What matters is when the buffet breakfast opens. At the Hotel Presidente (in downtown San José, Costa Rica), that’s 06:00.
A family of four shift from foot to foot in impatient unison. They’ve been first in line for three dawns. It’s already 06:04. Father passes the swathes of lost time by regaling his tidy tribe with tales of family-queuing past. ‘Remember getting a step on those sleepyheads in the beach campgrounds on the North Sea?’ Those were the days of adventure.
A couple with matching hawk-like noses swoops to their habitual perch at a corner table. They give the impression of having breakfasted hours ago. On some belltower eyrie. They require only strong coffee now.
They peck and pore over a Guide Bleu and a vast printed map. Old School, our hawk couple.
A man in a Tom Petty tour shirt knows what he wants. Spurning the buffet’s foreign abundances, he’s after toast.
Perhaps not only toast . . . . He barks out a special order for a western omelette. His American English is impeccable.
Another man with a small dog’s face (maybe a Pekingese) is, by contrast, so beset by the buffet’s choices that he cannot, well, choose. Finally, all elbows and desperation, the dog-faced man heads for the heaping tray of gallo pinto. But a harried-looking competitor —also curiously dog-like, but Daschund this time— has been roused to step up their game, and from a strategic vantage near the last dollop of scrambled eggs, just manages to cut in front of him.
A woman in black, with impeccably spiky hair and massive ear rings, slips the hotel’s perfectly ordinary silverware into her bag.
A disconsolate teen —in earbuds and skinny jeans— is not for moving. He slumps in immaculate inattention to anything but his jesus-phone and music. He will eat only papaya on vacation, and he’s not finished his helping. His parents launch half-hearted, individual sorties into the back of his hoodie. “We leave in five minutes,” utters one. “Now we’re really going,” intones the other.
THE HOTEL PRESIDENTE lays on an excellent breakfast, and a privileged cosmopolitan crowd in touristic mode knows it. Estilo buffet unfolds.
But just how to appreciate most fully the morning buffet's repeating scene, the buffet as touchstone, a landmark of reality?
As my photographs and paintings may suggest, happenings in the foreground can't help but be juxtaposed with what rises in wait behind. I have no right. Yet I can't help but look for signs that those partaking in the bustling banquet are aware of their backdrop. Signs that it might matter in some way to be dining beneath the backdrop of history; History, in fact, The Past in grand sweep.
Three scenes in low-relief bronzed stucco —created in 1966 by the sculptor Francisco Ulloa Báez for the “Hall of the Americas”— dominate the long wall in what has become the hotel’s restaurant. In both his subject matter and his medium Ulloa is a re-teller, a re-shaper of vast murals past. He was most directly inspired by the sculpted work that engulfs the “Golden Hall” in the Museo de Arte Costarricense, originally created by the French artist Louis Ferón in 1939-1940 (to adorn the Diplomat Lounge in the museum’s first incarnation as La Sabana International Airport).
One is face to face with Ulloa's vision of the history of Costa Rica —and, by inference, of Latin America and the Caribbean, indeed of “the Americas” and the Philippines archipelago and a TransPacific West writ large— these histories in a nutshell. History shorn of doubt and complexity, with selected and realisable ends, shaped upon a wall in three acts. History glimpsed through what Roland Barthes (in the context of France in the 1950s) called a society's popular “mythologies." By myths he meant all that had become a (bourgeois) society's common sense, its unspoken convictions, its naturalising distortions, and perhaps especially its convenient caricatures of historical moments, phenomena and meanings, society's reiterated “essences.”1 These essences often stand in for history. For history's purported turning points, for its protagonists and their obstacles and opponents, for moments in and senses of history, things I explored differently in an earlier dispatch, Aguirre and the Princess.
Ulloa’s first essence is “Discovery / Descubrimiento.” The panel gives privilege to visually and rhetorically seductive binaries. “Pre-Hispanic” nature, indigenous beauty —rendered feminine and earthly, unclothed, hospitable and abundant—
provides. Provisioning abounds in a land of plenty.
The people and waters, the trees and lands of this coastal idyll are happened upon by different men (there are no women of their kind. Not yet) in heavy clothing and armour who
—brandishing their beards and banners, their crosses and (for the moment) sheathed steel-- exist as if only to arrive, to assume, assert, and claim.
In “Colonisation / Colonización” images of conquest and war —Spaniards’ horses trample, swords are now raised and muskets aimed, while indigenous warriors resist with bows and arrows—
give way to representations of evangelisation and civil-isation.
A scene of baptism and an iconic church take pride of place,
but prominent too is a new architecture, the village settlement.
Enslaved African captives are completely absent from panel two's bronzed essence.
And yet work, played out on a different register, joins architecture and the Catholic Christian religion to signify “the colonial period.” Attentive labourers —indigenous, it seems, though mestizo-minded, neatly dressed and their hair cropped— work the loom, ready the wine, and drive imported animals upon a tamed land.
The third panel, “Republican Times / República,” fast-forwards to heroic struggles for independence, and to symbolic portrayals of “modern” times: the period up to the sculptor Ulloa’s mid-1960s, to be sure, but in ways that still partook of the (moment of his inspiration Ferón’s) late 1930s, just as Costa Rica recognised Francisco Franco’s seizure of power in Spain and, with it, an amplification of a providential and valorous unfurling of trans-oceanic Hispanism. Spain’s loss of this region (and most of her far-flung realms) could be re-mythologised, and replaced by nationalism’s histories, the mysterious but inexorable workings of God’s will anew.
Heroes’ sacrificial deaths are embroidered with hope, loosed from worn out colonial shackles, finding freedom.
All hail the prominent table at which visionary founders and stern statesmen with tight collars, and still flanked by churchmen, sign papers.
They’re surrounded by “new” symbols of industry, wealth-production and transportation, by ventures in mining, petroleum, factories, and the glories of air travel.
IT’S BIZARRE BUT somehow vital to see the shapes and meanings sought by Ferón in 1939, that begat Ulloa’s tripartite vision in 1966, opening on to now, our times, 2022-2023.
Jostling about the breakfast buffet, who am I,
who are “we,”
but participants in a fourth and perhaps a fifth panel of “modern” essences
—invading, assuming, promising, extracting anew— our assembly of contemporary myths in crumbling bronzed stucco.
There’s a woman with owlish spectacles and a notebook at breakfast. I kid myself she might care.
That, upon noticing me sketching, she’ll follow my gaze, my thoughts, beyond the steam pans and cheese trays.
* Watercolours and photographs by Kenneth Mills
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In Mythologies, trans. Richard Howard and Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, [1957] 1972, 2012), Barthes wields a ranging and playful skewer, identifying, exposing, and dissecting across a vast “treasure” of bourgeois contemporary myths. He loathes the “lies of essence,” even as he recognises their widespread power, how they suffuse the world and its language, becoming historical imagination and cultural understanding.
And I think you really captured the mood of the early morning hotel breakfast. You enable us to feel the characters.
Are your characters real? Did you see them, or "feel" them as you describe them? It does not matter, really. Authenticity does not depend on it.
A dissection of western cultural consciousness and conscience that cloaks intellectual substance by assuming the gait and gaze of the traveller passing through. A little gem of a multi-media ensayo that makes the fallacies and deliberate distortion of cultural memories tangible.
I will soon be thinking of teaching Y2 students about the early modern Hispanic monarchy. I have to do it differently. One session will be on "memory". I will return to this substack and your thoughts on Aguirre.
As always, I love your art.
Many thanks, Ken.