I had turned eighteen a few days before my parents took me to tour part of the continent. It was a middle-class Buenos Aires custom: you had to travel to understand how big and complex the world was. Perhaps the tradition of the Grand and Petit Tour of the Generation of 1880 was followed, it is possible, already adapted to a Latin America that replaced – lowering costs – the necessary trip before “settling down.” Do Peru and Mexico replace Egypt and Crete? It is possible and I appreciate it.
On a street in Mérida, in the Yucatán, with my brain full of ruins, pyramids, historical monuments, museums, unimaginable traditions in our Buenos Aires, I saw a ceramic angel (an angel actually, because she was a woman, different from men ) dressed in Yucatecan clothing: the huipil. (You can see the image at the beginning of the article) Was it possible for an angel to be a woman and dressed as an indigenous person? At that age, those questions generate a lot of ideas. One of them was to begin to buy – sometimes compulsively – popular art from Latin America and to try to understand what the intellectuals of his time divided between high art and popular art.
Trip after trip I filled my house, to my family's suffering, with objects and boxes full of them: bathrooms, kitchen, every possible place was the right place for something new. Obviously the problem was money since few could access the large pieces that were reaching unsuspected values, but… you had to buy as much as possible. I once wanted, obsessively, a “ferris wheel” that was made in Oaxaca, but when I decided to buy it the artisan had died. Convincing one of her children to take up the craft was an adventure that took two years of traveling, until the piece was ready.
Of course, we are talking about before popular art museums multiplied across the continent, when it was still possible to buy the Guarani figure of a crocodile catching a fish. Unusual since those animals never do it. Or finding ceramic giraffes in Paraguay whose inspiration was born to that potter in a magazine with photos of Africa. And since the photograph was broken, the giraffes had short, thick legs: a marvel of spontaneous creation. I have on my table an elephant from Mitla, where the alebrijes, today world-famous objects, were born in the 1970s. There I found an elephant with its four calves, except that it carries them on its back as if it were a possum. Whoever created that enormous painted wooden image must have seen an elephant on television, but without a calf, the rest was his imagination.
The penetrating gaze of the yaguareté in a guaranític carving. Misiones, Argentina. Photography: D. Schávelzon.
Donating a large part of the collection to the José Hernández Museum of Popular Motifs was an acute pain. It was fifty years of seeing them every day, sharing their beauty and multiple meanings. But there went almost three hundred pieces that now belong to everyone, and the books on the subject that increased his library.
Let's imagine: looking up and seeing four meters high, a wooden parrot painted in bright colors, two meters long (bought in Misiones and for which I had to pay for the seat next to me on the plane to take it); have braided baskets under the table full of knives, spoons and hand-carved wooden objects brought from Chaco and Formosa, look at a niche in the wall where there was a pair of broken oars worn by water over a century (collected in the Paraná River).
Peruvian folk art. Photography: Daniel Schávelzon.
Do you know what it's like to ask my son in his ear to get up from a cushion on which he sat in a third-class trough on a trip to Neuquén and buy it from the cook as a marvel of sewing, or to see a wooden cross? in that the small images that decorate it were placed inside colorfully painted soda caps? The pleasure of buying my wife clothes from each country, or delaying a flight from Caracas to purchase all the ceramic animals from an airport store. What can I tell you about the emotion that guided me when I went out to search throughout Cuzco who made the bulls that are placed on the tiles when inaugurating a house in the mountains. In the United States, in the south, exotic animals carved in wood are sold, like an unusual zebra, and knowing that in my house no one wanted to clean a room because there was a wooden skeleton with a sickle in its hand. It was an anxious search that one day had to end. In our country, could someone make Zapatista guerrillas with old fabrics and sell them? I already experienced that collection, now let everyone who wants to enjoy it.
The message was explicit, and they were sold in the market of Chiapas, Mexico. Photography: Daniel Schávelzon.
The latest craft
Walking through the city of Oaxaca, among the craft vendors in front of the Santo Domingo convent, I had an impossible vision. I had already donated my collection so I was going through this time in my life in which I had decided not to buy anything else, ever. It was a difficult week to accept it with hundreds of crafts on the street. Until I saw a simple and tasteless airplane made of ceramic. The wings were stumps, the windows were square, it was a short-lived toy, why did I want to know more details? Finally I asked the saleswoman, idiot of me: - Why doesn't it have a door?
The silence was absolute and the look I received led me to regret it. The lady answered, with a soft voice: - And why are there doors going to be there? I saw many pass through the air and none of them had any.
She had screwed up and I continued the dialogue, surely deepening the gesture of absurd superiority. Lady: travelers arrive inside, how do they get in and out?
But what she said was true: the airplane doors are hidden in the fuselage, the plane moves into the distance across the sky, you can't see them. - Well, my son, I don't see any doors, so they don't exist.
I bought the plane, shut up and left, and I didn't sleep that night. The plane also went to the museum.
* Special for Hilario. Arts Letters Trades