The Brooklyn Rail

“The Chinese character ku (蠱) represents a bowl in whose contents worms are breeding. This means decay. It has come about because the gentle indifference of the lower trigram (巽 sun) has come together with the rigid inertia of the upper (艮 kên), and the result is stagnation. Since this implies guilt, the conditions embody a demand for removal of the cause. Hence the meaning of the hexagram is not simply “what has been spoiled” but “work on what has been spoiled.”¹”— Commentary on hexagram 18, I Ching or Book of Changes

Daniel Guzmán’s The Man Who Should Be Dead is an ongoing series in the style of a mythic narrative. Sub-titled Notes on the Dead House, the Fire and the Tale, the exhibition currently on view at kurimanzutto New York is the most recent manifestation of the series. Guzmán staged the previous installment, You Must Come in to Get Out, in July of last year at the Mexico City location of the same gallery. There is quite a lot of overlap between the two exhibitions, and many of the works from the earlier one can now be found in New York—the truest distinction between them may emerge simply from temporo-geographical displacement. What we now experience within the context of New York City’s art discourse in fact has its roots in Mexico—and another, more symbolic place.

According to Guzmán, the central inspiration for The Man Who Should Be Dead is hexagram 18 (Ku: decay) of the I Ching. As quoted above, the hexagram has a double message. Firstly, that something has been spoiled, and, secondly, that what has been spoiled needs to be worked on. Which is to say that despite a rotten situation, and the associated guilt of having contributed to it, something still can be gained by moving on and focusing one’s efforts on remediation. It is not immediately apparent that this has to do with Guzmán’s drawings, outside their general aesthetic of decay, even abjection. Mounds of flesh, heaps of bone, sex organs, orifices, and severed fingers all abound. Guzmán shares a morbid curiosity with Paul Thek, beginning and ending with vulgar reality. However, the connection with hexagram 18 is more than simply iconographic: its full dimension becomes clear when considered in relation to the histories and narratives that Guzmán references.

There is a symbolic universe that inhabits Guzmán’s work, one accessible if a viewer knows what to look for. For example, a helmeted Darth Vader recurs throughout the show. Sometimes just the helmet appears, but the figure can also be depicted with the face of a skeleton, a phallus, or anus. This is conquistador Hernán Cortés. At other times, however, Cortés appears not as this relentless death’s head, but instead, as in Apuntes de la casa muerta, el fuego y el relato (2023), he is shown cradled by death, seeming merely to be an instrument. A variety of red almond-shaped symbols regularly reappear throughout the drawings: “tecpatl” or sacrificial daggers once used by the Aztecs. They are often depicted in Aztec art in just the same way, red with white ornamentation.

Guzmán also represents the Aztec goddess Coyolxāuhqui after her decapitation at the hands of her brother Huītzilōpōchtli. Images of Coyolxāuhqui stood as warning signs to enemies of their fate should they be captured. Most striking is El sacrificio (2023), in which Coyolxāuhqui is cast down, disfigured by the sacrificial ritual, her feet pierced by tecpatl. Or in Ensayos de campo de concentración narrativa temporal: Señales de vida (2023), one of the installation pieces, a naked woman who again appears to be Coyolxāuhqui hangs upside down with her legs severed. She seems to be falling away from a long line of Tecpatl marching from Cortés’s helmet. In a more contemporary allusion, Dr. Atl, the notable Mexican landscape painter, makes a number of appearances smoking a pipe. The Paricutín volcano, a particular obsession of Atl’s, erupts throughout the exhibition. At times the references almost seem like a hodgepodge, but they are ultimately united by Guzmán’s distinctive personal vision.

Seen through the lens of Guzmán’s many historical, mythological, and artistic references, his invocation of hexagram 18 could suggest that culture and history themselves represent a spoiled or tarnished inheritance. Guzmán himself has alluded to this idea, writing, “To be born is a mystery; the place of our birth imposes a history and a language on us, an origin. We begin to walk through life trying to assemble the narrative, the story of that origin, the dead house, and the fire of the mystery that brought us to life.” He goes on to describe the works in this exhibition as “a note, an attempt to recount a personal experience of the world we inhabit among the ruins of creator myths—the dead house and the metaphysical fire; language that sweeps away everything we once knew.” We might understand the “dead house” Guzmán refers to as the legacy of violence that has shaped modern Mexican history, from the Aztecs and Zapotecs to Cortés, the conquistadors and missionaries. A history layered with bloodshed, to be sure, but Guzmán appears to embrace it as an origin story. It is not, perhaps, a history that can be easily swept away, in the end—as hexagram 18 tells us, just because the origin is spoiled doesn’t mean the rest is a waste. You have to work on it.

1. The I Ching or Book of Changes. (1967) English translation by Cary F. Baynes, original German translation by Hellmut Wilhelm. Third edition, Bollingen Series XIX. Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey. Pg. 75.