CH’U MAYAA AND

THE
APPROPRIATION OF
THE PAST
Jesse Lerner

21: INQUIRIES INTO ART, HISTORY, AND THE VISUAL

#2-2023, S. 1–14

https://doi.org/10.11588/xxi.2023.2.96033

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 Jesse Lerner

ABSTRACT

The short video Ch’u Mayaa (Maya Blue, 2017) by artist Clarissa
Tossin uses the Barnsdall (or Hollyhock) House, one of five South­
ern California textile block homes by Frank Lloyd Wright built
in the early 1920s, as the setting for a dance performance by the
choreographer Crystal Sepúlveda. Without dialogue or narration,
the video raises complex issues about the use and appropriation of
imagery and designs from the ancient Americas, and the ways in
which a structure from the past, now designated an architectural
landmark, can be reframed by contemporary artists. The essay con­
cludes with a brief discussion of the author’s collaboration with
Mexican artist Mariana Castillo Deball, a playful conceptual project
which also highlights the relationship between the architecture of
Frank Lloyd Wright and that of the ancient Maya.

KEYWORDS

Maya Revival; Appropriations; Video Art; Clarissa Tossin; Mariana

Castillo Deball; Frank Lloyd Wright.

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 Ch’u Mayaa and the Appropriation of the Past

Any number of contemporary artists have made works based on

twentieth-century Maya Revival architecture, from Eduardo Aba­
roa’s epic fantasy of iconoclasm, La destrucción total del Museo
Nacional de Antropología (2012–2016), to the late Lourdes Grobet’s
photographic essay Neo-Olmayaztec (1990), from Pablo López Luz’s
deadpan photographs of even more modest, vernacular examples of
this style gathered in Pyramids (2019) to Andrés Padilla Domene’s
Yucatecan science fiction documentary Ciudad Maya (2016, set in
the ruins of the Mérida nightclub of the same name).1 All of these
works sit at a crossroads, where modernism meets the Pre-Colum­
bian past, where architecture, archaeology, contemporary art, and
art history all intersect. Elsewhere I’ve explored the ways in which
Maya Revival architecture – in Mexico (both within and beyond
the Maya region of the southeast), in the USA, in Spain, and bey­
ond – has been framed by forces of nationalism, manifest destiny,
post-Revolutionary ideological debates, and regional pride.2 In the
wake of the European invasion of the Americas, the introduction
to and assimilation of the radically different aesthetics of Mesoame­
rica produced little discernable impact on European art, and even
less on European architecture. It was not until the late nineteenth
century and the start of the twentieth that the first Western archi­
tects began to integrate references to these ancient structures into
contemporary designs, in ways that were as diverse as the principal
practitioners: Robert Stacy-Judd, Walter Burley Griffin and Marion
Mahony Griffin, Frank Lloyd Wright and his son, Lloyd Wright. In
Mexico, and especially on Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula, these refe­
rences gathered another set of meanings and a different ideological
charge, as evident in the work of architects there, especially Manuel
Amábilis and Francisco J. Serrano. When taking these Maya Revival
buildings as a point of departure, contemporary artists are confron­
ted with a tangled knot of questions revolving around appropriati­
ons of the Indigenous past, tangible and intangible cultural heritage,
and the legacies of the European Conquest. How can artists re-ima­
gine these histories? A short, seventeen-minute video by Los Ange­
les-based artist Clarissa Tossin entitled Ch’u Mayaa (or in English,
Maya Blue, 2017) enters into these debates with a choreography
and montage that create a powerful, poetic intervention within one
particularly beautiful, highly charged space, one richly suggestive of
a productive dialogue between contemporary art practice, archaeo­
logy, and art (and architectural) history.

1
Eduardo Abaroa, La destrucción total del Museo Nacional de Antropología, Mexico City 2017;
Pablo López Luz, Pyramid, Paris 2015. Grobet’s photo-essay has yet to be published in its
entirety, but is available for viewing on her website Lourdes Grobet .

2
Jesse Lerner, The Maya of Modernism. Art, Architecture, and Film, Albuquerque, NM 2013.
More of the context for these exchanges and appropriations in architecture and design
is provided by Wendy Kaplan (ed.), Found in Translation. Design in California and Mexico,
1915–1985, Los Angeles 2017.

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 Jesse Lerner

Ch’u Mayaa is shot at the Barnsdall House (1918–1920, also

known as the Hollyhock House), the first of five textile block homes
Frank Lloyd Wright built in Southern California in the early 1920s.
The building was commissioned as a private home by the million­
aire oil heiress, arts patron, experimental theater impresario, and
radical leftist Aline Barnsdall, who imagined it as the center of a
sprawling arts complex called Olive Hill. During this interval in
Southern California in the early 1920s, Frank Lloyd Wright and
his office (especially Rudolph Schindler, Richard Neutra, and Lloyd
Wright) designed – in addition to the Hollyhock House – Pasaden­
a’s Millard House (1923, also known as La Miniatura), the Ennis
House (1923–1924), the Storer House (1923–1924), the Freeman
House (1923–1924), as well as a never realized plan for the Doheny
Ranch Development (1921), an ambitious proposal for what is tod­
ay’s moneyed Trousdale Estates neighborhood of Beverly Hills.3
The most notable commonalities shared by all these projects are
the abstract geometric references to the ancient monumental archi­
tecture of the Maya region and the use of textured, cast concrete
blocks, incorporating sand from the site, to add an element of the
local earth tones. Numerous scholars have detailed the connecti­
ons with ancient Maya ceremonial buildings,4 but Wright himself
was loath to acknowledge “influences”, for fear that it might dimi­
nish perceptions of his originality or genius. “Resemblances are
mistaken for influences”,5 Wright stated dismissively. Yet Wright
did acknowledge that from an early age, “primitive American archi­
tecture, Toltec, Aztec, Mayan, Inca, stirred my wonder, excited
my wishful admiration”.6 Later in his life, after his 1952 visit to
Mexico City (and especially the newly constructed Ciudad Univer­
sitaria campus of the National University, or UNAM), he stated he
was “more than ever sure that American Architecture needs only
American influences originating in the Toltec area as the great
basis of all future architecture […] Swiss or French influence is now

3
The Doheny Ranch Development would have comprised between two and three hundred
textile block houses of different shapes and sizes sprawling over a 411-acre site, owned
at the time by another petroleum multi-millionaire, Edward L. Doheny. See Greg Gilden
and Sam Lubell, Never Built Los Angeles, New York 2013, 52–53. Frank Lloyd Wright was
in Japan during much of this time, preoccupied with the construction of the New Imperial
Hotel in Tokyo, and left much of the work on the Hollyhock House to Schindler, Neutra,
and his eldest son, much to the consternation of Barnsdall. See Kathryn Smith, Frank Lloyd
Wright. Hollyhock House and Olive Hill, Buildings and Projects for Aline Barnsdall, Santa
Monica, CA 2006.

4
See, for example, Barbara Braun, Pre-Columbian Art and the Post-Columbian World. Ancient
American Sources of Modern Art, New York 1993, 138–179; and Anthony Alfonsin, Frank
Lloyd Wright, The Lost Years, 1910–1922. A Study of Influence, Chicago 1993, 221–260. Ruth
Anne Phillips and R. Sarah Richardson argue that the architecture of the Inca, Tiwanaku,
and other Andean sources were equally influential, if less often acknowledged: Phillips
and Richardson, Stone, Water, and Mortarless Constructions. Frank Lloyd Wright and the
Pre-Columbian Inca, in: The Latin Americanist 57/4, 2013, 97–129.

5
Frank Lloyd Wright, A Testament, New York 1957, 204.

6
Ibid., 111.

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 Ch’u Mayaa and the Appropriation of the Past

behind the American lighthouse and I hope it stays there”.7 These

Mesoamerican resonances appear earlier in his work (the no-longer
existent Midway Gardens, 1915, the A. D. German Warehouse, 1915,
the Imperial Hotel, 1916–1922, and the Bogk House, 1917) and conti­
nue intermittently until some of his very last buildings (especially
New York’s Guggenheim Museum, 1943–1959, a riff on Chichén
Itzá’s “observatory”, popularly known as El Caracól). But unlike
Amábilis and Stacy-Judd, who both wrote analyses and celebrations
of ancient Maya architecture, albeit through highly idiosyncratic
interpretations that flew in the face of the more orthodox archaeolo­
gical understanding of their day,8 or those of other contemporaries
mining these same sources, Frank Lloyd Wright’s appropriation
of Native American sources is elided by his obfuscations and deni­
als. “To cut ambiguity short: there has never been an external influ­
ence on my work, other than […] the great poets”, he wrote in one
autobiography. “As for the Incas, the Mayans, even the Japanese –
all were to me but splendid confirmation.”9
Recently, a century after the construction of the Hollyhock
House, there have been any number of unauthorized, popular inter­
ventions both in California and elsewhere in the USA attacking
public and private monuments that mark the European invasion and
Conquest. These attacks are part of a larger, national reckoning,
in large part provoked by the brutal murders by police of Eric
Garner, Michael Brown, Jordan Edwards, George Floyd, Breonna
Taylor, and too many others, and a contentious reevaluation of how
multiple histories of violence ought to be marked in public spaces
and in official narratives. Authorities in Carmel, San Luis Obispo,
and Ventura, California have removed and put in storage public
statues of Junípero Serra (the Franciscan friar – and as of 2015, a
saint as well – who led the evangelization of the Californias), similar
monuments to Serra in San Francisco, Monterey, Santa Barbara,
Sacramento, Mission Hills, Malibu, Los Angeles, and San Gabriel
have been toppled, vandalized, or decapitated.10 Dozens of public

7
Frank Lloyd Wright to Carlos Lazo, November 15, 1952, in: Frank Lloyd Wright, Letters to
Architects, ed. by Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, London 1984, 202. Wright’s use of the word “Tol­
tec” likely reflects a now-outdated understanding of that culture’s influence in Mexico’s
southeast. The first edition of Sylvanus Griswold Morley’s survey text The Ancient Maya
(Stanford, CA 1946, 88) for example, states that around the tenth century, it is “probable
that originally some of their ancestors at least had come from central Mexico, perhaps even
from Tula, the ancient Toltec capital”.

8
Stacy-Judd’s treatment of the ancient Maya revisits many of the ideas of Augustus and
Alice Le Plongeon and Charles Étienne Brasseur de Bourbourg; see his Atlantis. Mother
of Empires, Los Angeles 1939. Amábilis’s esotericism reaches similar conclusions with an
altogether different methodology; as in his Los Atlantes en Yucatán, Mexico City 1975.

9
Wright, A Testament, 205.

10
See the essays published in the section “Dialogues. The California Missions and the Arts
of the Conquest”, in: Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture 2/3, 2020, 53–111; as well as
Charlene Villaseñor Black’s introduction, Rethinking Mission Studies, in: Latin American
and Latinx Visual Culture 2/3, 2020, 3–7. For a more general discussion of the contemporary

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 Jesse Lerner

statues of Columbus across the USA have met similar fates, as have
monuments commemorating the conquistadors Juan de Oñate and
Ponce de León. While neither violent nor iconoclastic, Tossin’s Ch’u
Mayaa is also a reckoning with the history of the Conquest and
of cultural appropriation. As this rash of demolitions suggests, her
intervention (inevitably, and in too many ways to enumerate) takes
place in a political and social context, and at a moment that is quite
different from the time a century ago when the Barnsdall House was
constructed. One important difference is that the Hollyhock House
is no longer a private home, and Olive Hill is not (nor was it ever)
the sort of ambitious artists’ colony that Aline Barnsdall hoped it
would become.11 The southern and eastern parcels at the base of
Olive Hill were sold off to private developers, and today are the site
of a private hospital and a large shopping plaza housing a barber
shop, a Thai restaurant, an Armenian grocery store, a drive-through
fast food outlet, a faux half-timbered storefront selling fish and
chips, a taco shop, and an Asian fusion restaurant. This is the part of
the site where Barnsdall imagined constructing a series of studios,
home for an artists’ residency program that was never realized.
Nor were Wright’s plans for an open-air theater, an apartment buil­
ding, artists’ residences, and shops – except for two smaller structu­
res, known as “Residence A” (often called the “Director’s House”)
and (the subsequently demolished) “Residence B”.12 The Hollyhock
House itself, however, has been preserved and restored, and is
recognized on the US National Register of Historic Places. It is also,
like the Maya ruins of Chichén Itzá, Uxmal, Calakmul, Palenque,
Quiriguá, and Tikal, designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site;
along with seven other Wright buildings, it is part of a multi-sited
monument called “The 20th-Century Architecture of Frank Lloyd
Wright”.13 In short, the Hollyhock House is neither what it was
when Barnsdall (briefly) lived there, nor what she imagined it would
become today; it is rather now an architectural landmark, a monu­
ment.

re-evaluation of public art and monuments in the USA, see Laura Raicovich, Culture Strike.
Art and Museums in an Age of Protest, London 2021, 126–131.

11
Pilar Tompkins Rivas, Civic Virtue. Intersections of Art, Agency, and Activism, in: Civic
Virtue. The Impact of the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery and the Watts Towers Arts
Center, Los Angeles 2011, 40–43. Barnsdall’s relationship with the architect, who left for
Japan during construction, and whom she blamed for cost overruns and the building’s
structural problems, was contentious. Her relationship with the city government, to whom
she donated the building, was even more so. Wright returned to the site in 1954 for the Los
Angeles presentation of his retrospective, Sixty Years of Organic Architecture. The Works of
Frank Lloyd Wright, in a temporary structure of his design and the prototype for today’s
Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery. The Cultural Affairs department also operates a small
theater on the site, though modest compared to the open-air theater Barnsdall dreamed of
building.

12
After donating the Hollyhock House to the City of Los Angeles in 1926, Aline Barnsdall
continued living in the much smaller Residence B. It was demolished in 1954, eight years
after her death.

13
See The 20th-Century Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright on the website of the UNESCO.
World Heritage Convention (May 22, 2023).

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 Ch’u Mayaa and the Appropriation of the Past

While the Hollyhock House is not a tribute to a colonizer or

an evangelist, it is nonetheless one fraught with colonial subtexts.
However exceptional and however beautiful, it is like the countless
monuments to Columbus, Fray Diego de Landa, Father Junípero
Serra, and others, in that it is a product, a marker, and a celebration
of the Conquest and of the subjugation of Indigenous Americans
erected by Americans of European descent. While most such public
monuments use a familiar sculptural style inherited from Europe,
that of a bronze or marble bust or larger-than-life, idealized like­
ness placed on a pedestal and labeled with a commemorative plaque,
Wright’s monument is a house, designed for a modern, radical cli­
ent, and replete with Mesoamerican quotations. When people of
European descent in the United States hope to assert their “Ame­
rican-ness” and sever the umbilical cord with Europe, they often
don red face and buckskin and put feathers in their hair. From the
Boston Tea Party to fraternal organizations such as The Improved
Order of Red Men and the New Confederacy of Iroquois, the Anglo
tradition of “playing Indian” is part of what Philip J. Deloria calls “a
still-unfinished, always-contested effort to find an ideal sense of
national self”.14 Wright’s building performs a more sophisticated
sort of architectural red face, an act of cross-cultural transvestitism
that its author simultaneously acknowledges (“American Architec­
ture needs only American influences originating in the Toltec area”)
and denies (“there has never been an external influence on my
work”).
Tossin’s Ch’u Mayaa is a collaboration with the choreographer
Crystal Sepúlveda, who performs dressed in jaguar print leotards,
blue running shoes, and (occasionally) sheer blue dresses with high
slits. Both the fabrics worn and postures assumed by the dancers
suggest depictions of royalty or high priesthood in the paintings
and bas reliefs of the ancient Maya. The “Maya blue” of the title,
of the dancer’s shoes and dress all reference the exceptionally
stable mineral pigment used in ritual costumes and body paintings
as recorded in multiple pre-Conquest sources.15 The jaguar print
pattern of the dancers’ costumes might derive from that of one of
the triumphant royals shown in the murals of Bonampak’s room 2,
or slightly further afield, the warriors clad in jaguar skins painted
at Cacaxtla.16 But the movements are decidedly not a speculative

14
Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian, New Haven, CT 1998. See also Chad A. Barbour, From
Daniel Boone to Captain America. Playing Indian in American Popular Culture, Jackson, MS
2016. The project has been exported to Europe as well; see, for example, the documentary If
Only I Were an Indian… (John Paskievich, 1996).

15
See, for example, Constantino Reyes Valerio, De Bonampak al Templo Mayor. El azul
maya en Mesoamérica, Mexico City 1993; and Nicholas Carter, Stephen D. Houston, and
Franco D. Rossi (eds.), The Adorned Body. Mapping Ancient Maya Dress, Austin, TX 2020.

16
While outside the Maya region, the murals of Cacaxtla, Tlaxcala are done in a Maya style
and probably represent a battle between armies from the Central Valley and the southeast.
See Claudia Lozoff Brittenham, The Murals of Cacaxtla. The Power of Painting in Ancient
Central Mexico, Austin, TX 2015.

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 Jesse Lerner

reconstruction of what Mesoamerican ceremonial dance might have

looked like, far from the exotica styles adopted by Ruth St. Denis
and Ted Shawn in Xochitl (1915), or Stacy-Judd’s gesticulations in
his penacho and full art deco-Maya regalia, as recorded in his home
movies of 1932, filmed in front of the Ennis House.17 The garments
are not anything like the sort of reconstruction of ancient Maya
ritual wear we see in those dances, nor those in movies like Chilam
Balam (Iñigo de Martino, 1955), Kings of the Sun (J. Lee Thompson,
1963), or other cinematic reconstructions. The costumes and cho­
reography make even fewer gestures to evoke the era of the const­
ruction of the Hollyhock House: no flapper dresses, no shimmies,
no Charlestons. The strategy deployed here is something entirely
different, one that filters archaeology, art history, and modernist
architecture through a lens of re-appropriation and re-conquest.
Ancient Maya dance, “widely represented in ancient imagery”18
if little studied, is largely the realm of speculation. While we can be
sure that “the classic Maya paid great attention to the positioning
of human bodies in space”,19 and we can see many, many static
depictions of bodies in movement on painted ceramics, murals,
and in carvings, most of these ancient choreographies will always
remain unknown. Presented as the inhabitant of the house, Sepúl­
veda greets the dawn, opens the windows, and walks onto a bal­
cony. She gently caresses the cast concrete blocks and breaks into
dance. Some of the dancer’s movements are so suggestive of specific
actions or sources that they invite comparisons to ancient sources.
When Sepúlveda’s body rolls down the broad staircase leading to
the terrace outside the music room like one of the bloody prisoners
of war, splayed on the stairs depicted in room 3 in Bonampak. The
building fragments and crops her body, isolating hands, arms, legs,
like shards of broken artifacts. The camera is frequently positioned
to leave most of her body out of view, blocked by the architecture.
Her hand flits back and forth from an opening by Schindler’s flower
boxes on the house’s eastern side [Fig. 1]. In another sequence, the
columns around the garden courtyard obstruct our view of all of
Sepúlveda’s body except for an extended leg or arm. Like the frag­
ments of human bodies depicted on countless potsherds (in Maya
tepung, or tepalcates in Nahuatl), these are isolated excerpts of gestu­
res, extracted and divorced from any original context or meaning.
Tossin’s editing amplifies this sense of fragmentation. The repeated

17
Held in the Architecture and Design Collections of the University of California, Santa
Barbara.

18
Mallory E. Matsumoto, The Moving Body, in: Carter, Houston, and Rossi, The Adorned
Body, 175.

19
Stephen D. Houston, Telling It Slant. Imaginative Reconstructions of Classic Maya Life, in:
Joanne Pillsbury (ed.), Past Presented. Archaeological Illustration and the Ancient Americas,
Washington DC 2012, 392.

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 Ch’u Mayaa and the Appropriation of the Past

jump cuts interrupt the continuity of the dancers’ movements, fur­

ther fracturing the actions recorded.
But it is misleading to read too much here through the lens of
ancient Maya. The house is named for the Hollyhock flower, Aline
Barnsdall’s favorite and a graphic source of much of the ornamen­
tations. The Alcea rosea was imported from Asia to Europe, and
from there to the Americas. A fixture of Ukiyo-e, and a symbol of
the Edo (or Tokugawa) shogunate, the symmetrical arrangements of
the leaves and brightly colored flowers would have been familiar to
Wright, a collector and student of Japanese prints who was in Japan
during most of the construction process.20 At times, the abstracted
concrete adornments on the house can lead us to wonder: is that a
feathered serpent’s tail or a stalk of hollyhock buds? The influences
that shaped the house are not simply Mesoamerican, but like the
small businesses housed in the strip mall below, they are Asian,
European, and Mexican, in short, a result of the processes of globa­
lization which the European invasion of the Americas accelerated
immeasurably.
Other than a brief glimpse of Hollyhock flowers, the frequently
contradictory narratives about the house offered by Frank Lloyd
Wright and Barnsdall are entirely absent from Ch’u Mayaa. The
architectural historian Alice T. Friedman has argued that the
house’s open spaces were conceived as a sort of open-air theater,
and arguably Tossin’s video returns to that neglected part of the
building’s original program.21 But the dramas surrounding the conf­
lict between the demanding, doubtlessly difficult client and the lar­
gely absent yet authoritarian architect as well as the strange and
convoluted history of the house following construction are all eclip­
sed by Tossin’s re-taking of the space for an Indigenous subject, and
that person’s very physical and kinetic occupation of the restored
neo-Maya house and the broad expanses of Southern California
it surveys. It is, symbolically at least, a gesture of Reconquista, to
use a loaded term, one which symbolically reclaims a building that
borrows liberally from pre-Conquest Mesoamerica.
Tossin’s current project – which the global pandemic put on
hold – also reinvests a Southern California house with ancient
Maya. For this project, she plans to use a Maya Revival house
of the same period, the John Sowden House (popularly known as
the “Jaws House”, 1926), designed by Wright’s son, Lloyd Wright
(who directed much of the construction on the Hollyhock House).
Using replicas of ancient Maya wind instruments (based on 3D
prints from scans of ancient prototypes), and in collaboration with
a composer, Tossin will re-appropriate the space with a speculative

20
Frank Lloyd Wright, The Japanese Print. An Interpretation, and The Frank Lloyd Wright
Collection of Japanese Antique Prints, in: Bruce Brice Pfeiffer (ed.), Frank Lloyd Wright.
Collected Writings, vol. 1, 1894–1930, New York 1992, 116–125 and 221–224.

21
Alice T. Friedmann, A House Is Not a Home. The Hollyhock House as “Art-Theater Gar­
den”, in: Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 51/3, 1992, 239–260.

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 Jesse Lerner

[Fig. 1]
Clarissa Tossin, Ch’u Mayaa, 2017, video still, framegrab at 5:54, total running time 17:57.
Courtesy of the artist.

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 Ch’u Mayaa and the Appropriation of the Past

reconstruction of ancient Maya music, like Ch’u Mayaa, but now

through the sounds these instruments produce rather than through
dance.
To conclude in first person: in 2011, the Mexican artist Mariana
Castillo Deball invited me to participate (along with Mario Bellatín,
Pablo León de la Barra, Valeria Luiselli, and others) in a publication
of a collection of dust jackets for a collection of books never written.
The project, entitled Never Odd or Even, was published on the occa­
sion of her exhibition of the same name at the Grimmuseum in Ber­
lin. The palindrome title suggests its own reversal, an unresolved,
perpetual back and forth, as well as an algebraic puzzle. The dust
jacket for the unwritten book that I contributed to this speculative
collection is for a volume called My Debt to the Ancient Americas, by
Frank Lloyd Wright [Fig. 2]. Its graphic design is copied from, and
the text itself (on the book flaps and back cover) channels the rhe­
toric of the books Wright published with Duell, Sloan, and Pearce
in the 1940s.22 While I believe it looks convincing, the architect
would certainly never have written such a book, any more than he
would have recognized that the Hollyhock House (and the Ennis
House, etc.) had been built on the ancestral lands of the Chumash.
Unlike the collection’s title, the non-existent book I proposed here
is not a reversal of anything (least of all the Conquest), not even
on a symbolic level, but it does make explicit a heretofore missing
recognition.23
This hypothetical book jacket and Tossin’s video share, I
believe, a similar spirit, what author and journalist Cristina Rivera
Garza calls “disappropriation”, an effort to return cultural produc­
tion “to its plural origins”.24 Rivera Garza’s neologism is developed
in her wide-ranging collection of essays on writing during times
of violence, especially the violence that engulfed Mexico following
President Felipe Calderon’s catastrophic declaration of a “war on
drugs”. While her collection addresses a range of diverse themes,
from bilingualism and writing in a language that is not one’s mother
tongue to pedagogy and authorship, it repeatedly circles back to
the possibilities and challenges of creating a text attributed to a
single author based on the experiences of others, experiences of a
community, and Rivera Garza’s search for alternatives to the pater­
nalistic fantasy of “giving a voice to the voiceless”. She reflects on
a range of artists and writers who employ very different strategies
of appropriation, including Duchamp’s ready-mades, Kathy Acker’s
post-modern cut-ups, and James Agee’s “bold, mad, thrilling” col­

22
Frank Lloyd Wright, On Architecture. Selected Writings on Architecture between 1894 and
1940, New York 1941; id., An Autobiography, New York 1941; id., Genius and the Mobocracy,
New York 1949.

23
Mariana Castillo Deball, Never Odd or Even Volume II, Berlin 2011.

24
Cristina Rivera Garza, Los muertos indóciles. Necroescritura y desapropiación, Mexico City
2020, 4. Translations by the author.

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 Jesse Lerner

[Fig. 2]
Mariana Castillo Deball, Manuel Raeder, and Jesse Lerner, My Debt to the Ancient Americas
by Frank Lloyd Wright, from the series Never Odd or Even, 2012, print. One of a collection
of dustjackets for books never written. Photograph by author.

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 Ch’u Mayaa and the Appropriation of the Past

laboration with Walker Evans, the modernist account of Alabama

sharecroppers’ lives Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and proposes
working toward a model which “exposes the plurality that precedes
the individuality on the creative process”.25 So while Wright’s buil­
ding is both a collaboration (with Schindler, Neutra, and his own
son), albeit an asymmetrical one, and a series of unacknowledged
appropriations (principally from anonymous architects of ancient
Mesoamerica), Tossin’s video, like the dust jacket for Wright’s
unwritten book [Fig. 2], urges us to recognize what has for too long
remained unacknowledged, albeit in oblique, poetic, and – certainly
in the latter case – cheeky ways.
Disappropriation is a theoretical model to begin to think about
alternative ways of writing others’ stories and working collabora­
tively across cultural differences. One way in which Ch’u Mayaa
resonates with this model is through fragmentation; rather than
presenting a unified, coordinated whole (Wright famously insisted
on designing the furniture, carpets, lighting fixtures for his buil­
dings), the video relies on collaboration and fracturing, as argued
above. In the same spirit, Castillo Deball’s collection of dust jackets
involves more than thirty collaborators, as well as evoking additi­
onal, unwitting ones like Wright. While the two are clearly very
different sorts of cultural products in many ways, as are the writings
of Rivera Garza, Agee, and Acker, all signal in their own ways a
return of artmaking to a pluralistic and communal process, draw­
ing on the experiences and contributions of multiple participants.
Disappropriation is surely not a universal or facile solution to the
complex ethical and political issues involved in representing the
cultural heritage, class positions, and lived experiences of others.
These issues will remain, and the examples discussed above – taken
from experimental video, architecture, dance, literature, and other
disciples – all raise different and specific questions that deserve
consideration. Though while neither addresses this explicitly, one
significant commonality shared by the work of Tossin and Wright
are the traumas of the historical backdrop: the European Conquest
of the Americas and the ensuing dispossession of land, decimation
of lives, and mass destruction of cultures. The auto-da-fé of Izamal,
the burning of the Maya libraries, the Caste Wars of Yucatan, and
the genocidal wars of Guatemala all destroyed parts of Maya cultu­
res, thus making these cultures and their monumental ruins more
susceptible for use as a blank screen onto which others project their
own narratives and fantasies. Returning to the original prompt on
the divide between art and archaeology, the questions that provoked
these reflections, Tossin’s video is a powerful catalyst for thinking
through some of these issues.

25
Ibid., 65.

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 Jesse Lerner

Jesse Lerner is a filmmaker, curator, and writer based in Los Ange­

les. He is a professor in Intercollegiate Media Studies at the Cla­
remont Colleges. His experimental documentary films have won
numerous prizes at film festivals in the United States, Latin Ame­
rica, and Japan, and have screened at NYC’s Museum of Modern
Art, Mexico’s National Anthropology Museum, the Guggenheim
Museums in New York and Bilbao, and the Sundance, Rotterdam,
and Los Angeles Film Festivals. His books include The Maya of
Modernism. Art, Architecture, and Film (2011), F Is for Phony. Fake
Documentary and Truth’s Undoing (2006, edited with Alex Juhasz),
Ism Ism Ism / Ismo Ismo Ismo. Experimental Cinema in Latin America
(2017, edited with Luciano Piazza), The Catherwood Project. Incidents
of Visual Reconstructions and Other Matters (2018, with Leandro
Katz), L.A. Collects L.A.: Latin America in Southern California Col­
lections (2017, edited with Rubén Ortiz Torres), and The Shock of
Modernity. Crime Photography in Mexico City (2007).

14