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Medientyp:
E-Artikel
Titel:
Remedy or Poison? Diego Rivera, Medicine and Technology
Beteiligte:
Lomas, David
Erschienen:
Oxford University Press, 2007
Erschienen in:Oxford Art Journal
Sprache:
Englisch
ISSN:
0142-6540;
1741-7287
Entstehung:
Anmerkungen:
Beschreibung:
<p> This article takes Diego Rivera's History of Cardiology (1943-44) murals as the basis for a discussion of the relatively neglected role of medicine in his work's address of issues of technology and modernity. It is concerned with the intrinsically pharmakon-like character of technology, its dual proclivity for both good and evil, and analyses the rhetorical and visual strategies by which Rivera strove to ensure that its beneficent side would prevail. In Rivera's murals of Detroit Industry (1932-33), his best known treatment of the theme of technology, the positive face of modernity is represented by the pharmaceutical industry. I argue that it was a mural project by an erstwhile pupil, Bernard Zakheim, which opened Rivera's eyes to the scope for a similarly epic presentation of modern medicine. A commission to produce two murals as decorations for the newly completed Instituto nacional de cardiologiá in México City provided him with this opportunity. The project brought together a prominent member of Mexico's technocratic élite, Dr Ignacio Chávez, Director of the Institute, with a politically radical artist, both of them united by a broadly optimistic faith in technological modernity. The murals represent the historical evolution of modern cardiology as a vertical ascent propelled by an impersonal dialectic of science and technology (Rivera ingeniously adapts a circulatory metaphor from the Detroit Industry murals). The introduction of indigenous medicine by Rivera in the form of four predella panels complicates the progressivist assumptions that informed his brief, or so I suggest. I briefly compare the hierarchical schema of the Cardiology murals with his last-completed mural for the Hospital de la Raza (1953), where still relevant questions of health care choices and access to modern medicine are seen more from the viewpoint of a poor, ethnically diverse patient population. </p>