Puerto Rican Light and Ugly Sweaters

A Christmas postcard.

It took me five decades to realize that I had learned two important aesthetic lessons while growing up in Mexico and celebrating Christmas. One has to do with the relationship between kitsch and affective archival attachments and the other with the dialectics of light and shadow.

Mexico City’s weather in December goes down slightly; nothing too extreme— yet to me an exciting aspect of the period leading toward Christmas was to feel the cooler air in order to get into the holiday mood; I would stretch my imagination to picture a winter wonderland in a place where the last (and maybe only ever) snowfall had happened  in 1967.  One of the most exciting experiences of the season was going to the market to purchase the Christmas tree (the fancy and expensive ones were brought down from Canada; the cheaper and  uglier ones were brought down from the Sierra de Ajusco in the Tlalpan area) as well as heno y musgo (hay and moss) both of which were de rigueur in order to mount the nativity scene.  We had boxes of ornaments in old boxes stored in a closet that we would take out every December, containing many large, old-fashioned strings of Christmas lights with giant color lightbulbs that the family had been using since the early 1960’s (long before my time), as well as many old ornaments that were abundantly purchased during those, more prosperous years. Every year the tree would become a re-enacted archive of sorts of the family’s history, with ornaments and mementos from generations past. It was a compendium of many past childhoods, a true genealogical tree brought to life every year.

Moreover, Christmas decorations were always present in my mind. Across the street from our house was a small factory that was seemingly exclusively dedicated to making the Christmas street decorations for the entire city; gigantic styrofoam bells, stars, metallic garlands and singing angels that would be hung from telephone posts and cables all over the city come every December. The factory workers were like an army of elves working year-round.

I did not have a Santa workshop to run, but my annual decorative spirit would start to become fulfilled  while retrieving the nativity scene boxes from the closet. They contained dozens of small (also old and often broken) plaster figurines wrapped in newspaper, ranging from baby Jesus, Virgin Mary and Joseph and the Three Wise Men to countless shepherds, lambs, goats, donkeys and even giraffes and lions (rather incongruous elements that felt more appropriate to illustrate the story of Noah’s ark). We would stage the manger scene by using the purchased fresh moss and then grab rocks from our garden in order to create makeshift hills and valleys under the Christmas tree. One year I was so carried away installing the sprawling nativity scene with every single figurine available that when my late aunt Eugenia Pardo saw it while visiting the house one day, she said: “¡Parece un mitin de la SEP! (looks like a rally at the ministry of Education).”

Photo by Julian Jackson

Horror vacui notwithstanding, I now recognize that this was my first foray into Installation art (or mini-land art?), and in particular my exploration around the relationship between light and space. Bachelard was already implied in there, in particular his famous observation that every corner symbolizes “the solitude of imagination.” Years later, already in art school, I had only an inarticulable sensation that I wanted to work with that relationship between color light and spaces, but it would still not get to be expressed until I discovered performance art and also the magic of theater lighting.  In 1992 I wrote a prose poem trying to make sense of my obsession with color lights:

Through the passage of time I will say what I am and what I have been, two opposites, two presence of lights that never go away, the lights of the garden that illuminated the nights of my childhood, our secret gatherings: they were the reminiscence of the party, of the first party that I wanted to have one day and my father took me, on a gray afternoon, without light but with splendid chiaroscuros, to the hardware store in order to by the color lights that would forever hang in the vine, as if it were a giant Christmas tree, like the kind in which I wanted to hide in the corner in order to get myself lost in its branches, inside the moss and the ornaments, where every light was the doorway to a new world of corners, flashes and secrets, and I wanted to hang from a branch, to disappear, or live always as a light, always present, as the testimony of something  that I never knew what it was but that I knew was important for it to exist; the end of a party, when everyone had left the courtyard and everything had remained outside, illuminated without any one to see it, and this is why as a child when I would come out to see it would seem magical and sad because in a way I intuitively felt that I was in an unseen place, and it was as if I didn’t exist, and I was there, but sometimes I wasn’t there, because I would not consider myself neither spectator nor witness nor anything in particular, while other times I would be aware of being there and being the only one who could save that vision of that place for the world, and that made me feel important.

But the affective lens that Christmas offers also made me sensitive to one more thing: it gave me an endearing familiarity and affection of ugly toys and decorations: the older and uglier a Santa doll looks, the more I am attracted to it. I am not entirely sure of the extent to which anyone else shares this feeling, but I suspect that it is not too dissimilar from the American tradition of wearing ugly Christmas sweaters (initiated, according to some sources, in the 1950s). Which makes one wonder, what is behind the unabashed embracing of kitsch and ridiculousness of the season?

Photo by Mariel Escalante

The easy answer might be that the festive spirit of Christmas and the desire to celebrate and have fun may be a permission slip to be silly at least once a year. The more complicated answer, perhaps, might lie in the pagan roots of the celebration, the carnivalesque (Bakhtin’s term of which I have written about previously) mindset that allows us for a short period to be sentimental, and in a process that allows us to reconnect with those close to us and who might share our past, regress to a state of childish innocence where it is ok to be silly for once, not just because we want to be kids again – and this is important— but because we have a primal need to look emotionally relive our past and our traditions as a form to reaffirm our current identity, and this requires embracing the silly, the kitsch, the raggedy dolls and decorations stored in the family’s closet.

As to my personal history and interest in color lights, this is perhaps the reason why I have always  been moved by the work of Dan Flavin. In his case, the impersonal presentation of sculptural objects contrasts with the deeply affective —and at times spiritual, to some— aspects of fluorescent color light. I also always appreciated the ways in which Flavin sometimes made tributes or references to individuals in his works, most importantly his moving  1971 work at the Guggenheim dedicated to his fellow artist friend Ward Jackson: untitled (to Ward Jackson, an old friend and colleague who, during the Fall of 1957 when I finally returned to New York from Washington and joined him to work together in this museum, kindly communicated).

© 2018 Stephen Flavin/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

But I did not think too much on the matter until I saw a work by Allora and Calzadilla that made realize how I felt about Flavin (and which I consider one of the duo’s best works). Curated at the Americas Society by Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy in 2003, the artists borrowed a 1965 work by Flavin titled  Puerto Rican Light (to Jeanie Blake) (reportedly given that title because when Flavin showed the work to Jeanie Blake, then an assistant at Greene Gallery, she told him that it reminded her of the Puerto Rican day parade, and the title stuck). Allora and Calzadilla  borrowed the work for the exhibition, then charged a number of solar panels in Puerto Rico and shipped them over to New York to be used as energy source to light the sculpture throughout the duration of the show, effectively powering the work with “Puerto Rican light”.

Allora & Calzadilla, Puerto Rican Light, 2003, curated by Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy at the Americas Society. Images courtesy of the curator.

But going back to Yuletide reflections, it seems clear that the season may be the more meaningful precisely because of the tension between melancholy and happiness that envelops it, the solar (or rather, polar) energy that powers its most famous stories, from A Christmas Carol to The Grinch. The chiaroscuro, if you will, of the holiday.

The famous Spata house in Dyker Heights, Brooklyn

The other day, out of curiosity, I jumped into the bandwagon of AI chat, asking why is it that the Christmas period make us so sensitive, nostalgic, and sometime generates stress and sadness. The chatbot replied:

The Christmas period can be a time of increased sensitivity, nostalgia, and sometimes stress and sadness for a variety of reasons. For some people, the holiday season can be a time of heightened emotions and reflection, as they are reminded of loved ones who are no longer with them or of past holiday traditions that are no longer possible. Additionally, the pressure to create a perfect holiday experience or to meet others' expectations can be stressful, and the demands of holiday shopping, cooking, and entertaining can be overwhelming.

In addition, the winter months can be a difficult time for some people due to the shorter days and longer nights, which can lead to feelings of sadness or loneliness. The holiday season can also be a difficult time for those who are struggling with financial, personal, or other issues, as the emphasis on joy and celebration can be a reminder of their difficulties.

We all navigate this season in our own way. I know of artist friends who, for whatever reason ( be it religion or its heavy emotional charge) don’t want to deal at all with the holiday and thus try to spend it in a place where there is no Christmas, like in the Middle East. There are many other forms of escapism, which I absolutely understand. But I, for one, not only am I happy to accept the emotional rollercoaster that the holiday brings, but I am also certain that I do not want it to exist without kitsch and silliness, which are complements to the solemn and religious (and I care of the former much more than I care of the latter). So: give me the ugly sweaters, the over-the top lights, the worn-out Santas. I will sing (and those who know me know that I will sing) the Villancicos and Christmas carols. I am happy to regress.

Come New Year’s day we all can be serious again.

Photo by Ombra