Thinking Figurations Otherwise

Abstract

In the mural La katharsis, which hangs in Mexico City’s Palacio de Bellas Artes, the great Mexican postrevolutionary artist José Clemente Orozco depicts a nightmarish panorama of militarism, conflict, and the collapse of a sociopolitical order. The title of the painting suggests a dramatic purgation of demons away from the usual strictures of society; a hellbent letting loose of destructive energies in a baptism by fire; the perils of war, fascism, technology, and the modern age. In a visual field devoid of any recognizable agents of such forces—the painting is crowded by repeated but anonymous dark shapes flanked suffocatingly by metal coils and armaments—the only complete face and body that appears is that of the woman sprawled naked in the foreground. Her masklike visage stares vacantly and giddily at the viewer. Pearls wrapped around her neck above bare and drooping breasts, legs wide open, she is a prostitute—one of many painted by this artist. What is she doing alongside these indisputable images of the excesses of the bourgeois order: war and imperialism? What is the link? Is the sexual image suggested by this figure symbolic of the orgy of violence indicated in the rest of the painting? Here she is not trampled on or shown as brutalized or subjected to the surrounding terror; rather, she is a surface sign of its deep corruption; the wanton girl-toy of the rich, the Whore of Babylon whose presence is a metonym of the incipient moral decline in Europe—the old dame whose felled head lies next to the prostitute in the painting—and of the excesses of the industrial era.