Donald Kuspit "Signs of Living Death: Alberto Montaño’s New Paintings"

In a sense, Alberto Montaño’s Niño, 1993 epitomizes his new paintings, both in terms of loss and his abstract-semiotic method of rendering and mastering it. The canvas is unevenly divided: a field of gray, relativelu uniorm, aboce a larger, mottled (with gray) field of yellow.
On the upper field, there is the imprint-trace of a slipper; on the lower field, the word of the title has been printed by an innocent hand, as though that of the Niño himself. But of course it was written by Montaño, suggesting his identification with the boy. Indeed, Niño’s first letter is capitalized, suggesting that is not just any boy that is being alluded to, but a very particular boy: Montaño’s son. The capitalization implies his idealization. The gray is that of lead, rich with its associations of heaviness, gravity, inertia. It is finally a symbol of depression. The lead is a gray cloud hanging over the radiant yellow that suffuses the word Niño. The power and meaning of Montaño’s work exits in the interplay of the fields. At the time their contrast seems poignant, at times ironic, depending upon how we emotionally read the tension between them. Clearly, the painting’s lack of balance onveys ambiavalence.

In conversation, Montaño states that the slipper is a self-symbol. It represents the slippers he wore, for a year, after the mysterious death of his son. Montaño could not leave his house. He spend most of his time depressed in bed, traumatized by his son’s death, or else shuffling around, like a somnambulist, in the privacy of his home. But now he has gone public with his grief, mastering it through art. He has risen from his bed as if from the grave -his son’s grave- and no longer needs his slippers. They survive as a symbol: literally buryng them under the shroud of lead, they are reduced to the economy of sign – and outline. They stand in relief as a momento mori iof his son’s literal and his own figurative death-his death by identification with his son. Both slippers and the word Niño are residues of suffering-different ways of acknowledging it. With the word Niño Montaño acknowledges that his son now exists only in name. Hes has been reduced to an abstract word by death, perhaps generalized into an essence of boyness. The living, radiant word replaces the lost boy: the word is loved as the boy was loved.

In oscillating from the gray field to the yellow field, from the slipper that is the symbol of Montaño to the word that is the symbol of his son, the spectator follows the oscillation of Montaño’s spirit, trapped between depression at his son’s death and the elated memory, however abstract and minc, fading and reified in a word, of his presence. The pictorial split-the abstract partitioning of the work, in a way familiar since the abstract paintings of Mark Rothko-is agravated by the equally abstract contraditction between the shadow – like slipper and the word Niño, wich is also like a shadow.
The split reflects Montaño’s feeling of absolute separation from his son. The signs in the upper and lower fields of the paintings are different in kind, just as the colors are. The sharpness of that difference makes clear the primitive character of the split in Montaño’s psyche: the split defends against the death and loss of his son by announcing his own death, that is, his own loss of self-posession. It is as though the clarity of the split in the painting stabilizes the split in Montaño’s psyche, suggesting that the former is a way of living with and making good the latter.

Sings are a staple of Montaño’s art. From the start, virtually every one of his paintings has been, as Charles Merewether has written, a “field of signs.” They are “hermetic and fetish-like” for all their”referentiality.” But Niño shows a new concentration purpose – a new intensity and intimacy. With his son’s death, abstract painting has taken on a new meaning and importance for Montaño. His son’s death was a catalyst for a new consciusness of its expressive possibilities.
Indeed, his son’s loss has permitted artistic gains – has permitted him to realize the potential latent in his earlier works. In a sense, the earlier abstractions were fertile field waiting for the seed of death to bring them to artistic life. Montaño’s earlier abstractions were emotionally unfocussed, howerver “moody”; his new ones are imbued with the sense of inner necessity and conviction that comes from profound personal investment. It as though his son’s death permitted Montaño to reach an artistic as well as emotional depth in his earlier works only hinted at. In using his abstract painting to work through the particular associations and feelings aroused by his son’s death, Montaño has come into his own as an artist.

Comparing the high-heeled shoe of La Viuda Alegre, 1989, with the slipper of Niño, we notice that the former is rendered in a more remote, sketchy way. In contrast, the slipper has the force of destiny, the urgent, Delphic presence of an omen. The contrast between the upper and lower fields of La Viuda Alegre is less absolute and more arch—however strong the passion conveyed-than the contrast between the fields of Niño. Similarly, the glyphs in The Glyphs Oracle, 1990 – they are related to Adolph Gottlieb’s pictographs—are randomly displayed, and generalized. They do not make common cause. The Eclipse, 1990 is an abstract cosmic event with no personal import, however evocative of the “dark side” of life. Similarly, the 1992 Act of Faith renders the abstract notion of a mystical act of faith, rather than the conversion experience of a particular person. In fact, it seems to ironically render the loss of faith, caused by the eclipse of his son’s life, foretold in the oracle of the glyphs, as though it was destined. The peculiar barrenness and morbidity of these last three works, made after the sudden death of Montaño’s son, seem to register its generally depressing effect on Montaño. In contrast Niño recapitulates the boy’s presence in symbolic form, and thus represents Montaño’s attempt to heal himself.

Thus these four diptychs have their own pathos and subtlety, but they do not fully establish the “negative dialectic” of the other dyptychs. That is, their fields are not irreconcilable, but harmonize in a morbid cosmic blur of “significance.” In contrast, the fields of Nino are incompatible, even incommensurate, to the extent of suggesting altogether different realms of experience, and even being: the state of being of the living father and of the dead son. They can never be united, however technically related: the father exists in a space parallel to that of the son. They will never meet, even in infinity. Montaño’spaintings, which at first glance can be interpreted as statements of symbiotic merger, in fact reinforce his separation from his son. That separation is self-evident in his split psyche. (The difference between the fields also represents Montaño’s conflict about his son’s death. He blames himself for it, producing a quilt that conflicts with his love for his son.)

Thus Montaño’s, new paintings are dominated by the death instinct. They perform what psychoanalysts call mourning work. Where the earlier works were abstractly mournful, as though mourning for a loss that had not yet occurred—as though trying to rehearse mourning Montaño’s new works actually mourn an actual death. Death, abstract or actual is hardly a new theme in art, certainly not in Mexican art: the omipotence and omnipresence of death is a perennial theme, whether rendered in the terms of Aztec or Christian myth. Montaño uses neither to represent death, however much he alludes to both, particularly by way of the sacrificial, sacramental character of his objects: his diptychs are a kind of altarpiece. What is special —psychologically sophisticated— about his signs of death is that they are simultaneously signs of life. Montaño does not use conventional, culturally sanctioned emblems of death, but ordinary images of objects taken from life that by his treatment of them become signs that represent the passage from life to death.

They are used to suggest the fact that death lurks in life the way a worm hides in an apple or a canker in a rose. Montaño’s, signs symbolize the scene of life suddenly become obscene with death. His “scenic” objects seem alive, but they have the stiffness of puppets and air of being removed that accompanies death. They are thus signs of living death. Their ambiguity implies that whether we live or die is a matter of blind fate. Among lead’s other meanings, it symbolizes the indifference of fate. Life and death are both fated-a notion that philosophically reconciles us to the fact that death can destroy life at any moment.

In a sense, the question of Montaño’s work is whether the fatal lead of fate can be a alchemically transmuted into the gold of living art, and thus in a sense redeem death, make loss good. To put this another way, the problem of Niño is how to move from the gloomy, hadean gray lead of the upper father field to the radiant, heavenly gold of the lower son field. Above all, the perceptual conceptual problem is to accept their co-existence but irreconcilability. Each field may partially “translate” into the terms of the other-the yellow is informed by gray, as noted-but its terms are so completely different in spirit that they are incomprehensible to the other. The suggestion of a possible transposition of qualities, which brings with it a sense that the father is ready to trade places with the son, raises a hope that makes the over-all melancholy of Montaño’s paintings even more moving.

Moreover, this unconscious wish for a reversal of the profound reversal which death is, especially the sudden, unexpected death of a child, is a kind of perverse, however reluctant recognition, even acceptance, of death, that is, of the inevitable. If, as Aristotle wrote, tragedy deals with sudden, unexpected reversal of fortune, and recognition of it as fated-an explicit recognition that brings with it, paradoxically, subliminal recognition of the meaning and value of life-then Montaño’spaintings are high tragic art. They not only reconcile him to the reversal of his fortune that the sudden, unexpected death of his son was, but subtly disclose the meaning and value of his son’s life as well’ as life in general.

I think this tragic “mechanism” of reversal -and– recognition is dramatically explicit in La Calzada de los Muertos, 1993. It alludes to the famous street of that name in Teotihuacan, the City of the Gods. The paradox of the numerous small skulls on that sacred street, and in Montaño’s sacred painting, is that they look-and emotionally are – alive. They are obiects we have lost but still profoundly value. Thus they seem alive, and are in fact completely alive inside us. They are signs of living death, but also of how alive the dead are. The tragedy and paradox of the fatal loss of an object is that it makes us aware of how alive it once was, and how alive it still is in us and how valuable it remains to us-indeed, how much our sense of being alive and valuable are connected to our sense of its aliveness and value. So long as we can reach it in spirit, however unreachable it is in actuality the Montaño’s split abstractions acknowledge both-we can feel alive and of value.

It is only after its death that we can “artistically” plumb the depths of our relationship with it, and our dependence on it for our own feeling of life. That is it is only after its death that we can recognize who we ourselves are, that is, recognize how much we lived in and through the object. Thus, as Montaño’s Autorretrato I and Autorretrato Peaton con Capullo (both 1993) make clear, death is as much an instrument of self-recognition-the “Minimalist” rows of slippers in the latter represent Montaño’s self —obsession–as it is a means of recognizing the emotional presence as well as physical absence of the other.

Montaño’s paintings are, then, a psychologically complex semiotic. Triumph of Death-an allegory of signs of death that bespeak its inevitability as well as its power to illuminate life, by sharply contrasting with it yet perversely resembling it. Again and again, in a kind of obsessive-compulsive repetition a sign of inner fate, as it were -Montaño signals the difference yet weird affinity between life and death. In Autorretrato I the living if depressed Montaño, with his dead Nino on his mind, is juxtaposed with a potent symbol of the life force-the erotic highheeled shoes that represent the phallic woman, that is, the pre-Oedipal mother. In Autorretrato Peaton con Capullo Montaño again juxtaposes his depressed self, in the form of the slippers, and the bright yellow cocoon/larva/embryo emblematic of his son, whose life was in effect nipped in the bud.

Alembic, Broccoli, Again, Espiral, Tres (all 1993) represent objects food, spoons used for eating, toys-associated with his son. Virtually all these objects are funeral fetishes, to allude to the title of Fetiche Funeral, 1993. They not only represent the phallus that fertilized the woman who gave birth to his son, but reified-obsessively and compulsively repeated associations and feelings about him. Fertilizante, 1993 symbolically reifies the moment of conception of the child, as though Montaño wishes he had never been born. Freud points out that we obsessively and compulsively repeat when we cannot remember, in a gesture of denial of what we want to remember, even as repetition is an at tempt to master a trauma that has become unconscious but can be mastered by being remembered, that is, made conscious. Montaño’s paintings are at once involuntary repetition compulsions of signs and events associated with his son’s life, and at the same time desperately willed remembrances of his son’s death. They symbolically repeat that death and simultaneously work through and master its traumatic effect on Montaño.

In Arbolito, El Arbol Caido, and El Costillar (all 1993) Montaño moves away from his obsession with his son’s death and life to archetypal, universal signs afirming life, namely, the tree and the egg. While Juguetes, 1993 seems to return to the therm, of his son’s death, in fact the black signs of toys in the lower field resemble the earlier glyphs, both in shape and in their random jumble. Similarly, the egg is an archetypaI, universal symbol, however much it might be personally appropriated. However erratically, Montaño achieves, through a process of generalization, a certain distance from his son’s death and life. He no longer blames himself for it, but impersonal, indifferent fate. Death is a universal, and he turns to symbols of universal life to counteract and survive it. Reconciliation with the dead through fate, and the diffusion of survivor guilt in the universal that transcends the individual, are psychic strategies that permit life to affirm itself and continue.

Nonetheless, in his most recent works-Bonita, Sana, sana, colita de rana, Extremascara, and Un solito, all 1994 -the split continues. It has become a grand obsessior, with an artistic life of its own. But there has been a new deveopment: the painting has been polarized into black and white parts, as though in Manichean dual. Bonitastrong> represents the pretty doll the blonde, white woman-in whom the larva-embryo in the lower level grew. It is also ironically “pretty” as much of a monstrous “deformation” as the doll, which lacks arms and legs. In Sana, sana, colita de rana-a rhyme one tells to a hurt child-the armless and legless doll is now dearly Montaño’s dead child, its body and face ironically covered, for the covering is simultaneously swaddling cloth and shroud.

Only the tip of the child’s nose and pink lips appear, as though to signal, with bitter poignancy, the loss of the child’s whole being. The fact that the doll is the same one that appeared in Bonita suggests the identification of the mother with her child. Both have in fact disappeared from Montaño’s life. Extremascara an invented word, meaning “extreme mask” (it combines “extremity” and “mask”)-shows us Montaño again, wearing the “original face” of his suffering, as Michael Eigon calls our true inner face. Memory fragments of his son exist in the space above his head, which is as bleakly white-pale as death-as they are.
And indeed it is the face of his living death that Montaño uncovers for us. Death also makes itself felt in Un solito, alluding to the first steps a child takes on its own. Here, indeed, they are pathetically solitary. Whatever else they are about, the black forms in the picture’s lower register negate these steps. It is as though Montaño wishes his son was never born, so that he and Montaño himself, in a different way- would neyer have died.

Montaño is in effect cancelling out signs-memories of his son’s existence in the very at of memorializing it. It is a strange fresh start that Montaño is proposing for himself-a fresh start premised on a death that continues to haunt him. A final word about the artistic method in Montaño’s“madness” -the ingenious way he renders the depression or symbolic death the death of his son induced in him, and his “resurrection” to eternal life, as it were. Like slippers, eggs and branches are literally embedded-buried-in the lead, giving death, as well as the paintings, a startling sculptural presence and projective power.

The infantile fragility of the lettering suggests the hand of Montaño’s son, as i have noted. But the important point is that it is a “spirit” writing as “ghostly” as any of Montaño’s. signs. (A sign-language-is a kind of ghost.) Similarly, Montaño’s signs, by reason of the economy of their execution and frontal / confrontal presentation, seem beyond time and space, even as they appear, in an emotionally timely way, in the “spiritual” space of the field.

Above all, what makes Montaño’s paintings particularly impressive is their complicated surface, which he plays with virtuoso intensity. Lead is simultaneously hard and soft surface. More particularly, it integrates hard objects by shrouding them with its insidious softness. Indeed, it turns them into-me-morializes them as -enigmatic arts, which makes their significance as forms of life all the more emphatic Montaño’s, use of lead as a shroud is a wonderful way of suggesting that the signs of living death are in the process of being repressed.

That is, they are being removed to the unconscious. Viewing them in mid-process-as simultaneously absent and present, emotionally neutral yet charged with intense feeling, flattening into outlines yet force-fully three-dimensional-we become hyper-conscious of their existence, making them all the more real and meaningful. Montaño’s uncanny mix of paint and lead-dense and flexible in different ways-bespeaks the uncanny relationship between the life and death instincts. His work generates a sense of enigma that reminds us of their enigmatic interplay, which is the highest compliment i can pay it.