Having produced his famous Tower monument in praise of the Communist International ( an uncompromisingly modern and technologically daring project ) , Tatlin concerned himself with the invention of an 'air bicycle' , or glider , the Letatlin .sx It was intended to be based on bird flight .sx It was ridiculed as primitive by some of the technicist Soviet critics of the time .sx Tatlin replied , in terms similar to those of Malevich's memoirs :sx I want to give back to people the feeling of flight .sx This we have been robbed of by the mechanical flight of the aeroplane .sx .sx .. We can no longer feel the movement of our body in the air .sx .sx As he grew older and more isolated , Tatlin was referred to by some in vaguely pitying terms as a clown , or Big Fool .sx In fact his life exemplified the real dilemmas of a struggle with the dichotomy between art and technology .sx If in his Tower he used his revolutionary outlook and artistic imagination and daring to reveal the possibilities of technological innovation , which would otherwise be assimilated to archaic , traditional patterns of thinking and daily life , with his glider he seemed to resist the inevitable drift and rationale of mechanical , industrial culture .sx He insisted that he conceived the glider as an artist , that it should be aesthetically perfect .sx Against the 'iron laws of technology' it was considered a failure .sx Yet although his proposal was taken for what it partly was - a critique of social life and values - in some ways Tatlin was still bound by technological priorities .sx He still felt , like Leonardo before him , that the 'feeling of flight' , which is really a psychological desire and dream of freedom , could be satisfied by a machine .sx The drama of his whole position was to be caught between the real and the imaginary , between art as a representation of life , and life itself .sx MEXICANIDAD Quite different issues are raised by the itineraries of the Mexican painter Diego Rivera .sx He made the aspiring artist's journey from periphery to centre :sx he travelled to Italy , and to Paris where he painted as one of the cubists .sx He also absorbed at first hand the energy of the two emergent global powers , the USA and the USSR , and he joined those other Mexican intellectuals whom the revolutionary upheaval of 1910-20 spurred to travel widely over their own country for the first time .sx But the key move of Rivera's was from the metropolitan art centres back to his own country at a time when Mexico was reasserting itself against the effects of centuries of invasion and brutalization by outsiders .sx He radically changed his style and began to produce the monumental , didactic murals in which he set out to reinvent the history of Mexico ( and its modern development ) in visual images for a still-overwhelmingly non-literate population .sx In Paris Rivera may well have absorbed the avant-garde discovery of 'primitive' and non-European art :sx some of the evocations of Mexico in his early murals appear to owe something to the paradisal tropics of Gauguin and Rousseau .sx But in Mexico such 'primitivism' became absorbed in the powerful and complex movement of indigenism or nativism which was a driving force of the revolution in the area of culture and which spread across all disciplines ( art , architecture , archaeology , folklore , music , poetry , education , literature , medicine , and so on) .sx Anthropologists define nativism as an organized and conscious effort on the part of members of a society to revive parts of its own culture - in Mexico this implied not only national resurgence but also the rediscovery of indigenous cultural values despised by most of the ruling class within Mexico itself .sx Characteristically , Rivera's style evolved from primitivist projections to an extraordinary effort of factual research into ancient and folkloric Mexico , which he converted into painted images .sx In a late mural like the one in the Hospital de la Raza in Mexico City , Rivera gave a vast and detailed portrayal of Aztec medical practices equal space with a portrayal of modern medicine .sx This in itself was a bold assertion , but when one looks longer at the layout of this painting one sees complex tensions of fact , fantasy , and desire .sx The Aztec scenes are painful but open and communal ; the modern ones painless but torn by class strife and segmented into alienating boxes .sx The very colour and conviviality of the Aztec scenes show the way in which Rivera has marshalled and constructed an ancient world to point beyond the present to a Utopian communist future .sx Rivera's gargantuan project and his position in twentieth-century art raise many questions .sx Interestingly , some of the contradictions of his art become clearest in the comparison between his own painting and that of his wife Frida Kahlo , certainly his equal as an artist .sx In keeping with his socio-political role as educator and illustrator , his relationship to the masses always seems to be one of depicting and organizing from the outside .sx He stylized both ancient and modern Mexicans as a people , as a historical force .sx Rivera's contemporary , the Peruvian critic Jos e Carlos Mari a tegui , had said that the " idealization and stylization of the Indian " was an inevitable feature of 'indigenist' literature in Latin America .sx An 'indigenous' literature would appear only " when the Indians themselves are able to produce it " .sx It is revealing too that women could enter Rivera's murals only allegorically .sx Even though very often they were his friends or lovers , in the mural they took on a generalized , abstracted persona , an actor either in historical events or in the world of concepts :sx 'fertility' , 'America' , 'agitation' , etc. Frida Kahlo's method - although she lived with Rivera for so many years and was as militantly communist as he - was almost opposite .sx She had no links with the tradition of 'high art' and architecture .sx She was self-taught and because of ill-health was almost forced to work on a domestic scale , and even from her bed .sx Where Rivera generalized , Kahlo particularized , thinking on the level of the individual and lived experience .sx When Kahlo came to represent the Indian , it was the Indian in herself .sx My Nurse and I ( 1937 ) conveys the idea of being nurtured by the indigenous culture of Mexico in as intimately close , as physical , a metaphor as one can imagine ( Kahlo herself was of mixed ancestry :sx German on her father's side , Spanish and Indian on her mother's) .sx By showing herself as an adult she implies the continuation of this nourishment throughout her life .sx She suggests the 'continuity of consciousness' , claimed by revolutionary archaeologists between the ancient and contemporary Indians of Mexico , by giving her nurse an archaic mask ; this in turn modifies a comforting image into one of power .sx While Kahlo and Rivera shared the same enthusiasm for Mexican popular culture , Kahlo's relationship to these sources was less schematic , more organic than Rivera's .sx Her own work was strongly influenced by the style of popular retablo , or ex - voto paintings , where the traumas of individual lives are rendered with cruel and often bloody directness .sx In one sense these vernacular images represent the breaking-out of a suppressed voice ; the same can be said of Kahlo's work as a woman artist .sx Through the individual she arrived at the general , the collective .sx Nativism seems to have been an extremely complex phenomenon in Mexico .sx A more subtle analysis would have to take account of class ( in the dichotomy between Rivera's 'personality' portraits of the rich and famous and his 'humble' portraits of the poor , it is hard not to see a form of primitivism which has been avidly consumed as such by Mexico's upper classes) .sx And this is further complicated by the tendency of Europeans to see Mexican nativism in primitivist terms .sx In fact there is a sense in which the Indian in Mexico became part of Europe's argument with itself .sx The elements in Mexican culture formerly thought inferior to European elements were made visible and celebrated in Mexicanidad , and gradually became fashionable , rather in the way Africanity did in Paris in the 1920s .sx Rivera and the other artists had done much to define this Mexicanity .sx And although , unlike Africanity , Mexicanity was constructed 'at home' , it could be said to have created an imaginary Mexico which would later have to be 'deconstructed' in the name of the real .sx ANOTHER AVANT-GARDE .sx There is a significant sequel to this story of the Mexican experience :sx its almost complete suppression in European and North American histories of twentieth-century art soon after the Second World War .sx In his Concise History of Modern Painting , which has become a standard textbook since its publication in 1959 , Herbert Read actually declared that he was deliberately leaving out the Mexican artists .sx He left out much else besides , in fact the whole relationship of art to social change .sx But this was not unusual .sx With the growth of the art market , the philosophy of the Cold War , the aggressive exportation of western culture and life-style to the rest of the world , especially by the USA ( an exportation , overwhelmingly , of objects ) , modern art was constructed almost as a western capitalist monopoly enterprise .sx This has made the cultural expression of the power relations more complex .sx We see , for example , the projecting on an international scale ( with the help of the art market , of corporate self - interest , of museums and publicity ) , as in some way universally 'modern' , of art which actually embodies local or national myths ( " Pop Art is American ethnic art " - Rasheed Araeen) .sx Many major 'Third World' cities today ( Rio de Janeiro , Caracas , Buenos Aires , Manila , Delhi , etc. ) are as instantly well informed of developments in Paris or New York as those cities themselves , sometimes more so .sx But the traffic is always in one direction , confirming their satellitization in the world of multi - national capitals .sx Their reception , their critical transformation of new ideas , let alone their own discoveries , remain unknown and forcibly localized .sx New dialectics between local and global , between art centres and the rest , are coming into existence .sx On the one hand , artists of Third World origin find themselves marginalized within western capitals or separately categorized according to an exclusive mainstream .sx On the other , there are numbers of artists ( film-makers , theatre groups , etc. ) working 'locally' in the Third World but with modern techniques and world connections .sx Any attempt to describe the relations of these artists to the dominant centres of power in the post-war world would produce the most complex map :sx of emigrations , of returns , of exile , of staying home .sx Such conditions are not generally known , let alone the significance of an individual's movement and practice between different social spaces and cultural contexts .sx But a particular perspective is shared by all those who take the question radically 'from the other side' .sx Their consciousness of the daily socio-economic realities of 'underdevelopment' - of which a colonized culture is part - becomes inseparable from their critique of art , of its commercialization and neutralization in western cultural institutions .sx This perspective is expressed too , I believe , in radically different meanings and uses of 'primitivism' .sx Consider , for example , the work of two outstanding Brazilian artists , Lygia Clark ( 1920-88 ) and Helio Oiticica ( 1937-80 ) , of which the 'international museum circuit' remains ignorant .sx In the 1950s a 'universal' modernist movement was tested out in Brazil :sx constructivism .sx It flourished as part of the post-war economic and construction boom , answering the desire of dynamic sections of the Brazilian society to create an 'absolutely modern' environment .sx Both Lygia Clark's and Helio Oiticica's early work was done in the constructivist vein ( and has always since retained some traces of its geometric ordering) .sx But almost at once they began to question its application as a ready-made model to Brazilian conditions , and to explode the limitations of its rationale .sx According to a technicist notion of constructivism , Lygia Clark's and Helio Oiticica's work apparently 'went back' to 'primitive' materials , to the body , to 'primordial' sensations , relationships .sx In fact its radicalism was of another kind .sx An acute sensitivity to traditions and tensions in their own environment is combined with a searching questioning of the artist's production in a corporate , consumer society .sx By the early 1960s , Lygia Clark had broken with the traditional idea of sculpture as a detached object , in which the body's energy and the artist's expressive power are somehow captured , frozen .sx