Unoxuno by Melissa Calderon
At first glance, this piece says little about anyone’s culture, let alone any form of defiance against cultural appropriation. There is a blue, long, braided textile spread across a wooden surface – most likely a table – with two red circular marks along the left side of the cloth. The view is an overhead one which gives the viewer the illusion of standing over the object. The wood is natural looking – maybe she appreciates the beauty of simple things? The surreal thing about this painting is that the wood looks as real and natural as it gets, however, the string (I’m assuming) is animated; the white string running along the larger blue one looks like a drawn-on line and the blue itself has strokes of different shades of blue. We can also see this was intentional due to the lack of a shadow. Why would the artist place something so animated against something realistic?
After taking a long look and reading Coco’s essay, the simplistic painting revealed so much more information. Calderon might have made the contrast between reality and fiction as a political statement. The fact that the wood was made to look so real hinted at a bigger issue: one’s true history being wrapped by western interpretations. Wood comes from trees and trees are living things. That being said, the rings around the red spots tell the observer how old that tree is. Given the ripples around the spots, I’d say the tree is old. The blue fabric is unravelled – like DNA – but Calderon made it obviously fake. This might have been her way of pointing out the wrongness of European interpretations of Hispanic culture. The cloth symbolizes the expected roles of Hispanic women; the “it runs in their DNA” perceptions of Westerners are represented by the animated-like string and is placed against the old wooden surface (a surface that may be as old as the false interpretations.
Coco’s essay made me think about how important perception is. The truth of multiple, diverse civilizations becomes lost when aggressive forces – white Europeans – need to find evidence that supports their theory of racial superiority. Since Columbus, non- European cultures have been placed on display as uncivilized and exotic peoples in need of enlightenment. In layman terms, white people needed to boost their ego. By using their influence to intimidate other cultures into submission, the Europeans created stereotypes about indigenous peoples that were written in history as absolute fact.
Calderon’s artwork is an act of rebellion because she is attempting to call out the biased way of thinking among Europeans and Americans. By placing a false blue cloth – a symbol of cultural gender roles – against a wooden background – the hard truth, she is separating the western interpretations from reality. She also uses small things, like the DNA-like structure of the string in an animated setting, to make larger statements. The culture of Hispanics has been manipulated into a westerners’ fantasy and passed off for too many generations as truth. In Coco’s essay, the bold move of pretending to be exotic, undiscovered peoples in order to expose the white man’s tenacity of appropriating “inferior” cultures, is the response to the messages sent by artists like Calderon. The “unconscious structures of belief” aspect of the piece is that the Europeans don’t realize that they are misinterpreting the truth; it’s basic confirmation bias – they will view these cultures in a primitive light if it helps to prove that Europeans are the dominant and superior race.
The message that Calderon was trying to relay was well hidden and many might have missed it like I had at first glance. Both Coco and Calderon’s methods of attacking the threat to their culture’s history are an intelligent use of bait and perception.
