Mexicans Diaries

Mexicans Diaries, 1995/2000

Photos from Mexico taken during successive trips to Central America with my friend Olga, between 1995 and 2000 to:

- Mexico (Museo Nacional de Antropología) & Puebla

- Guernavaca (Taxco)

- Oaxaca (Monte Alban & Mitla)

- Merida (Chichen Itza, Dzibilchaltun & Uxmal)

- Guatemala, Antigua et Panajachel (Chichicastenango)

Those great traditional Indians civilizations : Olmec, Aztec, Maya, Toltec, Mixtec, Zapotec, influenced me to start my "Mayan Diary" paintings series and are still strongly influencing my work to this day.

"The Indian Culture", an Antonin Artaud text to read about his Mexican experiences

"The Indian Culture", Antonin Artaud, Trans. Jack Hirschman

I came to Mexico to make contact with
             Red Earth
and she stinks as she smells sweet
and she smells good when she is stinking.

     Aboriginal urine down the slope of a
                                             tight vagina
     that objects when you grab it.
     Urinary camphor from the eminence of a
                                             dead vagina
     boxing your ears when you spread it,
     when you gaze from the height of Mirador
                                                            of Pitre,
     the studded tomb of the terrible father,
     the hole hollowed out, the tart sunken
            hole where the cycle of red lice boils,
     that cycle of solar red lice
     all white in the network of veins
          of one of the two of them.

But which two, and which one of them?
What two
          at the time
          slandered seventy times over
          when man
                             crossbred with himself
          giving birth to a son
          by the sodomy
          of his own
          hardened ass.
So, why two of them
and why, in the first place, TWO?

     Pitiful clown of a papa's mimicry,
          filthy parasite mountebank in the hollow
     mamaloaf pulled from the fire!

For all the round suns spending around you
are nothing next to the clubfoot
with its immense articulation of the old
gangrenous shank where
a buckler of bone ripens,
a war-like underground rising up of
the bucklers of all the bones.

                         What does that mean?
It means that papamummy stop buggering
                                                           the innate pederast,
                         the filthy bucker of christian orgies,
                         the interloper between ji & cry
                         who was contracted in jiji-crycry;

and that means war
will replace the fathermother
here where the ass built its barrier
against the nourishing plague
of the Red Earth buried
under the corpse of the dead
                                          warrior
who was afraid of going through
the periplum of the serpent
that bites its tail from up front
while papamummy make
little fanny bloody.

     And looking at it from up close,
     within the cankered shank of a slice of
               the old blotchy femur,
they're falling this way and that way, stinking;
     and the old warrior rises up
     with his insurgent cruelty,
     with that unspeakable cruelty
     for life without there being
     existence to justify you;

     and into the fixed hole of earth
               seen from above and within,
all the enlightened tips of tongues are falling
     which thought themselves souls one day
     without even being volitions;

and they are raising all the whipcracks of
                                                my dead hand
     against the uplifted tongue
     and the sexes of desire,
     who are only verbal dice
     powerless to seize existence;

yet they're falling brighter than the suns
     beamed into the cave where
     papamummy and fairy son
     have been killing each other since
     before it all started stinking.

When the solar jackass thought himself
                                                                     well and good.

          And when is it
                                   the heavens are in
                                                                   their circle?

When one is
                     outside it,
     supremely dumb
                                   to smell it
                                                    in his cunt,

with nothing to stand as a barrier against
                                       the void,
where there is neither horizon nor upright,
nor surface
nor height,
and everything puts you back in touch with the depths,
        when one is straight all the length of him long.