Mexican Art and the Destruction of Hegemonic Myths, Essay Example

In Mirkin’s article “Images of Childbirth in Modern Mexican Art”, I was most drawn to a short, yet powerful statement: “senility and madness, although unquestionably personal phenomena, may at times reflect the social and political environment.” (22) This statement can be said to both function as an independent observation of the particular phenomena discussed, while also summarizing the radical changes in perspective that the Mexican art discussed in the article bring about. As Mirkin notes, senility and madness have a subjective dimension; however, they can also possess a social symbolism. Senility is often thought about as the individual’s mental deterioration with age and with time, whereas madness denotes the individual’s mental deterioration irrespective of time. In both cases, however, deterioration is only visible when it is contrasted with what it is considered to be “normal.” Namely, senility and madness, although they can be debilitating to the individual, also reveal the boundaries and prejudices of what we consider to be a normal mental life. Accordingly, Mirkin’s remark is provocative because it lets us think about how minorities and anomalies in society in themselves tell us about the deep-seeded prejudices of this society, which makes the minority or the anomaly appear in these particular forms.

In this regard, Frida Kahlo’s oil on metal work My Birth (1932) can be viewed as exposing some of the social normativities that inform how we look at the world. Kahlo plays with the traditionally assigned roles of the birthing process, covering the mother’s head as though it were a dead body, while placing a human head in the birth canal. This contrast between the headless mother and what appears to the head of the child disorients our common perceptions of the birthing process, as the mother is viewed from a patriarchal point of view as a child-producing machine. Kahlo strives to show how such a viewpoint negates the identity of the mother as an individual, as demonstrated in her own face being covered by a blanket. Much like senility and madness, the mother may also be defined in terms of normativities that are not a part of her own subjectivity. What is crucial is therefore to understand how these normativities structure our lives, and understand that they are merely contingent phenomena, which covertly intend to maintain an already existing hierarchy of how to look at the world.

References

Mirkin, Dina Comisarecno. “Images of Childbirth in Modern Mexican Art.” Woman’s Art Journal. Vol. 20, No. 1, Spring-Summer, 1999. 18-24.