An axe-wielding Christ-figure stands before a fallen cross and a junk heap of shattered cultural symbols. Small, ghostly children stand in the shadow of a zombie-like schoolteacher, their gray-and-black schoolhouse looming in the distance. A gray-skinned Hernan Cortez stands in front of his burning ships, standing over piles of naked Native bodies lying at his feet.
These are some of the scenes Jos Clemente Orozco paints in "The Epic of American Civilization," which is housed in Baker Library's Reserve Corridor. Although Orozco shied away from politics, it's not hard to guess where his sympathies lay. His belief in the need for a seismic change in economic systems is evident in his depiction of a socialist utopia rising from the ruin of our tumultuous capitalistic world.
Orozco, David Siqueiros and Diego Rivera were known as "los tres grandes" of the Mexican Muralism art movement. The three men were friends, collaborating closely and co-founding multiple organizations. Although Orozco avoided entanglements with the Mexican Communist Party which merely considered him a "bourgeois skeptic" his friends were the definition of extreme communists.
In the panel "Gods of the Modern World," Orozco depicts undead skeletons in academic garb framed against a fiery background. The figures stand supervising the birth of useless knowledge symbolized by the births of stillborn skeletal fetuses from the human remains which rest in the foreground of the image. If any art can be said to be "extremist," this is it, but for some reason the murals are not nearly as controversial as they should be. Maybe people are worried that by criticizing Orozco, they'll be viewed as ignorant or simply violating certain unspoken rules of political correctness. Apparently it's alright to use undead skeleton caricatures as long as you're making them about white Westerners.
"The double-edged incisiveness of controversy is one of the major educational values to be derived from work as positive and vital as Orozco's", the Dartmouth library website reads. The College should of course be open to differing viewpoints and would be amiss to shy away from controversy, but real intellectual contention entails the representation of opposing perspectives.
Dartmouth has very prominently featured views on how terrible technology and modern western civilization are, but would it ever be willing to give similar representation to opposing historical perspectives? Imagine that in place of the Orozco murals was artwork that celebrated the largely linear progression of western technology and showed how innovation delivered man from the suffering of past ages to our glorious contemporary one. The murals would show how the brilliant ideas of entrepreneurs, inventors, and corporations such as McDonalds and General Electric have dramatically improved the human experience, especially for the poor. They could conclude with a vision of a great, free-market based urban utopia full of skyscrapers and flying cars. The College community would find this the artwork offensive because of its lack of consideration for all the minority groups and underpaid, overworked laborers who were "exploited" by "greedy" capitalists in the name of "materialistic" and "unnecessary" technology. The murals would be criticized for taking a very narrow view of human progress and for failing to reflect the suffering and inequality in the world today. As with Orozco's work, there would be reasonable criticisms, but there's no reason why one viewpoint is more acceptable than the other.
Completely censoring art is akin to censoring books. There are a lot of books in Dartmouth's libraries that are offensive to people, but that doesn't mean we should stop people from reading them. The problem with the Orozco murals is that, through their public display in Baker Library, they impose their presence on people who did not come to see them. Covering up the beautiful art would probably be counterproductive, yet by bestowing praise and attention on murals that ought to be highly inflammatory, the College indicates a bias towards certain viewpoints.
Incredibly, Orozco's radical sentiments seem largely unremarkable to the Dartmouth community. If the College were really as serious as it claims to be about "the double-edged incisiveness of controversy", it would give representation to other, less socially acceptable perspectives.
