Book Reviews 203

Hoiv a Revolutionary Art Became Offiríal Culture. Murals, Museums, and the Mexican
State. Mary K. Coffey. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012. xiv and 234 pp.,
photos, maps, notes, and index. $24.95 paperback (ISBN 978-0-8223-5037-8)

While books devoted to the Mexican muralists abound, most of them

are expensive, luxuriously illustrated books destined for the coffee table and the
'occasional glance. Mary K. Coffey's book merits much more than a glance. The
murals of Rivera, Orozco, Siqueiros, Tamayo, and others are still there in full
color, along widh the aesthetic, political, and at times personal squabbles that are
known to have occurred among the muralists, yet the context of Coffey's study
extends well beyond this to include the museum spaces in which the murals are
displayed, pubLc reception, race, gender, and and relationship between art and
the State.
The author begins her study of Mexican mural art in 1934, when Ri-
vera and Orozco were called back to Mexico to paint monumental works at
the new Palace of Fine Arts, and follows its evolution to the 1968 Tlatelolco
massacre and the crumbling of state authority. She shows how, over time and
"through the institutional apparatus of the museum, mural art became a tech-
nique of didactic museology and, as such, a technique of exercising power" (p.
20). Following Tony Bennett's application of cultural studies to the museum,
she argues tha: "the political effects of mural art should be sought not only
in their representational strategies or through the ideal viewers their aesthetic
arrangements posit but also [...] in how they were inscribed within the program-
matic, institutional, and governmental programs for postrevolutionary modern-i
ization, nationalism, and citizen formation" (p. 17). She also makes good use
of Foucault's theory of governmentality to explain the intersections of power
and subject formation through the "production of truth," in this case the truth
of "Mexicanness," or what it means to be a Mexican. As she explains, "the
museum is a truth-teUing technology wherein the forms of popular identifica-
tion are articulated and social conduct is shaped to create citizen-subjects who
act in the interests of the state" (p. 19). In short, she demonstrates how murals
created in the name of "revolutionary art" became, through federal patronage
and through tbe voice of intellectuals like Octavio Paz, a national icon of pos-
trevolutionary official culture.
Coffey focuses on what, she terms the "great cultural projects of the
postrevolutior«ary state" - The Palace of Fine Arts, The National History Mu-
seum, and the National Anthropology Museum — each of which was founded
with a different ideological objective. She describes the Palace of Fine Arts, for
example, as a Kunsthalle wherein the murals are presented as fine art and left to
speak not only for themselves, but also for the government under whose pa-
tronage they had been painted. At the National History Museum, on the other
hand, the murals provide visual support to a particular, elaborate, historical nar-
rative. Finally, in the National Anthropology Museum, the murals serve as di-
dactic supports for the exhibition of pre-Hispanic artifacts and as decorative
objects meant to enhance the museum's spectacular architecture and displays.
In Coffey's words, these three museums are where "Mexican culture has been
codified, historical citizenship defined, and Mexicanness, as a mestizo identity,
represented". Drawing heavily on the writings of Paz, Coffey uses these three
204 Journal of Latin American Geography

museums to illuminate the intersections of mural art, nadonal idendt;/, and cul-
tural polides.
Chapter One traces the history of the murals commissioned for
the Palace of Fine Arts (1934) and synthesizes the public, and at dmes highly
personal debate that raged among mural ardsts over the proper reladonship
between art and polides. Throughout the chapter, she provides a fascinadng
comparadve study of the murals based on style and objective, both personal
and propagandisdc, highlighting the process of what happens when purportedly
"revoludonary art" is commissioned by the government and installed, forever,
in a symbolically loaded edifice. She highlights the role that Paz played in con-
solidadng los tres grandes mto one monolithic icon and shows how his cridcism of
these "sacred" muralists ironically paved the way for the entry of Tamayo and
his "universal art" into the Palace.
In the second chapter, Coffey demonstrates how mural art was recon-
stituted in the National History Museum (1944) to lend narrative coherence to
the permanent exhibidon and to serve, through collecdve persuasion, as a "tell-
ing technology of nadonal truth. With the aid of didacdc, overdy propagand-
isdc murals, visitors are situated as historical citizen-subjects within the official
narradve of nadonal becoming" (p. 77).
The following chapter discusses the unique structure of the Nadonal
Anthropology Museum (1964), the ritualistic nature of the exhibitions, and the
diverse ardstic and ideological strategies used by the 23 invited artists to char-
acterize Mexico's indigenous past. The murals found in the 25 gaUedes serve
primarily as ornaments in a museum buut to portray the "deep Mexico," that of
pre-Hispanic civilizadons. As Coffey notes, the long struggle "to enact mural-
ism's revoludonary mandate to be a weapon for social change gave way, finally,
to the seductive power of official culture".
Like a set of Chinese boxes, Coffey's study situates Mexican muralists
within a physical space - the museum - and then within the polidcaj atmosphere
in which the murals were created and the museums were built, all of which is
then set within the broader context of Mexican cultural history. Particularly
fascinating is the link that she repeatedly establishes between the formal and
conceptual properdes of the murals and the ideological or rhetorical properties
of exhibidon and display. In short, she breathes new Ufe into an old debate:
"What we see today [in these museums] is the institutionalized afterlife of a
vibrant cultural debate muted by dme and the museum effect".
Coffey's book is to be recommended, not simply as an attracdve, yet
relatively inexpensive addidon to the coffee table, but also as sdmuladng read-
ing to those interested in Mexican art and museums and the way that both have
been used by Mexico's post-revolutionary governments to validate the Revolu-
don, to formulate contemporary cidzenship, to foster a patriodc sense of mex-
icanidad, and to ordain official history and culture. Although Coffey is primarily
an art historian, her study should be of considerable interest to polidcal and
cultural geographers interested in the theoredcal application of cultural studies
to urban spaces and in the intersecdons of art, museology, and the masses.

Jacqueline E. Bixler
Department of Foreign Languages & Literatures
Virginia Tech
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