Me subí al metro, tome taxis de la calle. Pasé por los tacos que más que gustan y por los mariscos donde siempre me reciben de lo más chido. Me empede en la cantina del Sanborns todo una tarde porque era "2x3".
Alcance correr a Antropología solo para ver a la madre del hombre, Coatlicue. She's pissed. This guy above is not her. That's Xochipilli, my dad.
Talk later ...
* Sigman (left) was born in Obregon, Sonora.
There’s a reason you saw more sugar skulls and calaveras on the streets of the U.S.A. this year.
It’s one of the many after-effects of the second major historical wave of U.S. migration from Mexico, which more or less coalesced around the opening of the North American market and has reached net-zero in relation to migrants who are returning to Mexico. In its wake, Americans have adopted the taco truck, the liberal use of Spanish phrases in rap by major American hip-hop stars like Kayne West and Kendrick Lamar, and the Days of the Dead.
The (Days or) Day of the Dead, aka "Dia de Muertos," is celebrated November 1 to 2, overnight. Mexicans at home make altars for their departed, while on the streets the holiday has morphed into a carnival of sugar skulls, calavera skeleton figures, and crowns of marigold flowers.
Since last weekend, countless communities from big cities to rural counties in the United States took on festivals and special events, concerts, art openings, and exhibits related to Day of the Dead. Morrissey — idol to many, many Mexican American mozheads — headlined last night's Day of the Dead festival in Santa Barbara.
Inevitably, given current trends in liberal academic theory, Day of the Dead has become a flash-point in ongoing debates about cultural appropriation in U.S. consumer culture. The imagery related to the holiday will abound in a forthcoming Disney/Pixar animated feature titled "Coco"; cartoonist Lalo Alcaraz is a consulting producer on the film, which can't be anything but a good thing.
** Originally published Nov. 1, 2013, at VICE México:
En Los Ángeles -- la segunda ciudad de mexicanos más grande del mundo -- el Día de Muertos se lo toman en serio. El año pasado estuve en el Sur de California por estas fechas, donde, en el centro cultural Self-Help Graphics & Art, una joya histórica de la raza del Este de Los Ángeles, vi el mejor altar de muertos que jamás he visto.
Lo hizo un artista conocido como Vyal Reyes, en memoria de grafiteros y taggers que han muerto de L.A. durante sus búsquedas por conquistar las calles con sus rayas.
Viniendo de una familia que incluye grafiteros, me impactó mucho este altar.
Primero, el artista uso un ataúd negro como pieza principal, donde metió fotos de graffiti-heads que han caído junto con latas de aerosol negras. Por fuera, Vyal pinto escenas urbanas con ojos "para estar trucha." Colocó latas de aerosol blancas en vez de velas, y pañuelos en vez de mantelitos.
"También incluí una cinta de seguridad, para indicar que la mayoría de estos artistas tuvieron muertes violentas" me dijo Vyal ayer vía correo, desde Los Ángeles.
"No conocí a todos los artistas personalmente", agregó, "pero tengo un gran respecto hacia ellos y hacia las contribuciones artísticas que dieron a la escena. Quiero homenajearlos para que sus esfuerzos no sean olvidados".
Los detalles obviamente tienen un sentido bien pensado. Hay una máscara para pintadores, junto con la salvia blanca que se quema tradicionalmente en California.
"Son las herramientas que usamos para protegernos físicamente y espiritualmente", añadió Vyal.
Afuera en el patio de Self Help, chicos del barrio del Centro de Los Ángeles estaban practicando su "spray art". Adentro, había muchos altares de la comunidad chicana de L.A., pero ninguno tenía la relevancia bruta con las calles como el de Vyal One. Tuve que regresar a tomarle más fotos, y a pararme a contemplar un poco la ofrenda.
El trabajo de Vyal se puede ver aquí. Este año, me dijo, está armando un altar en downtown Los Ángeles.
** Originally published at World Now:
MEXICO CITY -- Skull motifs. Dollar bills pasted on a wall. Phrases written in neon lights. Figures cut out of photographs. Or, if you like, a bunch of lines on paper.
It's hardly surprising that the offerings at Zona Maco, the Mexico City contemporary art bazaar that opened its 10th edition Wednesday, tend to look and feel like the art for sale at any other big fair.
Many of the galleries with showcases at the glitzy five-day event are visiting from established art centers like New York or Milan. But the ambition of Zona Maco's longtime director, Zelika Garcia, is to help build a mature art market in Mexico by cultivating domestic galleries and buyers.
Has it worked? Not entirely.
Numbers on Mexico's cagey collectors and what they're spending are hard to come by, and Garcia was not available for an interview. But dedicated fair-goers said that the number of collectors in Mexico City remains small.
By far the biggest local art patron is Eugenio Lopez, heir to Mexico's Jumex juice fortune and owner of the Jumex Collection, said to be the largest private art collection in Latin America. Housed at a juice-making plant in the Mexico City suburb of Ecatepec, Lopez's collection is reportedly worth at least $80 million.
On the fair's opening day, which was attended by Lopez and other noteworthy buyers, including the former mayor of Tijuana, Jorge Hank Rhon, there was much grumbling by dealers, artists and visitors.
There was no Internet connection in the hall at the Banamex convention center and not a lot being handed out for free. No water for sale, but plenty of tequila cocktails.
"Slow," "pale" and "thin" were some of the words used to describe the scene.
"What bothers me is there's no real thread," said Mario Ballesteros, editor of Domus Mexico magazine. "Even the big-name galleries, it's like they're just pulling out the inventory, like a garage sale."
On the bright side, government cultural agencies are becoming more involved, offering special programs and providing venues for Zona Maco events, said Maria Ortiz, director of volunteers at Mexico City's Museum of Modern Art.
Give the scene more time to grow, Ortiz said. "They have international galleries coming now, and so we can see art from abroad that we couldn't see otherwise."
By the afternoon, works were selling briskly. A government cultural official announced the establishment of an $829,000 fund to buy new work for Mexico's museums.
Prints by the artist and tattooist known as Dr. Lakra, made in his trademark style of embellishing vintage paper nudes, were going for $12,000 apiece at the booth of the local Kurimanzutto gallery. Working musical instruments made out of gun parts from Mexico's violent drug war, by Pedro Reyes for the Labor gallery, were going for $20,000 and up.
But some of the most interesting events are happening away from Zona Maco. Across town, small galleries, art collectives and pop-up curators are offering a host of intriguing indie exhibits throughout the week.
The group Bucareli ACT brought art viewers to a decaying downtown street Tuesday night where largely disused buildings were turned into venues for sound-art and other shows. A new video by artists Ilan Lieberman and Rafael Ortega juxtaposed clips from the classic film "King Kong" with footage of the arrest of the famously smirking U.S.-born drug lord, Edgar "La Barbie" Valdez.
Also away from the fair, art titan Gabriel Orozco is launching a collection of new works at Kurimanzutto on Saturday, a homecoming of sorts after a retrospective of his art traveled through New York, London and Paris in recent years.
Could Zona Maco be the place where a future Orozco makes a first sale? If market-savvy skills are any indicator, why not?
In the young artists section, Monterrey-based gallery Alternativa Once was showing "TwitterDrumSolo," a drum-kit that played itself, by 25-year-old Daniel Perez Rios.
A lanky guy in glasses, Perez explained that he used a computer to program the drumming to match surges in tweets about the presidential candidates on the night of last year's election.
The bass drum, for example, played when tweets mentioned "electoral fraud." Asked how much the piece cost, Perez replied: "You'll have to talk to my dealer."
* Update, 19:02 p.m.: Actualizo en la noche si tienen tips!
Real quick, here are some recommendations for some interesting exhibits and events happening around Zona MACO:
Opened Thursday or Saturday:
Morgan Manduley, at Yautepec, Melchor Ocampo 154-A, San Rafael.
Salón Acme No. 1, at Gob. Rebollar 45, San Miguel Chapultepec.
Gustavo Abascal, at Arte TalCual, Colima 326-A, Roma Norte.
** Also ongoing and highly recommended: "Asco: Elite of the Obscure," at MUAC at UNAM.
Opening Monday, April 8:
PJ Rountree with Kenny Curran, at Comedor (Cafe Zena), Gob. Tagle 66-A, San Miguel Chapultepec lunchtime through Friday, plus April 15.
Etienne Chambaud, at LABOR, Francisco Ramírez 5, Daniel Garza/Constituyentes, 5 p.m.
Opening Tuesday, April 9:
Jochen Lempert, at Lulu, Bajio 231, Roma, "la puertita roja," 5 p.m.
Esto no es un museo, at Centro Cultural España, Rep. de Guatemala 18, Centro, 7 p.m.
Miguel Angel Rios and Carlos Motta (fachada), at Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros, Tres Picos 29, Polanco, 7 p.m.
Group show; Bucareli ACT, Bucareli 120, Centro, 8 p.m.
Opening Wednesday, April 10:
MACO opens to the public. By now, Eugenio Lopez (or his staff of buyers) has already picked whatever he's taking home this year.
Opening Friday, April 12:
Colective Show Mexico City 2013, Neter, Calle 6, No. 11, San Pedro de los Pinos, 6 p.m.
Opening Saturday, April 13:
Gabriel Orozco, kurimanzutto, Gob. Rafael Rebollar 94, San Miguel Chapultepec, 12 p.m.
Sesiones de Azotea, at ATEA, Topacio 25, Merced, 3 p.m.
... More later!
** Photo: Artist PJ Rountree installing "Estaciones/Sazonez" at Cafe Zena, 2 p.m., April 8, 2013.
*** Added Wednesday, April 10: Raw Material/Materia Prima, hosted by Yuatepec, with five visiting galleries, Puebla 124, 12:00 p.m.
Above, several members of the Mexico City art collective Cráter Invertido at their studio space, October 2012. I profile the group, along with a variety of other exciting artist-run spaces currently operating in D.F., in the March 2013 issue of Art in America magazine, part of their series of "Atlas" columns from different art capitals.
An excerpt from the piece, in time for this week's energy around Zona MACO:
At a warehouse on a nondescript street in an old semi-industrial neighborhood near downtown, 14 artists have joined forces in a "collective of collectives" calling itself Crater Invertido. The name evokes the twin volcanoes that loom in the distance as well as an explosive inversion of the art pyramid. Most of its artists are recent graduates of one of the national art schools, La Esmeralda, where the group first took shape by organizing “happenings” in response to the institution’s deficiencies. Crater Invertido is now a politically sharp, process-based collective. Several members were active in the spring 2012 protest movement known as #YoSoy132, a grassroots democracy effort aimed at preventing the restoration of the old political regime.
"There was a constant interest in maintaining some type of cooperative. But we actually started seeing each other less, working less, because so much was going on politically in the country," remarks Crater Invertido artist Juan Caloca. "We kept asking ourselves what we could do, beyond purely symbolic actions, to generate something constructive in the long term."
#YoSoy132 was an electric moment for the opposition in Mexico, but the old regime won the election anyway. The movement eventually suffered a symbolic cooption by one of its sworn enemies when the media giant Televisa announced that prominent former members of #YoSoy132 were joining one of its programs as on-air panelists. On the October day that the news broke, members of the Crater Invertido shrugged it off and were busy at work, hunched over tables finishing a joint assemblage project called "Container of Volcanic Ash." There was still beer left over from the space’s most recent live-music event.
While reporting this piece, I interviewed Jose Kuri, co-director of kurimanzutto gallery, about the growth in independent art spaces in the city. He recalled a similar movement a generation ago.
"That’s why the artist-run spaces were there, where they could bounce off ideas, connect with other artists, experiment," Kuri told me. "That's why they had the artist-run spaces like the Panaderia, a place to meet people, to hang around, to go see a band to play."
"You don’t want only galleries, the commercial side of it. You want these other places, where [young artists] can show without the pressure of the galleries and without the pressure of the market," added Kuri.
* Above, members of the collective and space Neter, in San Pedro de los Pinos, Nov. 2012. Left to right: artists Marcos Castro, Alejandro García Contreras, and Jimena Schlaepfer.
Kuri and Monica Manzutto show many artists who started out in the important spaces of the 1990s -- Abraham Cruzvillegas (who has a great "Autoconstrucción" up right now at the Eco), Miguel Calderón, Gabriel Kuri, Gabriel Orozco, and more.
On Saturday, Orozco could possibly grab the highlight of D.F.'s annual spring "art week" based around Zona MACO, the city's major art fair. He's opening a solo show at the kurimanzutto's space in San Miguel Chapultepec, his first at his Mexico "home" since 2009, and I believe his first new work on display since Orozco's conquest of New York.
The 2009 show was an intriguing offering. I covered it here. Gabriel Orozco is currently on the cover of the weekly Frente, for an interview by Rulo.
Continue reading "Art in America: Mental spaces and empty promises" »
PJ Rountree is a visual artist based in Mexico City who makes work about the news, about the city, and about color and shapes. That's about as plainly as I can put it. See here, here, and here.
His current central project is Punto de Reunion, a study of the evacuation spots outside buildings in Mexico City that ... You just have to see, because you can also wear it.
** Originally published at World Now:
MEXICO CITY -- Did the rulers of the ancient city of Teotihuacan dedicate their largest pyramid to the god of fire, the so-called old god with a signature beard and fire atop his head?
Mexican archaeologists announced this week that a figure of the god, called Huehueteotl, was found in a covered pit at the apex of the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan, a popular archaeological site north of Mexico City.
Excavations are ongoing, but the discovery suggests that a long-disappeared temple at the top of the pyramid was used to perform ritual offerings to the fire god, Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History, or INAH, said in a statement Monday.
Huehueteotl is known in the archaeology of various Mesoamerican civilizations, such as the Olmecs and Aztecs, and the Aztecs' predecessors in the Valley of Mexico, the Teotihuacanos. He is commonly represented as a viejo, or old man, sitting in a cross-legged position, often with a beard and a beaked nose, and with a hearth-like source of fire balanced on his head. Huehueteotl is associated with wisdom and rulership.
Archaeologists found the Huehueteotl, along with two stone pillars, in a covered pit about 15 feet deep, at a height of about 214 feet from the ground. The pit is below the remnants of a platform at the top of the Pyramid of the Sun that probably served as the foundation for a temple.
The people of Teotihuacan finished building the pyramid around AD 100 and destroyed its apex temple themselves around the end of the 5th century or the beginning of the 6th century, INAH said.
Archaeologists did not know that a pit existed at the top of the stepped pyramid, renowned as one of the largest of its kind in the Americas. It is now thought that Leopoldo Batres, the pioneering archaeologist who restored the pyramid to the basic form seen today, covered the platform a century ago without properly excavating it.
"Once we didn't find the bottom of the platform, upon further digging we figured out it was pit," INAH archaeologist Nelly Nuñez said in a video.
In 2011, INAH archaeologists announced they had found a 400-foot-long tunnel at the base of the Pyramid of the Sun, which is still being studied. Mexico's government has been excavating the structure in earnest since 2005. Only a fraction of the Teotihuacan site has been studied in about 100 years of government archaeological work there.
The Huehueteotl was uncovered between June and December. It weighs 418 pounds and is made of a gray volcanic stone. An INAH spokeswoman said Wednesday that the fire-god figure and other objects found with it were still being examined. It was unclear when they might be exhibited to the public.
** Photo by INAH via LAT.
** Originally published in Domus México No. 4. No direct link. This is the original draft submitted to the magazine for translation to Spanish.
MEXICO CITY – In the photograph, Enrique Flores Magon is seated at a table facing a bank of angled mirrors. His white, wavy hair is tousled upwards wildly, as if he had been submitted to a rain of static. His expression is morose. Flores Magon is reflected in the mirrors four times, and so at the top of the print, a winking caption is written in cursive ink, in Spanish: "Mis cinco cuates."
And below, in English: "Who said that a haircut was needed?"
When I first saw this photo – in the personal archive of Enrique Flores Magon, which is being revived by his great-grandson – it filled me with wonder and amusement.
For anyone familiar with Mexican Revolutionary history, the dominant image of those called its "intellectual authors," brothers Ricardo and Enrique Flores Magon, is that of stalwart, driven journalists who challenged the regime of Gen. Porfirio Díaz and sought justice for the working classes through the power of the printed press. Of course, the lives of any historical figures are in truth far more complex than the heroic legacies that they leave behind.
How did the Flores Magons interact with the world around them on a day-to-day basis? What were their domestic concerns and challenges? In their interior lives, how did they respond to the growing pressures and persecutions of the Mexican and United States governments that led to their repeated imprisonments?
The photograph of Enrique and his "cinco cuates" – modeled on a 1917 Duchamp self-portrait photograph using the same effect – is among one thousand photographs that exist in his personal archive. As an image, it offers a window in the dissident writer's sense of humor and sense of self. It is undated. The exact location of where it was taken is not known either, although Enrique’s great-grandson, historian and writer Diego Flores Magon Bustamante, believes that it was probably taken in Los Angeles around 1923, when the brothers were in exile north of the border and raising revolutionary trouble there as well.
Diego is spearheading an ambitious project that will permit all of his great-grandfather’s materials, including some 15,000 documents, to be available for viewing to the general public in the form of a digital archive. It is perhaps one of the most significant archival projects undertaken in Mexico in recent years.
The digital archive will be housed at the restored building at Calle Républica de Colombia 42 in the Centro Histórico of Mexico City where the Flores Magon brothers and a committed group of lawyers, artists, and writers – including Daniel Cabrera, Jesús Martínez Carrión, and Juan Sarabia – published an opposition newspaper to the Dáiz regime, El Hijo del Ahuizote.
The project is being funded by a mix of support from the Fidecomiso del Centro Histórico, CONACULTA, and private foundation grants. Diego, now 32, explains he is a fervent believer that the archive that his father passed to his care should be available to a viewing public that is as wide as possible. The idea is that with new readings of the materials that Flores Magon left behind, fresh interpretations and applications of the brothers' ideas could emerge.
The historical value of the archive is immense. Ricardo Flores Magon, the more historically prominent of the two, died at a U.S. prison in Leavenworth, Kansas, in 1922, facing espionage charges for publishing pacifist materials in the U.S. version of Regeneración, the brothers' second newspaper. Any known archive belonging to him, Diego believes, was lost in Ensenada, Baja California, in the 1940s.
"Ricardo no tuvo una vida que le permitiera coleccionar nada," Diego says. "Llevo una vida de martir y de perseguido y de fugitivo. No tenía nada."
Continue reading "Domus Mexico: Introducing la Casa de El Hijo del Ahuizote *" »
On the question of political art in Mexico, one of the best places to turn in recent years has been the Internet. Simon Pecco, of Tijuana, tells Steven Rodriguez at LA TACO:
I did not burn down the Peña sign / I applaud the person who did. That’s more or less an invitation. Fuck the law! Those kinds of heroes are needed so that people can become aware that they need to get with it.
ESTADO is a series of electronic music sets taking place each Saturday this month at the Estela de Luz monument in Mexico City, showcasing the most cutting-edge and challenging emerging talents from four eletronic music centers in Mexico: Ciudad Juarez, Tijuana, Monterrey, and D.F.
Here's the site, with samples and takes from each of the artists. The series is curated by Alberto Bustamante of N-A-A-F-I.
The Estela, a monumentally distastrous project since its inception, is being gradually claimed as everyday-usage public space along Paseo de la Reforma. This was where the #YoSoy132 movement held one of its earliest and most spontaneous demonstrations. Inside, or rather underneath the structure, a Centro de Cultural Digital was established, and from here, musical performances have taken place on the square at the base of the "Suavicrema."
The ESTADO site is well worth a browsing and listen. Here's a compilation of the artists at Soundcloud, with downloadable tracks.
* Also, upcoming in Tijuana, near where I am presently reporting, two good festivals I hope to check out: Norte Sonoro, curated by Jace Clayton, and All My Friends.
** PREVIOUSLY: See also, Estrella Cercana, "Teen DJ from Ciudad Juarez, Mock the Zuma, reflects a 'bizarro' reality," "More snapshots from Monterrey, NRML fest," "Estrella Cercana: A newspaper's obituary, Part 4."
Dobler is a street artist in Taxco, Guerrero, who paints mural portraits of people on their stoops and corners in the middle of the night. His work creates startling visual scenarios when the street-person represented returns to a regular spot and orbits around the mural.
In one instance, Dobler painted an indigenous woman vendor of artesanías. When the woman saw herself represented visually on the wall behind her usual puesto the morning after Dobler struck, she began attempting to wash it off. Passersby tried to stop her, telling her the portrait was beautiful, but the vendedora was adamant. She removed it.
More at La Crónica Biónica.
** See also, "A beach in Veracruz," "First encounter with an Olmec head," and "Tattoo shops in Oaxaca."
** Originally published at World Now:
The art world in this art-obsessed city entertained a minor controversy last week during the official reopening of the Rufino Tamayo Museum in Chapultepec Park.
With President Felipe Calderon presiding at an official ceremony, the museum was reinaugurated with the names of two patrons placed in gold-lettered signs in two refurbished halls.
One hall is now named for Angelica Fuentes, president of Omnilife, a supplements company. The other is named for Carlos Hank Rhon, a banker who sparks polarizing reactions anywhere Mexicans gather to gossip or argue about the state of their country.
Hank Rhon, who recently entered Forbes' wealthiest list, is brother of the scandal-ridden former mayor of Tijuana, Jorge Hank Rhon. Their father is Carlos Hank Gonzalez, former governor of the state of Mexico and a powerful figure in the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI.
La Jornada, the stalwart of leftist newspaper journalism in Mexico, quoted a rebuke from the respected art critic Raquel Tibol, who knew Tamayo and sometimes squabbled with the painter.
"It is embarrassing that culture and art these days must depend on the money of ricachones" -- fat cats -- "without determining the origin of those accumulations," Tibol said.
There were similar complaints on Twitter.
"Better be the room dedicated to surrealism," one quipped. "At this rate, the new airport will end up being named Joaquin Guzman," after the world's most-wanted drug lord, another huffed.
But the complaining didn't last very long, and for some that crystallizes a cold reality. Private money is increasingly a crucial source of funding for public cultural institutions in Mexico.
In turn, private cultural institutions are gradually muscling out public ones as the sources of dynamism with the art community at large. Last year, for example, the biggest art event in Mexico was the opening of the new sponge-shaped Soumaya Museum, built by the world's richest man, Carlos Slim.
Hank Rhon is a longtime patron of the Tamayo museum, one of several grouped under the Olga and Rufino Tamayo Foundation. The foundation provided $2.5 million for the renovation, or about a third of the total cost (link in Spanish).
The size of the gift from Hank Rhon that led to his name being placed in a gallery hall, however, was confidential due to the foundation's rules, said museum spokeswoman Beatriz Cortes.
Carlos Hank Rhon is not directly implicated in any of the kind of scandals surrounding his brother Jorge Hank Rhon, whose Tijuana compound was raided in June 2011 by Mexican soldiers looking for weapons. Jorge Hank Rhon was arrested, but later released, to the approval of many residents of Tijuana whose livelihoods depend on the family's businesses.
Yet the name sizzles among the political chattering classes. Some still said they thought the gold-lettered names were a bit too much.
"Is it an art piece?" asked artist Miguel Calderon. "Because if it's an art piece, that'd be amazing."
On Sunday, the first day the renovated Tamayo opened to the public, visitors mostly shrugged when asked for their opinion of the museum's new Hank Rhon gallery.
"I don't have a document that tells me where his money came from, and I don't need it," said Ricardo Martinez, 40. "I applaud the gesture, bringing art nearer to the public."
* Photo: An interior view of the renovated Rufino Tamayo Museum in Chapultepec Park in Mexico City. Credit: Alex Cruz / European Pressphoto Agency
** Originally published at World Now and re-published in the print edition of the Los Angeles Times:
The pay phone is tucked into a colonial-era doorway facing a busy sidewalk downtown. It happens to draw attention only because the phone is bright red. “Free calls,” reads a plain sign taped inside, along with instructions on how to dial any number in Mexico or in the world.
An installation conceived by artist Minerva Cuevas, the phone also features a photograph of a chimpanzee picking up an old rotary phone, like an open invitation. One recent day, this reporter stumbled upon the phone and did what millions of others might do when faced with a free call. I called my mother.
“Hey, mom! I'm calling you for an art piece!”
“Oh, that's great, mi'jo,” she replied, before launching into the latest local gossip.
Few artists in the world challenge the penny-for-penny profits of global capitalism as bluntly as Mexico City native Cuevas. She puts revolutionary slogans inside mass-produced fortune cookies and hands out bottles of water taped with the word “Egalite” instead of “Evian,” because shouldn't water always be free?
Her free pay phone is a new work produced for an exhibit at the Museo de la Ciudad de Mexico, or Museum of Mexico City. The show, on view until Aug. 5, covers a career defined by Cuevas' knack at turning art into giveaways for ordinary people hustling to make ends meet in a tough city. They are particularly subversive gestures for Mexico, the artist says, a society where the very wealthy and connected usually get all the shortcuts and giveaways they might wish.
Cuevas' Mejor Vida Corp. is perhaps her most well-known conceptual project. This Better Life “corporation” distributed subway tickets inside underground stations, handed out low-price barcodes to sneak onto items in stores, and produced fake student ID cards (for transit and entertainment discounts) by request from strangers.
As might be expected, the public responded approvingly. Mejor Vida Corp. went on to become an icon of contemporary Mexican art in the 1990s.
The exhibit on Cuevas also highlights works that are surprising for their almost formal expressions in painting and performance. In a 1995 video, the earliest piece in the exhibit, Cuevas films herself through the process of drinking an entire bottle of tequila.
She does so mostly in silence. In person, Cuevas is similarly soft-spoken yet precise, deliberately measured with her words. She would describe the tequila video only as “sculptural.”
The free pay phone is a powerful piece, the equivalent of an art-world bomb aimed at the web of private financial structures that profit from our 21st century need for telecommunicating with loved ones. It is especially potent in the financial nerve center of Mexico City, where telecom magnate Carlos Slim bases the Telmex and Telcel empires that make him the world's richest man.
“It was one of the most difficult pieces to get installed,” Cuevas acknowledged on a recent bright midday outside the museum. “Obviously, in Mexico, we have the reference of the monopolies, of Telmex, but it's also about creating this oasis in the city.”
Cuevas said she is paying for calls made at the installation herself. She is keeping a registry of the calls made, but in keeping with the strategy behind Mejor Vida Corp., the data will remain private. (The artist said she can confirm that calls from Mexico City to Cuba are the most expensive.)
On Wednesday, free-admission day at the museum, the phone doorway was closed because the museum's telephone and Internet connections were inexplicably down, a spokeswoman said. It was a cold reminder for any would-be caller of the frequently unreliable nature of telephone service here, even in today’s wired world.
* Photo: Artist Minera Cuevas says her free pay phone is about "creating this oasis in the city." Credit: Daniel Hernandez / Los Angeles Times
** Originally published at World Now:
Elizabeth Catlett, a U.S.-born artist who directly confronted the injustices faced by African Americans and celebrated black identity and culture through her work, has died in her longtime home in Mexico.
Catlett, who died Monday, had lived in Mexico since 1946. She spent most of her years here as an exile from the United States, which in 1962 tagged her an "undesirable alien" after she became a Mexican citizen. Her U.S. citizenship was eventually reinstated in 2002.
A sculptor and printmaker, she had recently begun to gain international renown for her long body of work.
Read the L.A. Times obituary on Elizabeth Catlett here.
"Confident that art could foster social change, Catlett confronted the most disturbing injustices against African Americans, including lynchings and beatings," says The Times article written by Mary Rourke and Valerie J. Nelson. "One of her best-known sculptures, 'Target' (1970), was created after police shot a Black Panther; it shows a black man's head framed by a rifle sight."
Arturo Sarukhan, Mexico's ambassador to the U.S., memorialized Catlett in a message via Twitter on Tuesday night: "Mexico & the US today lose a great sculptor and printmaker, Elizabeth Catlett, an American by birth and a Mexican by choice."
Reporting her death, Mexico's national arts council said: "Through her work, Elizabeth Catlett always demonstrated her interest in social justice and the rights of black Mexican women."
Catlett is survived by Mexican children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. You can see more of her work and read more about her personal history here.
RELATED:
Elizabeth Catlett dies at 96; among 20th century's top black artists
Leonora Carrington dies at 94; a leading figure of the Surrealist movement
The radical landscape paintings of Mexico's Dr. Atl
MORE:
* Image: "Sharecropper,” (1970), Elizabeth Catlett, via National Museum of American Art.
** Originally published at World Now:
He was a muralist, an educator and a civic activist who once helped save a colonial-era convent from demolition by moving in and living there. He published books, invented paints and signed his works "Dr. Atl," an imaginary honorific using the Nahuatl-language word for water.
Born Gerardo Murillo in Guadalajara in 1875, Dr. Atl is one of the most accomplished and enigmatic figures from the golden period of modern art in Mexico.
His unmistakably forceful landscapes are familiar to average Mexicans as sort of visual footnotes to an era that saw Diego Rivera and Jose Clemente Orozco flourish internationally as muralists. Yet Dr. Atl's greatest pieces have resided mostly in private collections, making them rarely available for viewing to the public.
PHOTOS: The radical landscapes of Dr. Atl
That changes with "Dr. Atl: Masterpieces," on view at the Centro Cultural Universitario Tlatelolcojust north of downtown Mexico City. It is the first retrospective on Dr. Atl in Mexico in 27 years, meaning a generation of art lovers could get to know his work in depth for the first time.
The show is organized by the Blaisten Collection, a private museum founded by collector Andres Blaisten that sits inside the renovated university complex at Tlatelolco. It features more than 190 works, many of which are privately owned and not usually shown to the public.
The exhibit charts Dr. Atl's progression from early, more conventional landscapes through his adoption of the curvilinear perspective -- as the eye sees, he argued -- in rendering innovative and sweeping views of the Valley of Mexico.
The artist clearly was fixated on Mexico's volcanoes as both subjects to paint and sources of inspiration, particularly as he sought to push the very boundaries of the landscape form beginning in 1922.
By the end of his career, Dr. Atl wanted to radicalize landscape painting entirely with his theory ofaereopaisajes, or aero-landscapes, in which artists would go up in planes, helicopters and eventually into space to create landscapes of infinity, of "supreme ascension."
Several of the most arresting paintings in the exhibit depict volcanoes at night, in a slanting perspective from high above. Glowing in aquas and purples, the paintings come close to creating a vertigo effect in the viewer, suggesting a peaceful eternal space.
Dr. Atl, who died in 1964 at the age of 88, worked in the classical method, hiking his way to peaks near the twin volcanoes of Popocatepetl and Iztaccihuatl to make swift sketches of the mountains and valley below (until he later lost his right leg). Then he would transform the quick sketches into brilliant paintings using oil and mixed wax-resin paints he made, calling them "Atl Colors."
It is a happy historical triumph that Dr. Atl was alive in 1943, when the Paricutin volcano began to poke out from the middle of a cornfield in the western Mexican state of Michoacan.
The artist recorded the rise of Paricutin as perhaps no other figure could, with dozens of sketches and paintings that showed the fiery and violent process of a once-in-a-lifetime geological phenomenon.
"For him it was important to walk among the volcanoes. He studied them from all angles," said Vannesa Bohorquez, director of the Blaisten Collection museum, during a recent visit to the show.
"If you didn't know the artist, you'd think these were done by a young [painter]," Bohorquez added. "You need a physical strength to do this, and this was a very old man who had lost a leg."
The artist was also a committed educator and activist, founding an open-air art school and living for an undetermined amount of years in the Convent of La Merced in the historic center of Mexico City in an effort to prevent its demolition. The building still stands.
"Dr. Atl: Masterpieces" is on view until April.
* Photo: "La sombra del Popo," or "Popo's Shadow," a 1942 painting by Dr. Atl on view at the Centro Cultural Universitario Tlatelolco in Mexico City. Credit: Daniel Hernandez / Los Angeles Times
A friend sent over this image of a hand-cut stencil representing Coatlicue, posted in the Brighton Park neighborhood of Chicago around December 12. The artist says:
I spray painted through the stencil on paper, then pasted it up late at night, its still there, haven't talked to people about it, have noticed guys checking it out though, my roommate took a photo of it while waiting for the bus and talked to a local who said he liked it, and it would make a nice tattoo.
The Coatlicue statue, now on view at the National Museum of Anthropology, is one of the most terrifying and mysterious Aztec structures unearthed in Mexico City during the Colonial period. From a piece for Nero Magazine, by the artist Tania Perez Cordova:
After some research, the university scholars realized that the sculpture was the Coatlicue goddess. The viceroy of the time, Viceroy Revillagigedo, had the sculpture placed at the Catholic University as a monument to ancient times. After a short while, the scholars realized that some locals where secretly worshiping the sculpture and thus decided that having it in public view could revive old Aztec beliefs among indigenous people. In order to protect the catholic Spanish colony, they chose to bury the monolith once again, this time under the university’s patio. However, before it was dug in, the scholar Antonio de Leon y Gama had time to make a detailed description of it.
Read more here.
* See also, "The anthropology museum, reconsidered."
** Originally published at World Now:
It was billed as "the first act of collective psycho-magic in Mexico."
The call made by the cult mystic Alejandro Jodorowsky said the event would seek to "heal" the country of the cosmic weight of so many dead in the drug war, by gathering for something he called the March of the Skulls.
On Sunday, on a wet and frigid morning in this mountain capital, hundreds of Jodorowsky fans answered the open convocation (video link in Spanish).
They donned black top hats and black shawls, and carried canes and Mexican flags colored in black. They wore calavera face paint or masks to give themselves the look of stylish skeletons gathered in this often-surreal city in the name of Mexico's tens of thousands of sometimes nameless drug war dead.
"Long live the dead!" they shouted.
Truthfully, the Marcha de las Calaveras was a minor weekend event compared to the city's heavily publicized "zombie walk" the day before, in which almost 10,000 people playing zombies marched through the city's core. That event marked yet another one of Mexico City's recent obsessive hobbies:breaking Guinness world records.
Yet for the estimated 3,000 people who showed up to the Jodorowsky march over the course of the day, it was significant as a rare public appearance in Mexico by the Chilean-born filmmaker and tarot guru (link in Spanish). Jodorowsky lived in Mexico for many years and produced his most well-known works in the country, the films "El Topo," "Santa Sangre," and "The Holy Mountain."
The event also demonstrated that Mexicans seem willing to try almost anything at this point -- even a counterculture-era act of public mysticism -- to seek an end to the awful violence brought by the fighting between the government and the cartels, a war that has cost more than 40,000 lives since December 2006.
"The young people's call is another form of saying, 'Enough.' Enough deaths," said Angelica Cuellar, a 63-year-old teacher. "Through the psycho-magic, we are saying, for this moment, we are them."
Her sister, Dulce, standing nearby, said: "I am here in the name of someone who didn't have a voice, someone who was suffocated, someone who went north searching for work. I say, 'I'm here for you.'"
"And if we do it collectively, I assure you, at another level of energy, those dead will come awake," added Dulce Cuellar, 60.
Walking skeletons milled about in the background on the steps of the downtown Palace of Fine Arts, as the crowds eagerly awaited Jodorowsky's arrival. Perhaps out of boredom, or inspiration, some mimicked the mournful howl of the native xoloitzcuintli dog, man's guide to the underworld in Aztec mythology.
(There were also a few deep incantations of "om.")
The "maestro" arrived at the palace steps about 1:30 p.m., causing brief havoc among the gatheredcalaveras as people jostled to get near him. The white-haired Jodorowsky, fit and agile at 82, wore a black sports coat, a bright purple scarf and a detailed skull mask.
Along with his family, Jodorowsky led the calaveras up the Eje Central avenue to Plaza Garibaldi in a mostly silent demonstration. In the late 1980s, he filmed some key scenes of "Santa Sangre" at this plaza, homebase for the city's for-hire mariachi bands. On Sunday, it was easy to imagine another "Santa Sangre" scene being filmed during the march, but this time from a dark and unfamiliar future.
Someone decided the group should sing a song. It became "La Llorona," the Weeping Woman.
Jodorowsky was displeased with the group's initial interpretation, so he asked for another go at it. A mariachi band joined in as accompaniment.
"There are 50,000 dead beings," Jodorowsky said through a bullhorn, before the sea of skulls. "They are sheep. They are not black sheep. We must have mercy for these souls that have disappeared. Let's sing this song with lament, as if we were the mother of one of these persons. Understand?"
Then he asked that all those present cross and link their arms with those of the strangers around them. The group did. They chanted "Peace, peace, peace!" until Jodorowsky asked that everyone let out a big laugh. Laughter and applause followed.
* Previously, "We're mutants: Wisdom from maestro Jodorowsky," and "Jodorowsky's Sunday comics."
** Originally published at World Now:
A day laborer outside a Home Depot hardware store in northeast Los Angeles is riding in a bright orange shopping cart in the store's parking lot, peering through imaginary binoculars, as if he were on patrol in a dangerous jungle.
Others are crawling under parked vehicles as if squeezing below barbed wire, or diving and body-rolling as if evading gunfire. Before a sale display for storage sheds, two men lie still on the asphalt, their legs spread, as if dead.
The laborers are undocumented immigrants from Guatemala, and in an unsettling video installation by Mexican artist Yoshua Okon on view at a university gallery in Mexico City, they are war survivors playing themselves.
Before Okon's cameras, the migrants are reenacting their days fighting in Guatemala's long and catastrophic civil war.
The four-channel video piece, called "Octopus," is Okon's latest and possibly most provocative video in a career in which he frequently pushes against viewers' comfort zones with the use of improvising non-actors.
A native of Mexico City, Okon has also lived part-time in Los Angeles. He bought a house in L.A. and came to participate in a rite of passage for many new U.S. homeowners in the last decade -- hiring day workers.
The men he found at the Home Depot store in the Cypress Park district, it turned out, were indigenous Maya from Guatemala. They spoke a Mayan dialect and very little Spanish or English. They had escaped Guatemala's war in search of work in the United States.
Some fought for the U.S.-backed military government and others for the leftist guerrillas. Some, he said, showed him scars of bullet wounds. Now, as laborers at the bottom of the U.S. social ladder, they fight for scraps of work in the slumping construction market.
"They're more afraid of immigration than about talking about the war," Okon said during a visit this week to the exhibition space in Mexico City's Roma district. "To me, that's what the piece is about. It's the United States. The war is not over. The war is over there."
Okon, 41, has made films with wanna-be Nazis in Mexico City, an isolated family in California's high desert getting drunk on "White Russians," and Mexican police officers who agree to make bawdy sexual gestures they probably shouldn't in uniform.
While these works usually elicit in viewers a mix of chuckles and creeps, "Octopus" is different.
The new video is guided by a polemical stance, not self-parody. Home Depot customers amble past the bizarre scenes playing out with hardly a blink, showing that workers who build homes in the United States have "always been invisible," Okon said.
The artist also had to work guerrilla-style in some form himself. He filmed on the store's parking lot without proper permission. "I had to constantly negotiate with the security guards, until they finally kicked me out," he said.
Over two days of filming in March, Okon said the men from Guatemala gradually stopped giggling through takes and began to seriously inhabit -- or re-inhabit -- their roles. "It felt like a job," one of the workers later told the LA Weekly. And indeed it was; Okon said he paid the men a double day-rate for their time.
"Octopus," commissioned by the Hammer Museum at UCLA, will show at the Casa Jose Galvan exhibition space in Mexico City through January. Next year, Okon plans to take the piece toProyectos Ultravioleta, an arts space in Guatemala City.
A single-screen version of the 18-minute piece is viewable here. In one shot, as seen above, a motorist drives past Okon's cameras with a bumper sticker that reads, "Voter for a new foreign policy."
The shot was not staged.
* Image: A still from 'Pulpo.'
** ... Continued from previous post [or start with Part 1, then 2, then 3].
And here is some of the cool shit we got around to publishing in six lil issues of 8-pages each!
This was the best part of the entire Estrella Cercana operation, I think. We turned into a platform for fresh and interesting work, intersecting on the printed page across text and image, and often in interaction with pieces in the "Distant Star" show at the gallery.
We had no editorial guidelines from our publisher, the Kuris. The sky was the limit.
And as things came in, we went with the most Newsy stuff possible. Inevitably, this led to some criticisms about whether there was too much death, exploitation, violence, abuse, loathing, shock-value, guns, fascism, skin, dirty sex, and politics in our pages.
Our response, inevitably, was, 'Duh.' This is a NEWSpaper. (But with pseudonyms at work, yes.) We published, and please stay with me, the following ...
Continue reading "Estrella Cercana: A newspaper's obituary, Part 4" »
** ... Continued from previous post.
The launch of a project without an immediate precedent -- in this case, an experimental newspaper with a six-week life-span -- is never smooth. The team had to establish a working schedule that could form around our already-busy lives. We had to communicate to our collaborators what we wanted but didn't have a model to show them yet. And we had to settle on a printer.
From a year of service leading the campus paper at Berkeley (props to anyone who does it; the Daily Cal is a 15,000-circ., city-serving, five-days-a-week, totally independent operation), I knew we had to establish a solid working relationship with the imprenta Homero found and eventually hired.
One evening early on, we went to visit and personally introduce ourselves at Litografía HEVA, near Tlatelolco. We arrived on a bad footing from the get-go.
The first issue was delayed by several days due to a serious printing error in the first-run of the first issue. We couldn't introduce Estrella Cercana to our readers with huge black marks over some of the images, as the first-run turned out, and we had to convince Señor Felipe, our man at HEVA, that the printer needed to make a second-run for us. For free.
Don Felipe was cool. Chilango to the core, but cool. About fifteen years ago, he told us, he lost half of his left-hand index finger in an accident on a large cutting machine in the workshop. (See Don Felipe standing with that machine here, and his half-finger here.) We checked out machines and techniques that now only exist in analog-era journalists' nostalgic memories: off-set, movable types, plates, inks!, etc.
During the visit, Don Felipe made a weird and slightly offensive comment that ended becoming something of a calling card for us, "Este periódico no es para familias ni para gente honesta." ("This newspaper isn't for families or for honest people.")
Huh?
Our work schedule also proved challenging. Everyone on board was good for the project because we're the sort of people who are constantly juggling several projects at once. (I work as a news assistant in the Mexico City bureau of the L.A. Times, contributing regularly to the World Now blog.) We decided we would work whenever possible at the Kurimanzutto space, an environment which I ended up developing a strong admiration for, it's so well-done, or at our home offices.
Yet over the six hectic and crazied weeks, the design and editorial team never quite pinned down a reliable schedule. We worked together a few nights a week whenever we could, and rushed through galley edits at the last minute in order to meet our weekly Thursday (... or Friday...) printing deadline.
This kind of pace meant we had limited time to engage with collaborators. We needed pieces to come in clean and sharp, as ready for publication as possible. A couple things we commissioned, especially for the most "relevant" and up-to-date news reports we carried (Beyonce's baby-bump, for example, or Justin Bieber's visit to DF).
We also, you might've noticed, permitted writers to submit pieces under psuedonyms, making for a lot of unusual fun fun fun.
** Part 4, next.
(* Photo above, inside Litografía HEVA, by @demomilton.)
** ... Continued from previous post.
And here's how the team came together.
Homero would be in charge of the production process -- lining up the budgets, locating and contracting the printer, developing an advertising plan, handling all the transactions with advertisers and payments with collaborators, and building a distribution map. It's a huge task over-all. See this recent piece Homer wrote for Tomo.
Alberto, designer behind the Soma site, among others, would be in charge of devising a design scheme and laying out each issue. We looked at Mexican tabloids and Cuban party newspapers he acquired on a visit there. We picked fonts. Alberto subcontracted an assistant design editor, Adiranne Montemayor, also an architect. Then we brought on Javier "Coco" Rivero, the brain behind Writers & Kitties, as copy editor. (It sounds way better as corrector de estilo.)
Coco's job was to review pitches as they came in to a general email address, recommend them to me to read and edit, line-edit stuff we'd want in the paper, and handle any big edits directly with the writers. A key point for me, after the traumas suffered freelancing through la crisis, was insisting early on that contributed pieces to the paper had to be paid, like in "real life." It's the principle. Kuri agreed.
Things started rolling. We bought the Web domains, opened a Twitter, found a printer (a testy old man in the Col. Guerrero, but that's another post), hired a web manager with Rodrigo Escandon, and hired Jeromino Jimenez (aka Ñaka Ñaka) to design a unique banner background for each issue's nameplate. Online, these would be .gifs. Yay.
The gallery gave us a budget for six issues at eight pages, with four pages in color. The core editorial team decided we would reserve the centerfold, known in the old-school as a double-truck, for a strong visual display, like a poster readers might want to keep. The back page would be called FUN FUN FUN, and would be jammed with random newspaper diversion bits, like horoscopes, gossip and such. The back-page would also include the print announcement for our carefully curated audio downloads. (More on that later.)
Then, we put out the call for pitches. Here's my Intersections post announcing the launch of the project.
This was to become the hardest part while getting started, establishing and nurturing the paper's editorial voice and character -- fast. We wanted Estrella Cercana to operate as a refraction, an interpretation, or a decoding of a "traditional" newspaper. We wanted stories and works to have a degree of intimacy or relevancy, no matter the genre or format. News for you and me.
Thankfully, weeks before, the Monterrey journalist Diego Enrique Osorno had published on a Gatopardo blog a "manifesto for infrarrealist journalism." This piece, re-published with Osorno's permission in the first issue of Estrella Cercana, became our anchor text, our baseline.
One part says:
Hagamos un encuentro nacional de jóvenes escritores militarizados o de jóvenes escritores zetas. Si algún imbécil menciona
los treinta mil,
o cuarenta mil,
o cincuenta mil,
o sesenta mil,
o setenta mil,
o noventa mil,
o cien mil muertos,
entonces hagamos algo extra: escribamos una columna de opinión defendiendo a las instituciones o leamos un haikú de guerra en el Zócalo al final de la marcha; cantemos el himno nacional o un narcocorrido antes de que comience la próxima sesión de nuestro taller literario.
Next, it came time to make to the first issue and get it out there. This initial process, as satisfying as it was, came with some ... setbacks.
** ... Part 3, next.
(* Click on the image for a larger view of one of Carolyn Castaño's Narcovenus works. * Post slightly edited)
It's been nearly a month since the final edition of the "periódico con fin de vida," Estrella Cercana at kurimanzutto, and I've barely had time to regroup, review, and evaluate the project.
This week's series of posts is an attempt to do that.
So, from the beginning, Estrella Cercana emerged as a response to an invitation from Jose Kuri to propose some kind of intervention at the gallery. He had read "Down & Delirious in Mexico City" and liked it. The invitation was open and I tossed around ideas here and there with friends, but nothing concrete ever settled. Time passed.
One evening in early September after work, I met up with two architects for drinks at a cantina in San Miguel Chapultepec. I told them about Kuri's invite. Alberto Bustamante and Homero Fernandez and I came up with the idea for a "literary newspaper" that would accompany the gallery's show "Distant Star." The group show, co-produced with Regen Projects in Los Angeles, was titled after Roberto Bolaño's novella "Estrella Distante."
The name of the newspaper came almost instantly: Estrella Cercana. We thought the image of a nearing star was futuristic, apocalyptic, semi-cultish, and very "newsworthy"; or in other words, evoking cultural codes weighing heavily on the zeitgeist as we approach 2012.
Kuri immediately said Yes.
What did we get ourselves into, though? Activating a newspaper -- a newsroom, with different writers in different places, a design operation, an advertising operation, a publishing operation, a printer, a budget, a team -- was not going to be easy. And, crucially, we all had normal day jobs.
It also sounded like an opportunity not to be missed.
We settled on a weekly. We met with the gallery to discuss logistics and consider what ended up being a totally generous budget, a deep sign of trust, I'd say. Kuri wanted the intervention to be good. We were in agreement.
Why not?
Who isn't down to work with a new, fresh group of people on a wild creative project? Thus, the team started coming together.
** ... Part 2, next.
Originally published at World Now:
The hard-hitting news magazine Proceso recently published a large-format special issue devoted to the tragedy of the drug war in the border city of Ciudad Juarez. For its cover image, Proceso chose a work from the golden era of Mexican modernist painting, a 1942 piece by Manuel Rodriguez Lozano called "Tragedy in the Desert."
The painting shows the backs of three hooded women who appear to be in mourning over the body of a female figure in a flat and desolate expanse of earth, blood emanating from her form. As a news image, the painting from more than half a century ago is meant to evoke the hopelessness felt by victims of Mexico's war, with its 40,000 dead.
"Tragedy in the Desert" is the first artwork seen by visitors to a sweeping exhibit on Rodriguez currently at the Museo Nacional de Arte in the historic center of Mexico City. It is an affecting and sad image, the colors muted, the perspective flattened in a recognizable Rodriguez motif.
Rodriguez is in fact known for a work more popularly seen at the Palacio de Bellas Artes, alongside Diego Rivera and Jose Clemente Orozco.
"Mercy in the Desert," a version of which is seen above (Rodriguez painted two), also belongs to a period in which Rodriguez painted what is now considered his most powerful pieces: an arresting series of paintings that cover themes of tragedy, suicide, rapture, holocaust and sorrow. The figures that appear here are elongated and mutated, as if moving in slow motion, expressions of sadness and fear evident even in faces that are far away.
Like a recent Orozco show in Mexico City that felt relevant in light of the country's ongoing tragedy, the Rodriguez exhibit -- and in particular its final room, "The Silence and the Tragedy" -- feels like a mirror to the world around us.
* 'Manuel Rodriguez Lozano: Pensamiento y pintura,' closed Sunday, Oct. 9.
Here's the site for Estrella Cercana, our experimental newspaper underway now at kurimanzutto. At the site, the main editorial crew and I are posting images and links to stuff we're thinking about, talking about, laughing about, cringing at, all through the production process for the weekly periódico con fin de vida.
We'll also be posting the issue's content on the day we publish, planned now for Saturdays through Nov. 5, as well as .pdf files of how the paper looks in print once distributed here in Mexico City.
What is Estrella Cercana, you ask?
It's a publishing project built around Distant Star, the show currently up at kuri, inspired by the literature of Roberto Bolaño. (See Intersections posts on Bolaño from 2007 here and from 2009 here). We're building a weekly newspaper, primarily in Spanish, partly in spirit of the Infrarrealists, but sort-of-actually-really-not-all.
("I haven't even read 2666, and that's so infrarrealista!")
Our newsroom is roaming between the gallery space and various points in the city, and so far always jussied up with the proper editorial bottles and snacks. The first issue of EC drops this Saturday, Sept. 24, and we haven't quite yet figured out how we're going to get it into people's hands. But it's definitely coming. Each issue will feature a beautiful full-color visual piece as a centerfold, and will also come with a link to a special audio track from one of our many beat-oriented comrades and collaborators.
We're all super excited, super nervous, and super busy (everyone on the small team has regular gigs or is juggling various other projects). So let's report it out, be nosy, read, not read, burn books, have a dance party, start a reality TV propaganda show, I dunno!
Update soon.
* NOTE: We are accepting pitches for your Highly Newsworthy stories, photography, cartoons, comics, info-graphics or maps, anything! Write us at prensaestrellacercana at gmail. Or to advertise in our pages, to reach our very classy would-be readers, please write publicidadestrellacercana at gmail.
** ABOVE: A Polaroid shot I've been holding onto for years. West Temple Street, Los Angeles, Calif., circa 2004. It lasted only a day, if not hours.
Greetings from City Heights, Eastside San Diego. I'm back in town because on Saturday a special event is happening at Sweetwater High School in National City: the re-inauguration and re-installing of the P.U.E.D.O. mural from the old National City Public Library.
Here's the essay I wrote on the mural last year for Zocalo Public Square, and my blog post on the topic.
With the tireless work of David Avalos and Juan Parrino, who helped lead the mural project in 1981, the city was able to locate the mural, allow Avalos to prepare it for re-installing, and find it a home, inside the new library at Sweetwater, which is celebrating the opening of several new buildings. (Here's a mention of the event in a Union-Tribune daybook note, and at the Sweetwater website.)
I look forward to meeting some of the then-student artists who worked on the mural -- who now must be adults with student children of their own -- and thanking them for such a vital, beautiful, and historic piece of public art in the South Bay of San Diego [...] here on the Pacific.
* Location: Sweetwater High School, 2900 Highland Ave, National City, 91950 / 4 p.m. / Aug. 6. * Post edited
I'm just gonna to keep it real up-front right here.
During Part 1, Tuesday night, I had a nice dinner in the West Village with a friend, nice little Italian place, quintessentially New York, four cheeses. Later, in the dead of night, my stomach rumbled me awake. I got up. I then proceeded to puke up buckets and buckets of purple cheese sludge.
It was really disgusting. Came without warning, unprompted by alcohol or anything else. Just a violent expulsion. At a loss once more. Something in this city is disagreeing with me, I thought. Then Thursday happened ...
... in New York City right now is writing PEMEX. Pemex, as in the state oil company in Mexico. Nice choice of letters, which is what it's really all about.
I spotted this lil guy of a tag while on a walk with Joven Will the other night along the now-soul-crunching region of Manhattan formerly known as something that used to be called the Lower East Side.
Now, I really don't know what you're supposed to call this. To think, these streets were once the trods of SACER-IRAK. But fuck-wait, what happened to them?
No use complaining anymore. I'm just gonna look at more by Pemex, look for more by SHA MONEY, and hope for the best. In New York, the birthplace of modern graffiti, bombing will never die.
Above, a "moodboard" used by designer Jennifer Heuer during her process for the book-cover design for "Down & Delirious." The image appears in a fascinating interview Heuer did with Faceout Books about how she approached creating the book's central selling-pitch, its cover.
I loved reading this, as I've never met Heuer and had no idea what Scribner would offer as potential covers, or from whom, until I saw the designer's options. Here's what Jennifer had to say about the process (love that she started doing research at the New York Public Library):
What is Down and Delirious in Mexico City about?
The author is a journalist living in Mexico City taking a look at the new urban youth cultures and the people who love them or sometimes violently hate them. This was directed at a young fresh audience interested in how certain, and sometimes similar subcultures can form and clash in different areas. The author introduces us to the new hyper-emo crowd, a fashion-forward crew, artists and musicians. It's in no way a tour book for the city, so the general direction was to aim in a fresh, modern and somewhat fashion-minded direction. Mexico City is set in a volcanic bowl which means the city can't physically grow outside it's borders. So the density within the city is intense, hot, polluted, and grounds for subcultural strife ready to boil over.
Were there any steps taken before starting, and was there a clear working process that led to the final? Any known influences?
I began by heading to the library (NYPL has a wonderful picture library and I'm lucky enough to have the Pratt library at my fingertips). I researched mainly Aztec art, Latin American Catholic art, Day of the Dead ephemera and so on. I also began setting up an online moodboard through Imgspark.com!
I tend to spend at least half of my time writing and sketching. I start by listing out categories within the book, then lists within those categories and see if there's anything interesting that pops out or crosses over (I find this works for fiction and nonfiction alike). It's also just good to get bad ideas and buzz words flushed out of the system so I can ignore their nagging.
[...]
For this cover, the final piece uses a cutout Aztec-inspired pattern and beneath is an image of a volcano erupting.
Super interesting, and also intrigued by Image Spark. In Heuer's moodboard above, I see the sun stone, pyschedelic pyramid forms, the skull-influenced cover of "El Monstruo" by the late John Ross, feathered serpents, Aztec glyphs, and a thrilling find because I've considered these a personal visual influence since I first saw them: old Slash magazine covers.
I love that the eventual design is a mix of stylish and superflat, pre-Hispanic symmetry and volcanic tension, almost radioactive. It's interesting that Heuer describes listing and cross-referencing categories, which is a method I used in writing and visually mapping the book's themes and eventual chapters. See this image and post.
She adds: "I basically learned what I always knew; which is to get away from my desk, go to the library, museums, read through fashion magazines and the newspaper, listen to the radio, watch documentaries and observe closely."
Friends and readers consistently tell me that the cover for "Down & Delirious in Mexico City" is eyecatching and inviting, so this discovery is a real treat. Congratulations, Jennifer! Hope to one day meet and shake your hand with gratitude.
** MORE: Here is the Rodrigo Betancourt illustration for Chapter 6, "The Lake of Fire." And more interesting interviews with book designers at Faceout Books.
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