Yolanda Gutierrez : experences, metaphors and mythologies
Author: Maria Lluisa Borras
ArtNexus No. 39 - Feb 2001
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If the metaphors of antiquity anchor the work of the young artist in tradition, the re-vindication of ecological effort that they propose place her in front of an unpleasant future in which the threat
of progressive devastation of the natural heritage becomes more and more driving and distressing
Her simplicity is impressive. I would say that so too is her modesty, but this word seems obsolete today, in a world of arrogant and ambitious people. When she explains works to me that I have not been able to see, it becomes clear that words are not her usual language of communication, because her sentences do not come out easily. Instead, she makes a genuine effort that leaves her unsatisfied, and she quickly seeks help in pencil and paper.
Yolanda Gutiérrez was born in Mexico City but she lives and works in Cozumel, an island next to the Yucatan peninsula, facing Cuba and the Caribbean; that is, she lives surrounded by the sea. And I say this because water was has a prominent presence in her creative work. When the island suffered the havoc of the sadly famous Hurricane Roxanne that devastated its reserve, for example, Yolanda dedicated one of her largest pieces, Retoño (Sprout), to designing a refuge for birds in the middle of the lake that lies at the center of the island.
The eldest child of a family of boys, with two brothers and six cousins, she found herself excluded in a certain way from their games, and therefore forced to concentrate on herself, making animals her true companions and preferring them to any toy.
She says that she will never be able to forget the weekly visits of her rustic paternal grandparents in Toluca, to the northeast of Mexico City, where they farmed the land. Nor will she forget the long periods when,
as a girl, she would walk with her maternal grandmother in Xochimilco, near the lake district known throughout the world for its canals and floating gardens. This experience gave the teenager privileged contact with nature in a prodigious setting. A landscape that she would integrate into her work, thus bringing up to date a tradition that Octavio Paz defined once and for all when he said, “Landscape
is for the Mexican artist of all times a metaphor, a religion, an idea of man and the cosmos.” Yolanda has
created her greatest works in the landscapes where she grew up, particularly with regard to water.
Water is life
Even before the Aztecs, the culture of water existed in Mexico as a symbol of fertility, fecundity, life. In the day/night duality, the day is the serpent, a symbol of Quetzalcóatl, astral god of water and vegetation. Gutiérrez thus creates a Serpiente articulated of twenty-five meters made of large bone flakes, which allow it to move across the water. And from a distance it looked real. It was part of the Manantial Original (Original spring, 1994), made of two works that floated in the lagoon: Coatl, the serpent, and Gotas Vírgenes (Virgin drops), as a warning about the degradation of a lagoon that had been an integral part of the Texcoco basin. It was a route for river transportation that extended two-hundred kilometers from Mexico City to the Chalco Valley, and from there on to Puebla. With the arrival of the Spaniards in the sixteenth century, the drainage of the lagoon began. The ancient Tenochtitlan was raised on its banks, so that at the end of the nineteenth century the drainage had practically been achieved.
A few days ago, in reference to Coatl, the serpent, whose reproductive ability turned it into a pre-Hispanic symbol of fertility, Gutiérrez told me that, “The intention of my sculpture is to evoke the Nahuatl past symbolizing fertility through its great reproductive ability. Doing it with bones alludes to my own idea
of the cycle of life/death, and it is, in and of itself, an image of the ring that links the poles of life and death”.
What is certain is that Coatl, rippling in the water, had, in addition to its unusual beauty, the aspiration of sensitizing people to the deterioration of the waters of Mexico’s rivers, canals, and seas into which toxic materials are dumped. Gotas vírgenes also touched upon this proposal. This is another floating work on the contaminated waters that, in spite of having been treated by the government, have still not been completely cleaned up. Her installation consisted of sixty spheres of blown glass full of pure, virgin water, though not completely full, so that the expansion of the water would not break them.
In 1995, after Hurricane Roxanne ravaged the island of Cozumel, Gutiérrez created Retoño, relying as I said, on the advice of Laura Domínguez and Roberto Arturo Cabrales, biologists at the National University of Mexico. On the Colombia Lagoon located in the center of the island, she placed an enormous sculpture in order to give shelter to the sea birds and in order that they might make their nest in it. Constructed
with the trees and branches that the hurricane had uprooted, it was the largest lake work that she had undertaken, with a surface area of some one hundred fifty meters and six meters tall. The scientists proceeded toward a systematic observation that lasted four months, during which time they recorded three pairs of herons of the species Egretta rufascens which made their nests there, from which sprang several chicks. They also observed that fourteen different species of birds with a total of some two hundred examples spent the night in the sculpture.
Actually, the hurricane drove the team to start working again. A little earlier, Gutiérrez and the biologists had jointly carried out Santuario (Sanctuary), the first sculpture for birds in the humid lands of the Ecology Department in Xochimilco. This structure is built with baskets of sedge over a platform covered with pasture and tule from the area. Gutiérrez created it by considering the ducks and the migratory birds that, in fact, perch on it as if it were something of their own.
Very recently, in the spring of 2000, she titled her exhibition in the Museo Amparo of Puebla, made up of
fourteen works, simply Agua and she explained, “After investigating the theme of water in cultures such as the Chinese, the Mayan, and especially the Nahuatl, I believethat the ideal form of life and society is, for me, that which establishes a balanced, tight relationship between man,nature, and the spiritual”.
In La Tempestad (The tempest, 1997), exhibited in the show Soleils Mexicains (Petit Palais, Paris 2000), she illustrates the opposing forces found in the origin of life with a sheet of lead placed directly above the floor, across which the artist extends a layer of agave thorns. The lead is a metaphorical image of a water mirror that, through the tempest, brutally turns into an incommensurable surface of bones due to the drops of rain that bounce off the water.
Fire is death
It should not surprise us that the duality life/fire, in which water is life and fire is death, dominates the tradition of a tropical country in which the rainy season alternates with an atrocious draught. Tláloc, the Aztec god of water and vegetation, is not only the god of life but also of tempests and devastating tropical rains that demand the sacrifice of drowning human beings in order to continue his fertilizing action. He is opposed to Huehuetéotl, the god of fire and the heat of life who, in a land of volcanoes, also represents destruction, old age, and the warning of near death. Water and fire, a basic duality, if water is life, fire is
blood, a red river in which death is a rebirth.
Among the group shows in which the young artist had participated in her early days, one from 1989 titled Verte Que Te Quiero Muerte awoke in the young artist such an interest in death that she began to investigate this theme and, as a consequence, she delved into the knowledge of Nahuatl philosophy.
Even before her aquatic proposals, Yolanda Gutiérrez, in her first solo show of 1989, was inspired by
the duality life/death that she presented in Umbral (Threshold), a spectacular installation created with
nearly a hundred cow jaws that dramatically represented the flight of a flock of strange white birds, each one of them formed by three jaws, two for the wings and one for the body. The teeth suggest the serrated feathers of each wing, other jaws act as the body, and the molars are the vertebra. Heavy jaws of a cow or ox, suspended by almost imperceptible cords that speak of death as the origin of life. They therefore point to our personal and joint responsibility in the disappearance of the species.
The butterfly, Itzpapáloti, also symbolizes fire and death. For the Chichimecas, the butterfly was the mother
goddess, goddess of human sacrifice and of war. And among the Mexicas, it represented the souls of the dead. In one of her last projects realized in Puebla, she marked the itinerary with a series of butterflies that hung from the ceiling.
At the Museo del Chopo in 1995, in the sculpture Reconciliados (Reconciled), she tries to bring together once again the concepts of life and death with a large mass suspended from the ceiling that resembled human entrails, but was in reality a hodgepodge of braided wicker with an invisible iron framework
inside.
This is not the only piece that seeks to reconcile life and death. En Esencias (In Essences), shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Santiago de Chile in 1993, constructs lotus flowers out of bones and ashes, signs of reincarnation in Indian philosophy where life and death are simple stages. In Deshojándose Mi Alma (My Soul Losing Its Petals, 1997), the dry intestines of a pig simulate a delicate flower caught
by the brutal hook of the butcher. From the same year comes Aratinga (1997) in which Gutiérrez covers with tropical bird feathers a termite nest that she rescued on the island of Cozumel after a hurricane.
Poetics of the object
What is really surprising is that in only six years and with three large installations (Umbral, 1989, Manantial, 1994, and Santuario, 1995), Yolanda Gutiérrez had defined poetics of her own and she had placed herself among the most interesting creators of the last decades. And I am not referring to a
restricted field within her country.
The excellent manipulation of natural forms, both organic—like bones, intestines, or animal feathers—and inorganic, could only attract the attention of the artistic sector in Mexico, and the prestigious Museo Carrilo Gil opened its doors to her and she was invited to participate in the 1994 Havana Biennial.
If the metaphors of antiquity anchor the work of the young artist in tradition, the re-vindication of ecological effort that they propose place her in front of an unpleasant future in which the threat of
progressive devastation of the natural heritage becomes more and more driving and distressing.
She had begun by registering at the university in the painting section, but her contact with natural materials
immediately made her interested in the three dimensions. She began to search for natural materials in order to create her first works. Her first solo exhibition in 1989 (Casa de Cultura of the State University of Mexico in Tlalpan) was thus a real manifesto. She gave it the title Númenes (Numina), reflecting on the deities as they are understood in Nahuatl and Aztec mythology, which were not polytheist cultures as is commonly thought, but rather monotheist. In this way, the numina or deities of nature stem from multiple unfoldings and different aspects in which a unique Being manifests itself, a deity that is all-embracing, that has no name or graphic representation, something similar to the Tao, which cannot be named or described.
I ask her if they are a sort of familiar spirit and she clarifies that with the same name of númenes, distinct pre-Hispanic cultures refer to a sort of nocturnal spirit, mischievous and playful, but I am referring to the divine entities that reveal themselves through nature in the form of wind, water, certain animals, etc. I attempted to give them a presence in the works of that exhibition..
On the walls of the gallery, she made use of various fragments of palm bark, using talc as a pigment. The largest ones were half a meter tall, and the smaller ones measured some twenty-five centimeters. She titled the sculpture Numen De La Noche (Night Numen); its texture evokes the earth’s skin, nature, and all things in general on moonlit nights.
Since then, and all the way until this serpent made of scallop shells that I now see in a studio on the outskirts of Paris, the unfolding of her creative potential has been astonishing. Under the attentive eye of Yolanda Gutiérrez, the work will become a thirty-eight meter bronze serpent designed to float in the lake of the Parque de Saint Pierre in Amiens, sectioned into elements, and linked in a chain in order that the
wind may move it.
For example, she confers an air of eternity on Magia (Magic), a spiral piece inspired by the line of a nautilus and formed by sea snails cut in a way that they look like roses. Tzubim evokes a shrub in danger of extinction, a small centipede protected by a network of bones that recalls how nature endows its tiniest creatures with defensive elements.
Reina madre (Queen mother) is an object made with sea sponges pierced with a crown of maguey thorns, whose title makes no reference to the Virgin Mary, but rather to mother nature. Parásitos (Parasites) is an object that recalls the orchid or some other exotic flower that sets up a symbiosis on a palm tree in order to take nourishment from it. Relicario (Relic) is reduced to the bark of a palm that supports the feather of a seabird known as the spoonbill. She is especially interested in the relationships established in the vegetable world, and in proving how dependency can lead to destruction.
I must point out, however, that her pliancy allows her to make use of other types of materials, for example, the installation that she carried out for Houston’s Tranquility Park titled En Común (In common). This installation used materials of an industrial nature (wheelbarrows and construction shovels) in a subtle evocation of Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, in which the bathers on the shore turn
into strange mechanical insects.
Fértil (Fertile), a bloom of immense land mixed with straw, branches, and bones evoked the idea of mother earth with an opening in the narrowest part in order to simulate the uterus, a fertile, humid, and warm space that also has connotations of refuge or burrow.
Works 2000
To mention just two of her latest activities, I shall finish by referring to the invitation that the artist received from the government of her country to participate in the Mexico Pavilion at Expo 2000 in Hanover. She was assigned the theme of Democracy. And knowing her work, it is well worth our asking how Yolanda Gutiérrez was planning to resolve this tricky problem. She explained to me: Every theme has two ways
of being resolved, out in the open or with an interior installation where it is possible to delve into poetic language. I titled the work Reivindicar la vida (Revendicating life), and I took corn as the element that symbolizes Mexican culture and the butterfly which symbolizes war and death.. I made a metallic structure in the shape of a corncob, a sort of well that contained two colors of corn, and I invited people to throw red corn into it in order that it might mix with the others and be recycled each new day. Inside, I placed a translucent stone, a piece of oval-shaped onyx,so that the kernels of corn fell onto it, the kernels were symbolic of work, of the struggle for democracy, for a better life. At its base, I gave it the shape of a prehistoric butterfly, marking the border of the wings with yellow corncobs.
Almost simultaneously, in April 2000, at the Museo Amparo of Puebla, Yolanda Gutiérrez presented a show of her work with the title of Agua, fundamentally based on the cultures of ancient Mexico, which
until now have only been studied by foreigners and are considered from a western point of view.
The exhibition was comprised of seven installations and seven object-sculptures inside the
museum. And outside, on two lakes (that of the Aviary of the Parque Ecológico and that of the
Ciudad Universitaria) Coatl, the bone serpent, and the virgin drops of Manantial.
And she explains: I called the exhibition Aztl, that is, Water, and I arranged on the lagoon, in the
shape of a meander, a serpent of some twenty meters formed by red containers of water and vegetable
oil that held two or three lit wicks. In memory of the fact that, in pre-Hispanic Mexico, when the Aztecs were at war they sacrificed the soldiers in bonfires in order that life might continue, I called it Agua
sagrada (Holy water), recalling the fact that they called blood “divine water” because for them it was something precious.
From the first room to the last, the viewer was guided by a thread formed by thousands of butterflies (symbol of fire, of war, and of death), a piece that she titled De noche un viento frío las trajo
(A cold wind brought them at night), simulated the butterflies by making wings with two leaves that I worked until I was able to make them look transparent, and the body with a maguey thorn. I hung them
from the ceiling and I used them to mark the itinerary from one room to the next, as if they were flying through the exhibition.
For El Espejo (The mirror), which in Tao represents contemplation, I made one thousand five hundred spheres of transparent glass of some three centimeters in diameter with water inside of them, and I hung
them 1.72 meters off the ground so that people would have to duck, so that theywould have to bow with respect in a gesture of humility. The metaphor of the mirror refers to the need for a more profound understanding, for a slow reflection that can pave the way for comprehension.
In a corner of the elongated room A la memory (To memory) arranges a mountain, pre-Hispanic symbol of
man where water was stored. A mountain of salt that weighed around four tons and some inverted transparent plastic cones with water inside, in homage to the people who suffered the loss of a loved one in the flood of 1991 which caused so much pain and death. I gave the title of Tlalocan to another installation
that evokes this place, mentioned in stories and legends as a garden of ritual and medicinal plants dedicated to the god of water, a vegetable god that intervened in the creation of man. I thus created a
garden with medicinal, hallucinogenic, ritual plants with two intertwined snakes,symbol of the life/death cycle, painted on the ceramic pots that contained the germinating corn seeds.
To corn, the basic staple of the country, she dedicates a piece titled Los ayudantes de Quetzalcóatl (Quetzalcóatl’s assistants), in memory of this figure, symbol of the duality and the beginning of all that is created, who descended to the world of the dead in search of human bones that, grinding them up and mixing them with his blood, gave new life to dead men. Quetzalcóatl then fed them with kernels of corn that he stole from the ants through a trick: he turned himself into an ant and went into the anthill. As the
main piece, Yolanda arranged a large broken pitcher that she filled with ants made of corn leaves and wire. They were spread throughout the room, even making their way to the ceiling.
When I ask her what the final objective of her work is, she responds: To transmit the message that today’s culture must consider man as an integral being in nature and that, without god (understood as a conjunction between man and nature), it is incomplete.
The delicate balance between idea and object is one of the achievements that marks all of Yolanda Gutiérrez’s highly unique work in which she displays a prodigious imagination that, based on the mythology of ancient cultures, stems from nature and creates visual metaphors of extraordinary
strength, and of moving beauty.
Maria Lluïsa Borras
Received her doctorate in Art History from
the University of Barcelona.
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