March 2012 New York-based artist Ugo Rondinone curates an exhibition that includes Hans Schärer’s Madonna, in which the teeth are replaced by yellowing pebbles.
April 8, 2013 The Fundación/Colección Jumex opens its exhibition El cazador y la fábrica.
2013 A two-Euro coin is minted to celebrate the 2,400th anniversary of the foundation of Plato’s Academy.
Afterword
THIS BOOK IS THE RESULT of several collaborations. In January 2013, I was commissioned to write a work of fiction for the catalog of The Hunter and the Factory, an exhibition curated by Magalí Arriola and Juan Gaitán at Galería Jumex, a gallery located in the marginalized, wasteland-like neighborhood of Ecatepec outside Mexico City. The idea behind the exhibition, and my commission, was to reflect upon the bridges — or the lack thereof — between the featured artwork, the gallery, and the larger context of which the gallery formed part.
The Jumex Collection, one of the most important contemporary art collections in the world, is funded by Grupo Jumex — a juice factory. There is, naturally, a gap between the two worlds: gallery and factory, artists and workers, artwork and juice. How could I link the two distant but neighboring worlds, and could literature play a mediating role? I decided to write tangentially — even allegorically — about the art world, and to focus on the life of the factory. I also decided to write not so much about but for the factory workers, suggesting a procedure that seemed appropriate to this end.
In mid-nineteenth century Cuba, the strange métier of “tobacco reader” was invented. The idea is attributed to Nicolás Azcárate, a journalist and active abolitionist, who put it into practice in a cigar factory. In order to reduce the tedium of repetitive labor, a tobacco reader would read aloud to the other workers while they made the cigars. Emile Zola and Victor Hugo were among the favorites, though lofty volumes of Spanish history were also read. The practice spread to other Latin American countries but disappeared in the twentieth century. In Cuba, however, tobacco readers are still common. Around the same time this practice emerged, the modern serial novel was also invented. In 1836, Balzac’s La Vieille Fille was published in France, and Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers was published in England. Distributed as affordable, serialized chapbooks, they reached an audience not traditionally accustomed to reading fiction. I realized I could combine these two literary devices that had once proven adequate in contexts not too different from the one I was facing. In order to pay tribute to and learn from these reading and publishing practices, I decided to write a novel in installments for the workers, who could then read it out loud in the factory.
The Jumex team was supportive and enthusiastic, and set up a space and the necessary conditions for the readings to take place. I wrote the first installment, which was printed as very low-budget, simple chapbooks that were distributed to the workers. A few workers became interested, and the curatorial assistant, Lorena Moreno, helped form and moderate a small reading club that met each week to read and discuss the pieces. I started sending new installments each week; the team at the Jumex Foundation printed the chapbooks and distributed them. With everyone’s consent, the reading sessions were recorded and sent back to me in New York. I would listen to them, taking note of the workers’ comments, criticisms, and especially their informal talk after the reading and discussion. I’d then write the next installment, send it back to them, and so on. They never saw me; I never saw them. I heard them, and they read me. Two members of the Jumex team, Javier Rivero and El Perro, also helped me take and collect pictures of the artwork, the gallery, and the neighborhood, which enabled me, virtually at least, to move around and explore the spaces I was writing about. The formula, if there was one, would be something like Dickens + MP3 ÷ Balzac + JPEG. With the last installment, I also sent the workers an MP3 recording of my voice, thanking them for their time and input. I had been writing under the pseudonym Gustavo Sánchez Sánchez, and I thought it was important to close the circle of intimacy we had created by letting them hear my real voice. Their reaction to my spoken voice was probably similar to my reaction when, months later, two of the workers appeared at the book launch in Mexico City at the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil. That is when the circle really closed.
Many of the stories told in this book come from the workers’ personal accounts — though names, places, and details are modified. The discussions between the workers also directed the course of the narrative, pushing me to reflect upon old questions from a new perspective: How do art objects acquire value not only within the specialized market for art consumption, but also outside its (more or less) well-defined boundaries? How does distancing an object or name from its context in a gallery, museum, or literary pantheon — a reverse Duchampian procedure — affect its meaning and interpretation? How do discourse, narrative, and authorial signatures or names modify the way we perceive artwork and literary texts? The result of these shared concerns is this collective “novel-essay” about the production of value and meaning in contemporary art and literature.
For their input and dedication, I would like to thank many people, but more than anyone, I’d like to thank the factory workers who read and somehow wrote this story with me: Evelyn Ángeles Quintana, Abril Velázquez Romero, Tania García Montalva, Marco Antonio Bello, Eduardo González, Ernestina Martínez, Patricia Méndez Cortés, Julio Cesar Velarde Mejía, and David León Alcalá.
Finally, I should say that from the initial installments read by the workers in the factory to this final version of the book in English, many things have changed. In fact, the Spanish book is also different from the English one — as has been the case with my previous books, which I revise and rewrite so thoroughly in English that I prefer to conceive of them as versions rather than translations. This English edition, moreover, includes an extra “chapbook” written entirely by my translator, Christina MacSweeney. Her Chronologic is a map, an index, and a glossary for the book, which both destabilizes the obsolete dictum of the translator’s invisibility and suggests a new way of engaging with translation; one that neither relies on bringing the writer closer to the reader — by simplifying and glossing the translated text — nor on bringing the reader closer to the writer — by means of rendering the text into a kind of “foreign English.” This book began as a collaboration, and I like to think of it as an ongoing one, where every new layer modifies the entire content completely.
Credits
The Story of My Teeth contains references to many texts, and in most cases these are creatively interpreted, paraphrased, or have been altered slightly through multiple translations. Pg. 16: Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus quote from The Twelve Caesars, translated by Robert Graves, Penguin Books, 1957. Pg. 22: Jean Baudrillard quote from America, translated by Chris Turner, Verso, 1989. Pg. 27: Cervantes. Pg. 45: Michel Foucault quote from “The Lives of Infamous Men” in Power: Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, Volume 3, translated by Robert Hurley, The New Press, 2001. Pg. 52: Michel de Montaigne quote from “Of Experience.” Pg. 55: Charles Lamb quote from The Life, Letters and Writings of Charles Lamb Volume II, Pg. 56: G. K. Chesterton quote from “The Appetite of Earth” in Alarms and Discursions, Dodd, Mead and Company, 1911. Pg. 71: Marcel Proust quote from Remembrance of Things Past: Swann’s Way, translated by C. K. Scott Montcrieff, Henry Bolt, 1922. Pg. 87: Danill Kharms quote based on excerpt from Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms, Ardis Publishers, 2007. Pg. 91: Based on a line from Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing. Pg. 113: Based on sayings by Vince Lombardi, Cervantes, and unattributed Latin, Chinese, and Spanish proverbs. Pg. 134–135: Walter Benjamin quote based on excerpt from “Theses on the Philosophy of History” in Illuminations, Schocken Books, 1968.