Essay from the exhibition catalog: “Vaguely Chicana”. Tropico De Nopal Gallery Art Space, Los Angeles 2008
The Poetry of Embodiment:
Series and Variation in Linda Arreola’s Vaguely Chicana
By Laura E. Pérez
At the hidden heart of what the European West has claimed as its intellectual core lies the classical Greek world of Pythagoras, the ancient Greek mystic and artist, who inspired and informed the work of later figures such as Plato. Pythagoras taught of the harmony of the spheres and developed systems of harmony in music and drawing as a reflection of the natural world and the principle of sacred geometry: God or the gods’ signature through the formal beauty and hidden codes, decipherable numerically, in the natural world.
When I look at Linda Arreola’s work, particularly the collection presented in Vaguely Chicana, I am reminded as well of the cross-cultural principle of harmonious balance of differences, derived from the observation of nature, and the gentle tension between core patterns and variations within these. A lush landscape in spring, variations of green, speckled with the yellow of new daffodils, the blues of irises, red tulips, of random variation held, as it were, within the bosom of a green (or brown or yellow) hillside, this is what Linda’s work brings to mind. A capturing of essential unity and in the stillness of closer observation, noticeable individuation.
In this, Linda’s work is for me both like Miró’s and that of the Russian constructivist, El Lissitzky. Form serves to anchor poetry. Disciplined, repetitive geometric shape, pattern and color series alongside the random splash of color, a sudden reversal of color and shape distribution, letters floating in all directions, and organic waves and globular figures cutting across the rest.
Linda’s work reveals beauty in the constancy and essence of geometric form, the stencil, and minimal color palettes, yet, crucially allows for the witness of the human trace, the signature of the unique, the irrepeatable, the unexpected. The poetic in itself is sign of the enigmatic, of the unsayable. Cipher and the indecipherable. The power and beauty of Linda’s work rests in this liminal sensibility for me. And, in so many of her pieces I find an irrepressible joy and energy, an affirmation of the constancy of change, inserted in what could be dry, cerebral exercises. Some minimalist sculpture, for all its stark beauty, for example, speaks anorexically of a binary, dogmatic aesthetic of skeletal purity. But beauty and purity are also lush, baroque, unmappable.
Poetry does not serve form. It is form that serves, that follows, the intuition of the poetic. Linda’s work in Vaguely Chicana embodies a pleasure in structure, in the materiality of embodied, and in its knowability, but it also witnesses that which is glimpsed beyond, between, alongside that which has a name, a figure. Her work captures the unexpected hybrid, the sudden birth of new forms, evoking in this way, the birth of all form. Constancy, repetition, identity giving way in a sudden emergence to difference, variation, serendipity.
Linda’s work opens before me like a landscape, like the spirit of a historical epoch, like a ten year cycle of past life, only now beginning to take shape, to become meaningful, coherent. I cannot perceive it all. I see some of it only at a distance as the dance of color and shape that reminds me of a swarm of bees, the organic dance of two strands of DNA, a core of microparticles dancing in space.
Part and parcel of these forms is their porosity, their commingling, their promiscuous transgression of borders, their essential hybridity. Poetry obeys natural, not social laws. Miró, Kandinsky, El Lissitzky, Motherwell, these are names that come to mind when I think of the primeval joy of the visual, the birth of color, the birth of form, birth itself, spoken of through the sculptural in paint. Geometry and poetry, the grid and serendipity. This is the stuff of which the living and its poetry are made. Vaguely Chicana registers the search for meaning, the capturing of that meaning as “flower and song,” in ixtli, in cuicatl, that is, as the poetic, as the Mesoamerican king, philosopher, and poet, Nezahualcoyotl mused in the fifteenth century, shortly before the colonial invasions of the continent. How can a marker of cultural-ethnic and gender forms such as the word “Chicana,” or Irish, Polish, or English woman be anything other than vague, even while it is also quite historically and culturally specific? The natural world shows us both essential identities through repetitious forms, and variations within these. Difference and identity simultaneously, playfully, mysteriously.
Laura E. Pérez is author of Chicana Art: The Politics of Spiritual and Aesthetic Altarities (Duke University Press 2007) and of the forthcoming Ero-Ideologies: Writings on Art, Politics, and Spirituality (Duke University Press). She is an associate professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.