CUERPOS CARGADOS DE TURBOSINA
This work offers a reassessment of José Clemente Orozco’s portable mural Bomber and Tank, first presented on May 14, 1940, in the exhibition Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. Drawing on the preparatory sketches preserved in MoMA’s collection, Mejía links the mural to the Mexican national emblem, noting the presence of an airplane (eagle) and a serpent—though in a reversed dynamic: instead of the bird devouring the reptile, the snake brings down the aircraft. While the finished mural only hints at serpentine shapes, the preparatory work clearly shows snakes destroying the flying machines.
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Local 1, Mexico City, 2023
This work offers a reassessment of José Clemente Orozco’s portable mural Bomber and Tank, first presented on May 14, 1940, in the exhibition Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. Drawing on the preparatory sketches preserved in MoMA’s collection, Mejía links the mural to the Mexican national emblem, noting the presence of an airplane (eagle) and a serpent—though in a reversed dynamic: instead of the bird devouring the reptile, the snake brings down the aircraft. While the finished mural only hints at serpentine shapes, the preparatory work clearly shows snakes destroying the flying machines.
For Mejía, this inversion of national symbols is compelling, as he reads in this “anti-emblem” a commentary on the mid-20th-century consumption of Mexican art and its ties to diplomatic and commercial relations between the two countries, framed by the oil expropriation and the Cold War. The artist mirrors Orozco’s own strategy, rendering it in caricature form. Orozco had proposed six possible readings of the mural by rearranging or removing certain movable panels from Bomber and Tank. Although his idea found little traction at the time—the mural has spent the past 80 years in MoMA’s storage and was only ever shown in its original 1940 sequence—the New York museum finally honored Orozco’s request in April 2023, displaying it in a different order.
In Mejía’s mural, the forms evoking the six versions of Bomber and Tank are not fixed to the wall but instead projected and set in motion within the gallery, echoing the powerful searchlights of the wartime era. The artist recalls that such spotlights originated in the arms industry but were quickly absorbed into the world of entertainment; with the advent of more precise radar systems, the technology became obsolete for military use and survived only in show business.
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