Chagoya's clash of cultures comic, caustic

Kenneth Baker, Chronicle Art Critic

The current political dust-up over immigration, an ideological duel with real lives and livelihoods at stake, adds voltage to the already electric work of Enrique Chagoya at the Berkeley Art Museum.

Chagoya has won considerable recognition locally. Born in Mexico City, he attended the San Francisco Art Institute, has advanced degrees from UC Berkeley and tenure at Stanford. But the Des Moines Art Center has organized and circulated "Borderlandia," his midcareer retrospective, which will travel later to the Palm Springs Art Museum.

From its beginnings Chagoya's work has had a grisly edge and a comedic one, not least because it draws directly from cartoons and comics. Big pastels, such as "Thesis/Antithesis" (1988), look like editorial cartoons taken to the scale of large posters, minus the clear message we expect from political art. These pieces also set the register of Chagoya's best work in that they manifest his acerbic tone while making it hard to pinpoint the humor in them.

"Thesis/Antithesis" shows trousered legs and smartly shod feet jouncing, like an acrobat's, atop a pair of bare feet that rises from what looks like a sea of blood. A figure for North American supremacy over the South?

To the left, in a passage irreverently borrowed from Michelangelo's Sistine ceiling, a bare hand also protrudes from the red depths, meeting fingertip to fingertip with a disembodied three-fingered glove - the right hand of Mickey Mouse.

Mickey appears throughout Chagoya's art as a symbol of American cultural influence, ostensibly cheery but in his falseness a sinister shill. Mickey, or his hand, serves in this case to satirize the developed world's fantasy of having originated everything.

In recent years, Chagoya has occasionally revisited the big black-and-red pastel format, with less convincing results. His caricatures of Bush administration luminaries as Snow White and the Seven Dwarves and of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Muhammad and Jesus as "girlie men" look like products of critical desperation, rather than inspiration. They suggest dishearteningly that events have outrun even the inventive responses of an artist as nimble as Chagoya.

So, in a different way, do the ink-on-paper works that pay too-direct homage to the Nixon drawings of Philip Guston (1913-1980), substituting the Bush cohort for Nixon and his cronies. Guston's Nixon drawings succeed because they achieve what I call delirious figuration, where marks through an ambiguous crudeness assume multiple meanings: a manner subject to tribute but not to imitation.

Chagoya found his own parallels to Guston's inimitable style in some of his prints and in his "codices," the accordion-fold drawings that celebrate and send up examples of ancient Mesoamerican pictorial narrative. Chagoya has gone so far as to replicate the amate paper on which ancient codices were inscribed, to amplify his connection to them as source material.

In his codices and related drawings and prints, Chagoya redraws the encounter between European invaders and vanquished indigenous people, envisioning a collision not merely of contemporaneous cultures but also of incommensurable mythologies and centuries.

In "Crossing I" (1994), he envisions the Aztec warrior god Tlaloc confronting Superman, who strips away a pilgrim outfit, rather than his Clark Kent disguise, to reveal his true identity. A tiny flying saucer with Aztecs aboard hovers in the background, evoking the cultures' alienation from one another as galactic, not merely cognitive.

The codices present themselves as continuous narratives, yet because they admit of no coherent reading, they force us to look. "The Organic Cannibal" (1996), for example, tumbles from an Aztec death god swallowing the most famous portrait of Christopher Columbus to racist panels adapted from Little Nemo and other old newspaper comics, diagrams from Vesalius and imagery from explorers' tales and Spanish colonial painting.

Only occasionally, as in the prints "Untitled (Pocahontas)" (2000) and "Road Map" (2003) does Chagoya pack into a single sheet the complexities of the manifold codices. Those complexities include satires of the putative liberties of modern European art, especially Picasso's, derided more heavy-handedly in a painting such as "Hidden Memories at Giverny" (1995).

The Pocahontas print even incorporates a reminiscence of the work of John Graham (1886-1961), a Russian expatriate to New York who helped to transmit Picasso's influence to a generation of American emulators.

"Borderlandia" familiarizes us with an artist who appears to work best when he does not know quite what he wants and so lets himself dream pictorially on his preoccupations with boundaries that divide cultural rituals, belief systems, social strata and eras.

His show of recent work at Paule Anglim, which ends today, displays the same triumph of graphic invention in prints over more conceptually ambitious but pictorially lumbering efforts on canvas.