The Aztec Hieroglyph and the Black Dancer: Rosa Covarrubias and Walter Nicks at El Eco

• In Event: Entanglements of Blackness and Brownness in the Aesthetic Production of the Americas

Abstract

In images of the Walter Nicks Jazz Dance Troupe at the inauguration of the Museo Experimental El Eco in Mexico City, 1953, the black dancers perform in the presence of artist Mathias Goeritz’s Serpiente sculpture in its courtyard, their motions choreographed by surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel. The dancers are adorned in costumes designed by the Mexican-American expatriate and polyglot artist Rosa Rolanda Covarrubias, inspired by the hieroglyphics of the Aztec codex. This moment continues to be mythologized in the history of El Eco–– an institution that continues to be celebrated as Mexico City’s first modern art museum, in great part for showcasing (as described by a recent Mexican culture blog) the “mestizo mixture of humanity.”

Even at its most bohemian or experimental, the institutional spaces of art museums are often bound to a progressive account of the nation. Such curation tends to categorize certain subjects of study at the expense of others, often occluding figures who provide the underpinnings of their celebrated collections. In the history of the avant-garde, Rosa Covarrubias is often reduced to a footnote or passing mention in relation to the work of her husband, the artist and ethnologist Miguel Covarrubias. Meanwhile, former Katherine Dunham student Walter Nicks enjoyed a prolific international career throughout the Americas during his lifetime––yet his performance work and travel remains underread in the present. Despite their historical marginalization, I see their work and meeting in this collaboration as blurring the boundaries between the mestizaje of post-revolutionary Mexican nationalism and the exaltation of jazz as a counter-nationalist project for African Americans––the blur subtly showing itself in the hieroglyphics that adorn the black skin. This is further complicated by the perpetually migratory lives of both of these U.S.-born artists, whose aesthetics were greatly influenced by their travels and lives abroad.

In this paper I theorize the encounter between Nicks and Covarrubias as offering a counternarrative to the notion of nation-building aesthetics, escaping the frame of categorization. I especially hold to mind Hortense Spillers’ description of the black captive body as bearing the “undecipherable markings” of violence–– “hieroglyphics of flesh”––and am especially interested in thinking about the new possibilities created by a juxtaposition of blackness and brownness through Covarrubias’ alternative hieroglyphics. While I attend to some of the problems that such a theoretical translation raises, I also want to know: what possibilities in the performance escape the frame of the institution? What do they teach us about the way we historicize aesthetics? Pushing further with these two figures on the outskirts of the avant-garde: if the modern human subject of the nation-state is what the institution celebrates, how do think about the counternarratives embedded among its annals and archives?

Author

• Maryam I Parhizkar, Yale University