Entry 1
on finding a Research Topic
For most of the term I thought I was going to focus on the political context of art, and then as the research paper approached I started shifting towards the idea of public art versus “private” art. Either way, I was intrigued by how art was seen and used as a social too. However, when I sat down to write an intro/summary of my ideas and research questions, I couldn’t form any questions that I really thought could be answered in a meaningful way. The ideas seemed abstract, and I felt disingenuous trying to find answers to the ways that art was “best” displayed and how it “should” be seen.
For a long time I’ve loved Diego Rivera’s artwork and his persona, and as I became frustrated with my first topic, he was in the back of my mind. During my first term at Dartmouth, I wrote a paper about Rivera’s contradictory identities as a nationalist and a communist, but I struggled with making sense of the paradoxical ideas he put forth in his art and life. I was so confused by the strong tone of Mexican pride that was so often incorporated into American murals depicting capitalist progress. How could he at once be glorifying the chugging capitalist machine and the concept of indigenous mestizo identity?
As I learned more about Rivera this term, my confusion was validated. Yes, his works were confusing and people during his lifetime complained about him as an artist because he couldn’t pick a side. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that he didn’t have to pick a side. He was an artist. In fact, that was the point. Artists who put forth one logical idea in their work – who often work for one organization or government – end up just being political tools. Free art is used to question perceptions, break constructs, and open pathways to new ways of thinking. In the early 20th century, this was true more than ever. Modern art, essentially, was the breaking of boundaries and the opening of minds to new arrangements of humanity.
With this in mind, I couldn’t help thinking about the modernists in Europe at the time, who were breaking the world into fragments, examining each piece, and rearranging them on a canvas. Cubism, to me, felt like the essence of this mindset, and of the definition of art as we’ve come to know it today. When I realized how connected Rivera was to the European modernist movement, I’d found my research topic. I wanted to find out what connected the modernist Rivera to the muralist Rivera, in an attempt to help prove that even his highly politicized paintings were still simply art, and did not have an agenda besides expressing the truth in a profound way.