This post is on a series
of twelve faces cast from sugar and water, works of art inspired by
Cartagena’s relationship with the United Farm Workers Foundation in his earlier
life and the brutal story of sugar beet farming in California. Prior to Cesar
Chavez’ labor rights movement, laborers had little to no rights or recognition.
They were the invisible figures that no one took account of when consuming food
or produce. The workers often chewed on sugar beets to acquire enough energy to
get through a day of picking the cash crop. The maltreatment and neglect of
these workers led Cartagena to collaborate with Maurilio Maravilla, a Mexican
immigrant who worked alongside Chavez during the fight for labor rights.
Cartagena cast a mold of Maravilla’s face with sugar, the cash crop he worked
so hard to harvest. He created twelve molds of Maravilla’s face to represent
the Last Supper. This reference is meant to create a relation between farm-workers and the fact
that they are the ones who put food on the table. In the work, Cartagena
purposefully uses sugar to refer to the struggle in the sugar beet harvest. He
also used it to create the molds because eventually the sugar molds will melt
away because of the heat lamp pointed at each one. The
works will essentially become non-existent because of this process. The
eventual non-existence of these works symbolizes the farm workers who, at one
point, were also invisible and non-existent to their employers and to consumers.
The story behind Sugar
Face evoked strong emotion in me because I have family members who are farm
laborers who experienced the struggle of having few rights. They relate to the
pain and inhumanity felt when they were made invisible by employers and
consumers alike. The story Cartagena
tells in these works is resoundingly similar to the stories I have heard my
aunts and uncles recount of the times they worked in the fields. Experiencing
works of art that I could relate to on such a personal level unlocked a
sensation that brought ease and tranquility but at the same time evoked pain
and anger. Looking at the molds of Maurilio Maravilla’s face was similar to a
face to face interaction because the molds were so realistic. I could make out
the creases in Maravilla’s skin and his sagged features. His face revealed a
life of pain due to unfair treatment in the agricultural labor force. This is
the aspect of the work that evoked pain and anger in me. I felt the pain and
anger that Maravilla experienced while simultaneously feeling the pain my
family endured in the farms. The life-like busts made the connection even more
intense because I felt like I was experiencing a genuine human interaction. I
felt as if Maravilla was one of my own family members. Overall, I was moved emotionally
by the realistic features and the story behind Sugar Face.
Sugar Face has
a unique story and appearance in comparison to similar works such as those of
ancient Greek masks. The works evoked such a strong emotion in me, compared to
similar works, because the features in these works were so life-like. I had
never felt a deeper connection to a similar work because I never understood the
symbolism of past works I experienced. I also valued the aesthetic experience
and the aesthetic emotion that these works uniquely evoked in me. Time stood
still as I observed the melting sugar drip down the sad, droopy face of
Maravilla. The raw emotions expressed in his face encouraged me to be raw in
the moment and allow my emotions to be honest and genuine. I felt overwhelmed
as I came face to face with the bust of another human. This work was effective
in provoking my aesthetic emotion by the dark color scheme created with the
mixture of sugar and water. Its realistic features and animistic emotions also
sparked unique emotion in me.
Getting to know and
understand the symbolism behind the twelve busts of Maravilla and the story
they tell played a role in my feeling such a strong emotion toward the works. Sugar Face taught me about pain and
sacrifice; it taught me the importance of leading a humble life. The works at
first glance seemed basic and uninteresting, but as I delved deeper into the
faces and their creases I discovered beauty in the struggle and wise life
advice. As humans, we all experience such
emotions and feelings as pain and suffering. Cartagena does a flawless
job of incorporating these emotions into his work in an attempt to appeal to the
emotions of any person who views his
work. This appeal to emotion simultaneously works as an appeal to human
consciousness and makes us aware of the agonizing labor process we take for
granted in order to have food on the table.
Overall, I experienced a
true aesthetic emotion toward Sugar Face,
but not the aesthetic emotion defined by Clive Bell in his book, Art. These works convey information and
purposefully encourage an emotion of sympathy toward the hard-working laborers.
For this reason, Bell would most likely have labelled this work as a descriptive
painting, although it consists of facial molds not paintings. His
description of aesthetic emotion also states that one should not attempt to enter the mind of the artist and view the work through their eyes; he says
one should experience one's own subjective reaction and create one's own
interpretation of a work.
I did not make attempts to interpret Sugar Face through the perspective of
Victor Cartagena, but I did feel a deeper connection with and understanding for
the work after reading the description and story behind the creation that
Cartagena wrote. My initial aesthetic emotion was not altered by the story behind
the work though. At first glance a strong aesthetic emotion was evoked within
me as I scanned over the precise facial features of an old man who was alive in
the sense of the cast’s animated qualities. Bell denies that aesthetic emotion
can exist when experiencing a descriptive painting, but this is simply not the
case.[1] The face of Maurilio
Maravilla unintentionally tells a story, a face carefully sculpted through the
genetics of his parents and through his life experience. A human face is independently considered aesthetic
with its symmetrical qualities and gentle features. Clive Bell’s hypothesis is
wrong to imply that an aesthetically pleasing human face cannot evoke aesthetic
emotion because the face simultaneously tells a story through its twinkling
eyes, skin creases, and scars. Bell says that the purpose of art is, “to
transport the viewer into a purely artistic world, cut off from real life” [2] (McLaughlin, 434). In Sugar Face, Bell’s claim of the purpose
of art is impossible. Victor Cartagena found a way to intertwine the artistic
world and real life by displaying the cast of twelve faces as art and using
their aesthetic qualities to promote a story of pain and sorrow.
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