaining colonies--a transformation that was spearheaded by that era's artistic vanguards. In some ways the aesthetic reevaluation of ancient Mesoamerican objects diverges from that of African, Oceanic and other Native American material cultures, and for this reason, are excluded from accounts such as Robert Goldwater's seminal Primitivism in Modern Art. [6] In spite of some significant differences, when rendered with broad strokes the modernist appropriation of ancien t Mexican forms conforms to the general pattern. While art historians have meticulously documented many chapters of this history, there is no consensus on how this aesthetic reevaluation ought to be interpreted. [7] Does modernist primitivism "broaden our humanity" [8] or reproduce "hegemonic western assumptions rooted in the colonial and neocolonial epoch"? [9] Evocations of decontextualized affinities, the premise of the 1984 exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) "'Primitivism' in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern," buttress modernism's claims of universality. "Primitivism," the much criticized exhibit, functions as a touchstone for much of the subsequent debate. While the catalog provides unquestionably valuable scholarship and detailed information, the exhibition and the publication both irresponsibly ignore the social and political context that brought these cultures together. That exhibit never indicated that the non-western objects that inspired the modern artists c ame to Paris as the loot of empire. The recurring imagery of "discovery" echoes a colonial project of expansion and conquest. [10]

Critiques of these dominant paradigms, such as James Clifford's influential essay "Histories of the Tribal and the Modern," reconnect the modernist appropriation with its colonial and racial politics. [11] Affinities, after all, are defined as affiliations made by choice, as distinct from those one is born into. The choice to align "primitive" and "modern" was surely not a mutual one. Henry Moore may have chosen to take a lesson from the Chacmool, but those Maya laborers crafted the object, and those who excavated that sculpture and hauled it to the port of Progreso for export knew nothing of Moore. [12] Furthermore, the process by which these objects enter collections in the U.S. and Europe is tied to struggle to establish a territorial and proprietary claim to the riches of the globe. [13] The movement of these objects echoes the asymmetrical power relations that characterize the exchanges between North and South. Orozco returns to a specific moment in that history, when Mesoamerican objects leave the circ us sideshow and the cabinet of curiosities and enter the sanctified space of the art gallery. But rather than interrogating the ideological, colonial and racial underpinnings of this movement, in the spirit of Clifford, Holly Barnet-Sanchez, Virginia Dominguez, et. al., Orozco offers us yet another set of affinities, this time in a set of decontextualized, ahistorical and nearly comical juxtapositions. [14] The publication that accompanied the 1999 Philadelphia exhibition, less of an exhibition catalog than an artist's book of Orozco's makes the gesture of pairing very clear. For example, a two-page spread puts side-by-side a frontal view of La Deesse and a large feathered serpent head in such a way that underscores a formal similarity.

What precisely are we to conclude from this affinity? How is a contemporary art piece derived from the slicing of a Citroen sports car like a feathered serpent sculpted some six centuries ago? William Rubin categorizes the "affinities" in the 1984 MoMA exhibition in terms of three sorts of relations between modern and primitive objects--based in "direct influence," "coincidental resemblances" or "basic shared characteristics." [15] For example, the evocation of ancient Mexican forms in Carlos Merida's Clay Figurines (sometimes called Three Dancing Figures, 1931) in the Arensberg collection is an instance of Rubin's first category of affinity--direct influence. The figures in the painting are modeled after the ancient Mexican ceramics of the sort found in the state of Nayarit. They represent part of a conscious celebration of Mesoamerican aesthetics shared with the muralists and other artists working in post-revolutionary Mexico on a nationalist project. But the affinities between Orozco's assisted ready-made s and the pre-Columbian objects in the Arensberg collection are of another sort. That the "palmate stone" (from Mexico's eastern coast) in the Arensberg collection shares the same general outline as Orozco's 1992 photograph Horse is apparent. To draw conclusions regarding the significance or origins of either the photograph or the sculpture based on that shared form would be fallacious and irrespobsible. [16] Many of the Orozco sculptures paired with pre-Columbian objects are in fact ready-mades with the most simple of shapes. Elevator (1994) and the fragment of a carved Aztec slab from the Arensberg collection have the same shape--they are both rectangular. In contrast with Merida's painting, where the modern forms are inspired by and modeled after ancient ones, what Orozco highlights is a banal coincidence.

The history of western commentaries on ancient Mesoamerican objects is full of extravagant claims made on the basis of such meaningless formal convergences. Imaginative diffusionists used such similarities to speculate on the origins of the Maya. In the nineteenth century, Frederick de Waldeck equated the snout-nose of the rain god, Chac, with the trunk of an elephant, concluding that Asians had colonized Mesoamerica. [17] At Palenque, Desire Charnay, though typically more level-headed, reached similar conclusions, arguing that "anyone who is acquainted with sacred Japanese architecture would be struck with the resemblance of this structure to a Japanese sanctuary. [18] While Orozco makes no explicit claims about the basis of the formal resemblances that he highlights, this dubious history is enough to caution us with regard to any significance derived from these sorts of parallels.

Orozco returns to the preoccupation with affinities because they are central to the aesthetic reevaluation of non-western material culture. It is precisely these sorts of meaningless formal equivalences that we are lead to once we give up on any efforts to think about what these objects may have meant in their original context. The religious or political functions of these objects are not only lost to us, but in the context of the art museum, they are not even worthy subjects for informed speculation. The captions for the 1954 Philadelphia Museum publication give minimal contextualization. Many pieces are identified with captions as tentative as "Mask. Granite. Guerrero? 6 3/4" high. Southwestern Mexico? Late?" The last section of the catalog features reproductions of objects that confound even this lax classification scheme. But in the end this should not matter if our interest in these objects is strictly aesthetic. The installation of the objects guides us to a preferred way of looking at the object. The original context is forever lost, and we will never see and understand these objects the way they were seen and understood by their creators. A new context suggests new meanings.

Sheeler's photographs of the Arensbergs' New York apartment in the late 1910s or early 1920s and Fred Dapprich's photographs of their Hollywood home give us an idea of how the couple installed their collections. Though filled with art and objects, theirs was first a space for living. Cubist and abstract paintings hang above chairs, African carvings alongside sofas and Mesoamerican sculptures. The installation bears no heed to the chronological or geographic categorization schemes employed in most museum displays, in fact, one writer characterized the installation as violating "every museum precept of height, space and light." [19] Nothing could be further from the chaste white cube generally favored by the modern art museum and gallery.

The installation of the Arensberg collection, whether interspersed with the Picassos, sofas and Brancusis in their home or in the pristine galleries of the Philadelphia Museum, encourages us to contemplate these pre-Columbian objects as art, even though it is likely that the concept of "art" was an alien one to these objects' creators. In his critique of the MoMA "Primitivism" show, Thomas McEvilley made a provocative comparison:

In New Guinea in the '30s. western food containers were highly prized as clothing ornaments--a Kellogg's cereal box became a hat, a tin can ornamented a belt, and so on. Passed down to us in photographs, the practice looks not only absurd but pathetic. We know that the tribal people have done something so inappropriate as to be absurd, and without even beginning to realize it. Our sense of the smallness and quirkiness of their world view encourages our sense of the larger scope and greater clarity of ours. Yet the way westerners have related to the primitive objects that have floated through their consciousness would look to the tribal peoples much the same way as their use of our food containers looks to us: they would perceive at once that we have done something childishly inappropriate and ignorant, and without even realizing it. [20]

The lesson here is that of Michel Foucault, who would remind us that the category "art" is not a timeless one; in fact it was quite likely alien to a ninth-century southeastern Mexican Puuc artisan. Nor is this category a stable one, one whose meaning does not change over time. What the Arensbergs, de Zayas and the Philadelphia Museum propose, and what Orozco lampoons, is the imposition of twentieth-century western criteria on objects from another time and another place.

Orozco's project functions on a number of levels; the links to the history of modern art are multiple. The flattened photographic renditions of his earlier sculptures link "Photogravity" to those experiments in modern paintings that toy with the rendering of three-dimensional objects on a plane. Cezanne wrote to Emile Bernard, in an oft-quoted letter, "You must see in nature the cylinder, the sphere, the cone." [21] In fact, flattening the simple shape of his Yielding Stone--essentially a sphere--to a disc, or reducing the Empty Shoebox (1993) to a trapezoid, Orozco revisits the apples on tabletops that populate the canvasses of Henri Matisse and Paul Cezanne in the Arensberg collection. But the focus here is not the relationship between Orozco's work and the canonical modernists who make up the twentieth-century component of the Arensberg collection, so much as the ways in which Orozco addresses the modernist appropriation of the "primitive." "Photogravity" engages in a dialog not only with the Arensberg co llection, but also with the larger context of the art museum and its institutional politics.

This institutional critique is best approached by way of another link between Orozco's project and a modern artist: the central figure in the Arensberg collection, Duchamp. [22] The relationship between Walter Arensberg and Duchamp was more than simply that of patron and favored artist. Although upon moving to New York City Duchamp declared his intention to take up residence in a skyscraper, in the end he moved into an apartment that the Arensbergs rented for him in their building and that was connected to their own. Duchamp was stimulated by Walter Arensberg's interest in cryptography, and their conversations clearly deepened a shared interest in language, especially anagrams, word games and puns. At times the two functioned as collaborators on objects, as was the case of With Hidden Noise (1916). [23] It was at the behest of the Arensbergs that Duchamp first replicated his own work. Arensberg regretted that when he had arrived (late) at the 1913 "Exhibition of International Art" (better known as the "Armor y Show") that the notorious oil Nude Descending a Staircase, number 2 (1912) had already been sold. [24] Obligingly Duchamp created a (nearly) identical version (with ink, watercolor, crayon and pastel) atop a full-scale photograph of the previous version. This initiated what would become a central practice for Duchamp--the reproduction of earlier works. Some of these reproductions are substitutes for lost or destroyed originals. Most are smaller, more portable and perhaps made of different materials. Some are altered in playful ways (e.g., L.H.O.O.Q. rasee, 1965, a postcard reproduction of the Mona Lisa without a mustache) and others are so close to the originals that they are mistaken for the prototypes. [25]

Critics have pondered the significance of this replication for an artist who stated that "the idea of repeating, for me, is a form of masturbation." [26] There is no question that, masturbatory or otherwise, during the later part of Duchamp's life one of his central activities was the manufacture of suitcases filled with reproductions and miniatures of earlier paintings and ready-mades. This lightweight, pre-packaged, one-person show is called the Boite-en-valise (The Box in Valise), also known as de ou par MARCEL DUCHAMP ou RROSE SELAVY (from or by MARCEL DUCAMP or RROSE SELAVY; various editions, from 1935-41 to the posthumous 1969 version, authorized by his widow). Orozco's decision to create more portable editions of his earlier works in "Photogravity" recalls this practice of Duchamp's. In fact, we find an antecedent for Orozco's photographic sculptures in one of the miniatures of the Boite-en-valise, as described by Dawn Ades, Neil Cox and David Hopkins:

The solution to the problem of reproducing the semi-ready-made Why Not Sneeze Rrose Selavy introduced a new form, "somewhere between the second and the third dimension," as Bonk put it. Duchamp varnished a photograph by Man Ray of the birdcage poised over a mirror to reveal the title-inscription below, then stamped out the image and pasted it on to a three-dimensional plaster "mould," based on the perspectival view of the ready-made in the photograph. This fourth miniature replica, a "three-dimensional photography," was placed at the centre base of the Large Glass in the Boite. [27]

Generally, the displacement of the sculptural object with the photograph is for the conceptual artists a central strategy. [28] This, as well as his interests in language, appropriation and replication, is central to the concerns that make Duchamp such an important figure not just for the conceptualists (and for Orozco), but for so many contemporary artists. It is not an exaggeration to claim as did William Camfield that with the waning influence of abstract expressionism,

almost everything in the late 1960s and early 1970s seemed to have roots in Duchamp's work--not only what came to be called Pop but Op Art, Conceptual Art, Performance and Body Art. In the course of a decade, Duchamp and Dada were transformed from secondary, aberrant phenomena in the history of modern art into the most dynamic forces in contemporary art. [29]

Specifically, Duchamp is crucial in directing artists' attention toward museums as institutions. [30] His Boite-en-valise might be thought of as the antecedent for Marc Dion, Marcel Broodthaers and any of a number of other artists whose work has addressed the institutional and ideological mechanisms of collecting and display.

The strategies of replication, doubling and flattening that are such an important part of Duchamp's Boite-en-valise and Orozco's "Photogravity" employ another technology of reproduction, namely photography. Eschewing the sensibility of the "fine print," the photographic component of Orozco's project refers less to modernist photography than to the hundreds of postcards, foldout maps and black and white reproductions that emanate from museums and archeological sites. The history of western aesthetic evaluations of ancient Mesoamerica overlaps to a great extent with the history of photography in Mexico. The earliest protagonists--Charnay, Frederick Catherwood, Augustus Le Plongeon--are the same for both of these histories. Their use of this technology implies a flattening of the ancient sculptures necessary for their reproduction en mass. Unlike Duchamp's practice, these multiples do not undermine the unique status and aura of the painting or other handcrafted object. They are, quite the contrary, logically im plicit within technology itself, as Walter Benjamin pointed out long ago. [31] All photographic processes utilizing a negative are capable of producing an infinite number of positives, no one of which is more or less original than any other.

In the context of the pre-Columbian objects that Orozco takes as his subject, the physical flattening of the sculpted forms is accompanied by other transformations in the reception of these objects. Leandro Katz's Catherwood Project (1985), for example, suggests multiple connections between the first photographs of Maya ruins (in situ) and the mass tourism characteristic of many of those sites today. No longer in their original context, but relocated to the gallery space, the photographic likenesses that Orozco reproduces similarly facilitate a mass diffusion otherwise untenable.

The question remains, does Orozco's Duchampian practice, with its multiple references and photosculptural doppelgangers, articulate a critique of modernist primitivism, or simply reference this as one of many historical and intellectual citations? What exactly is the nature and object of the critique instigated by all of this doubling? Is it, in fact, a critique, or simply another playful gesture richer in art-world references than in critical insights? Firstly, it is important to state that although there is a subversion of the modernist cult of originality in Duchamp's readiness to create replicas of his own work, and to "authorize" replicas made by others, it does not at all follow that Duchamp was hostile to modernist primitivism. [32] Though not a major part of his own work, Duchamp concurred with the modernist turn to the past and to other cultures for usable lessons. At a 1949 symposium in San Francisco, the "Western Roundtable on Modern Art," Duchamp took exception to some of Frank Lloyd Wright's mor e provocative statements. Wright, who himself paraphrased ancient Maya forms more than once, characterized the modernist interest in non-western aesthetics as "degenerate," and then linked this supposed degeneracy to the prominent role of homosexuals in modern art. In doing so, Wright echoed a conservative critique of modernist primitivism shared by positions as diverse as those of Max Nordau and the infamous Nazi exhibition of 1937 called "Degenerate Art." [33] Duchamp rejected Wright's position by saying that one "seek[s] in the primitive what might be good to take." [34] Later, Duchamp challenged the assumptions on which Wright's call to "go forward" rest: "There is no progress in art. There might be progress in civilization--which I don't believe at all--but, in art, I am sure it does not exist; so I respect the primitive no more and no less than T respect the contemporary." [35] In other words, Duchamp contradicted the progressivist and evolutionary assumptions, but viewed the appropriation of other cult ures as unproblematic.

Orozco's position is more ambiguous. Is it a critique of modernist primitivisim and the politics of the museum institution, in the tradition of the Guerrilla Girls and Hans Haacke, a reiteration of the appropriation of ancient sculpture that brought Mesoamerican objects into the art museum at the beginning of the twentieth century? If it is an institutional critique, it is a gentle one, less likely to offend the museum trustees than Haacke's pointed inventory of economic might in Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings--A Real Time Social System, As of May 1, 1971 (1971), for example. At the same time, Orozco's gesture is more than a belated replication of the appropriations of the modernist primitivists. While the gesture of pairing the contemporary with the ancient links Orozco's project with that historical project, the attitude is very different. Orozco's tone is ironic and playful, ripe with contradictions. Replicating the unique objects of the museum holdings by mechanical and photographic mean s, he creates not infinite multiples but another set of unique objects.

Photogravity is then not a postmodern critique of the museum space, using performance or installation to interrogate its power dynamics, elisions and ideologies, of the sort associated with Andrea Fraser, Haacke or Fred Wilson. Nor is Orozco's project simply a continuation of the modernist formalism associated with the painters represented in the Arensberg collection, the sort of art Duchamp would dismiss as "retinal." Rather, it echoes the contradictions of Duchamp himself, someone who both challenged the assumptions of the art museum and worked tirelessly for the establishment of institutional support for modern art. By deploying strategies reminiscent of those of the seminal modernists the Arensbergs collected to direct our attention to the modernist appropriation of the pre-Columbian past, "Photogravity" creates an elegant tension from the excavated ruins of those histories.

JESSE LERNER is the MacArthur Five-College Chair of Media Studies at the Claremont Colleges.

Ed. note: The work of Gabriel Orozco can be seen in an upcoming exhibition at the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Monterrey in Monterrey, Mexico.

NOTES

(1.) The Stendahl Gallery papers are now housed in the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. The role of this gallery is discussed in Paul J. Karlstrom and Susan Ehrlich, Turning the Tide: Early Los Angeles Modernists, 1920-1956 (Santa Barbara: Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1990) and in Michael D. Coe, "From Huaquero to Connoisseur: The Early Market in pre-Columbian Art," in Elizabeth Hill Boone, ed., Collecting the Pre-Columbian Past (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks. 1993), pp. 279-281. A more significant figure is Marius de Zayas, a Mexican who collaborated with Alfred Stieglitz in bringing the first exhibitions of modern art to the Americas. Impressed by the cubist interest in African sculpture, de Zayas organized in 1914 the exhibition "African Negro Art," and installed in 1916 ancient stone objects from central Mexico alongside cubist works by Diego Rivera. The only previous exhibition of pre-Columbian objects as art had been a 1912 display of Maya jade, ceramics and sculptu res from Harvard's Peabody Museum at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. De Zayas's own account of the early years of modernist painting in the U.S. is given in Francis M. Naumann, ed., How, When, and Why Modern Art Came to New York (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1996). See also Douglas Hyland, Marius de Zayas Conjurer of Souls (Lawrence, KS: Spencer Museum of Art, 1981); william Innes Homer, Alfred Stieglitz and the American avant-garde (Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1977); Marius de Zayas, African Negro Art: Its Influence on Modern Art (New York: Modern Gallery, 1916).

(2.) Eight of the 195 works reproduced in the "20th Century Section" are represented with color plates. All the plates in the "Pre-Columbian Section" are black and white.

(3.) Ann Temkin, "Afterword," in Photogravity (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Musem of Art, 1999), p. 176.

(4.) These include the primary color circles of the Caja de luz/Light Sign (1995), the cut-out discs of the Moon Trees/Arboles lunares (1996), the modified plane tickets of Servicio especial and De Berlin a Nueva York (both 1997), altered sports photographs (the Atomists series, 1996) and bank notes (1997), as well as the Tapes de Yogurt/Yogurt Lids (1994).

(5.) As early as 1520 Albrechst Durer saw beauty in the loot sent to Europe by Cortez, writing in a well-known, passage: "I saw the things that which have been brought to the King from the new golden land...All the days of my life I have seen nothing that has gladdened the heart so much as these things, for I saw among them wonderful works of art, and I marveled at the subtle ingenia of men in foreign lands." Quoted in Hugh Honour, The New Golden Land: European Images of the Americas from the Discoveries to the Present Time (New York: Pantheon Books, 1975), p. 28. A helpful survey of post-Cortesian aesthetic evaluations of ancient Mexico is offered in the first chapter of Barbara Braun, Pre-Columbian Art and the Post-Columbian World (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1993).

(6.) Robert Goldwater. Primitivism in Modern Art (New York: Vintage, 1967), p. 266. The exhibition and catalog "Primitivism" in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and tire Modern makes the same omission, in part because they were, that "more archaic than primitive in nature." William Rubin, ed., "Primitivism" in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern (New York: Museum of Modern Art. 1984), p.76:

(7.) I am referring here to meticulous scholarship on the encounter of Picasso, Klee, Brancusi and other modernists with non-western aesthetics gathered in the exhibition catalog edited by Rubin, ibid.

(8.) Ibid., p.73.

(9.) James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture (Cambridge, MA: Havard University Press, 1988), p. 197.

(10.) This is the word most often used by Marius de Zayas and his contemporaries in accounts of the appropriation of African forms. His book, How, When, and Why Modern Art Came to New York tells one of "several stories about how Negro Art was discovered." This version, indebted to Francis Carco's De Monmartre au Quartier Latin, recounts that it was Vlaminck who "discovered in a 'bistrot' at Bougival a negro statuette which he acquired by paying a round of white wine." Declaring it "almost as beautiful as the Venus de Milo," he took the object to Derain, who declared the sculpture "as beautiful." The two decided to show the piece to Picasso, who "at last, having found how to outbid these two opinions, too daring for the epoch, affirmed: "It is even more beautiful." De Zayas identifies this as the moment when "negro sculpture was discovered and consecrated as high art by the high priests of the modern movement." From How, When, and Why Modern Art Came to New York (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Techn ology Press, 1996), p. 56.

(11.) This essay is included in Clifford's collection The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988).

(12.) I explore this particular instance in greater detail in "On the Travels of the Chacmool," Architectural Design Vol. 69, no. 7-8 (1999), pp. 16-21.

(13.) Unpublished dissertation (Yale, 1998) by Roy Tripp Evans," Classical Frontiers: New World Antiquities in the American Imagination, 1820-1915"; Curtis M. Hinsley, "Hemispheric Hegemony in Early American Anthropology, 1841-1851: Reflections on John Lloyd Stephens and Lewis Henry Morgan" in June Helm, ed., Proceedings of the American Ethnological Society 1984 Meetings (American Ethnological Society), pp. 28-40; Cutis M. Hinsley, "In Search of the New World Classical," in Boone, pp. 105-121.

(14.) An essential bibliography for this topic would include Clifford, ibid.; Unpublished dissertation (UCLA, 1993) by Holly Barnet-Sanchez, "The Necessity of pre-Columbian Art: U.S. Museums and the Role of Foreign Policy in the Appropriation and Transformation of Mexican Heritage, 1933-1944"; Boone, ed., Collecting the Pre-Columbian Past; Virginia R. Dominguez, "The Marketing of Heritage," Americans Ethnologist 13 (1986), p. 546-555; unpublished dissertaion (Columbia, 1983) by Dan Eban, "From the Cabinet of Curiosities to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Beyond: A Study of the Transformation of the Ethnographic Artifact into the Primitive and Pre-Columbian Art Object."

(15.) Rubin, Ibid., p.18.

(16.) David Hackett Fischer offers a sampling of such false analogies in the ninth chapter of his Historians' Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1970).

(17.) The Waldeck "discovery" of elephants amongst the Maya carvings is discussed in J. Eric S. Thompson, "Elephant Heads in the Waldeck Manuscript," Scientific Monthly 25 (1927), pp. 392-397. The same theme reappears (nearly a century after Waldeck's two-year long residency at Palenque) in G. Elliot Smith, Elephants and Ethnologists (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co., Ltd., 1924).

(18.) Desire Charnay, The Ancient Cities of the New World, J. Gonino and Helen S. Conant, trans. (London: Chapman and Hall, 1887), p.249.

(19.) James Thrall Soby, "Marcel Duchamp in the Arensberg Collection," in View Vol. 5, no. 1 (March 1945), p. 11. Today one can see a similarly eclectic sort of installation in Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

(20.) Thomas McEvilley, "Doctor Lawyer Indian Chief: 'Primitivism' in 20th Century Art at the Museum of Modern Art in 1984," in Artforum 23 (November 1984), p. 59.

(21.) Quoted in Robert Goldwater, Primitivism in Modern Art (New York: Vintage, 1967), p. 155.

(22.) Orozco states that Duchamp, Piero Manzoni and Kurt Schwitters are the three artists who have influenced him the most in "Benjamin Buchloh interviews Gabriel Orozco in New York," in Clinton is Innocent (Paris: Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1998), p. 75. The multiple connections linking Orozco's work to Duchamp include the use of ready-mades, the interest in games, as well as the chess pieces, bicycle wheels, etc.

(23.) For more on the relationship between the Arensbergs and Duchamp, see Naomi Sawelson-Gorse, "Hollywood Conversations: Duchamp and the Arensbergs," in Bonnie Clearwater, ed., West Coast Duchamp (Miami Beach, FL: Grassfield Press, 1991), pp. 24-45; Molly Nesbit and Naomi Sawelson-Gorse, "Concept of Nothing: New Notes by Marcel Duchamp and Walter Arensberg," in Martha Buskirk and Mignon Nixon, eds., The Duchamp Effect (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press and October Books, 1996), pp. 131-176.

(24.) The "number two" refers so an earlier version, completed the previous year. The Arensbergs later acquired two other versions of the same painting, the one exhibited at the Armory show as well as version "number one."

(25.) Francis M. Naumann, Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Making Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1999), p. 167.

(26.) Ibid., p. 15.

(27.) Dawn Ades, Neil Cox and David Hopkins Marcel Duchamp (London: Thames and Hudson, 1999), p. 181. The reference is to Ecke Bonk, Marcel Duchamp: The Box in a Valise/The Portable Museum: The Making of Boite-en-valise De ou par Marcel Duchamp ou Rrose Selavy (New York: Rizzoli, 1989).

(28.) Benjamin Buchloh discusses this issue in relationship to Orozco's work in "Benjamin Buchloh interviews Gabriel Orozco in New York," in Clinton is Innocent, p.29.

(29.) William Camfield, "Duchamp's Fountain: Aesthetic Object, Icon or Anti-Art?" in Thierry de Duve, ed., The Definitively Unfinished Marcel Duchamp (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press and October Books, 1991), p. 161.

(30.) Kynaston McShire, "Introduction," in Museum as Muse: Artists Reflect (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1999), p. 11.

(31.) Harry Zohn, trans., Illuminations (New York: Schoken Books, 1969), pp. 217-251.

(32.) In Stockholm, for instance, Duchamp signed replicas of his Large Glass, Bicycle Wheel, and Fresh Widow that had been prepared for a Swedish exhibition. His autographed dedication to Ulf Linde, who lead the replication effort, reads "d'un sosie a l'autre" (translatable as either "from one imitator so another," though sosie can also mean double or doppelganger.) See Francis M. Naumann, Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Making Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, pp.216-219.

(33.) The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) recreated this exhibition in 1989.

(34.) Clearwater. p. 110.

(35.) Ibid.