Intersections

A focus on contemporary art, in Puerto Vallarta

An art scene, in Puerto Vallarta? The easy-going, tourist-friendly port on Mexico's Pacific coast may not be immediately associated with cutting-edge contemporarty art, but a festival coming up at the end of this month may help permanently shift those perceptions. L.A. gallerist, curator, and editor Pilar Perez, a Vallarta native, is organizing Puerto Vallarta Arte Contemporaneo 08: Extended Borders, Shifting Cartographies.

The invited artists include many prominent Mexican/American cultural producers: Ruben Ochoa, Sandra de la Loza, Ruben Ortiz Torres, Vincent Valdez, Shizu Saldamando, Francis Alys, Marco Ramirez Erre, Eduardo Abaroa, and others. Panelists include Mariana Botey, Alma Ruiz, Rita Gonzalez, Cuauhtemoc Medina, and more. I'll be participating on a panel about cross-border youth subcultures.

"There are about 20 commercial galleries in the city, but most are very traditional and show only painting or sculpture, and the market is oriented to tourists," Perez told me in an interview. "We hope to broaden the scope of the cultural experience — as well as the media presented — and provide a missing and necessary link to the existing international contemporary art world."

Vallarata is not the only emerging Pacific city positioning itself as a focal point for contemporary art in the new century. Also in June, San Jose, Calif. is hosting 01SJ: A Global Festival of Art on the Edge, and in 2009, my hometown San Diego, Calif. is hosting Beyond the Border. From these new urban poles, I'm sensing an energy and flexibity that you're less likely to get in established art capitals like Los Angeles and Mexico City.

For more on the over-all scene in Vallarta, see here. Vallarta is the inaugural festival's definite "hook," Perez assured me. "Five days at the beach, a nice hotel, an interesting group of people, and art. Did I mention margaritas?"

* Image above, a work in progress by local Puerto Vallarta artist Javier Rodriguez, titled "Epifinia Futbolera."

Ferocious cultural agent: Olivier Debroise, 1952-2008

Critic, curator, author, filmmaker, and 'myth-destroyer' Olivier Debroise, 56, died suddenly on May 6 in Mexico City. The cultural community in D.F. is reeling from his loss. This is how Debroise's friend and colleague Cuauhtemoc Medina memorializes him, in this potent and moving obituary, translated at e-flux:

Tempestuous, brilliant, and tireless, Olivier Debroise was a representative of an era in which fixed concepts of identity — personal, professional, and political — lost meaning, giving way to a contemporaneity in which the past is always active, and radicalism functions without need of dogmas. In a world of organic intellectuals and fossilized academics, Olivier saw the opportunity to treat culture like an adventure series within the cycle of upsets that was the twentieth century.

Read more here. And here is Ruben Ortiz Torres on Debroise's passing.

Debroise and Medina co-curated the landmark exhibit last year at UNAM, "The Age of Discrepancy, 1968-1997," a sweeping and unprecedented journey through previously unmapped experimental art practices in Mexico between the pivotal year of 1968 through the rapid internationalizing of Mexican art during the 1990s. Edited by Debroise, the show's giant bilingual catalogue is packed with rich essays and rare, thrilling images. It will now be one of many living testaments to Debroise's singular intellectual curiosity and might.

* Links: e-flux, ArtNet, The Backroom, Ruben Ortiz Torres, El Universal, Blow de la Barra, La Jornada, Anodis.

* Image above, "Death of an Art Dealer/La muerte del Art Dealer," 1982, by Ulises Carrion, from La era de la discrepancia, UNAM, 2007.

'ASCO' in Olde E: It's 1981 all over again *

Never seen this image before. It's a 1981 photo by Harry Gamboa Jr. of artists Gronk and Teresa Covarrubias. Notice the ASCO in Olde English letters on Covarrubias's tank. * More photos related to the East L.A. punk scene of the late 70s-early 80s at Tu Ciudad. Also, once again, see Diane Gamboa's "Unpopular Culture" photo series at KCET.

* UPDATE: There's a exhibit opening this month at the Claremont Museum of Art titled "Vexing: Female Voices from East L.A. Punk," curated by Pilar Tompkins. The press materials read: "Taking its name from the all-ages music club The Vex, once housed within East Los Angeles’ Self Help Graphics and Art, Vexing is an historical investigation of the women who were at the forefront of this movement of experimentation in music, art, culture and politics, while exploring their lasting legacies and contemporary practices."

The opening, for L.A. people, is May 17 and will feature rare performances by Teresa Covarrubias, Alice Bag, Lysa Flores, and Angela Vogel. * My instincts were on when I saw this photo; I'm told it will be making its public debut at the Claremont museum.

* Related: "'Phantom Sightings' arrives in Los Angeles."

View from Jumex: On the sun and other matters

This is a 2006 piece by Josephine Meckseper called "The Children's Crusade." There you have a standing foxtail, a plastic-wrapped toilet bowl cleaner, a mannequin hand, a shop sign warning to parents with kids, and a photograph of an anti-war demonstration. For sale? Guess so. Read more at my latest 'Letter from Mexico City,' "Braving 'New Worlds' at the Jumex Collection," on the opening of this exhibit in Ecatepec, Estado de Mexico. And on the sun, and on the party.

Floppy red hat in Mexico-Tenochtitlan

Above, L.A. woman Yaoska Davila on a street in Condesa on Sunday. Invites, galleries, runways, openings, magazines, DJ sets, deals, clothes, gossip. It's been nearly two weeks of non-stop art-experiencing and drink-drinking -- whenever possible and in most cases, for free. Thinking ...

No es verdad que vivimos,
no es verdad que duramos
en la tierra.
¡Yo tengo que dejar las bellas flores,
tengo que ir en busca del sitio del misterio!
Pero por breve tiempo,
hagamos nuestros los hermosos cantos.

* It's a poem from La Literatura de los Aztecas (1964), by translator Angel M. Garibay K., called la "Enigma de Vivir," or 'Enigma of Life.' * From MACO and Jumex, detailed reports are forthcoming.

Spacey pavilion at metro San Lazaro *

This is a view inside metro San Lazaro at the San Lazaro transit hub on the eastside of Mexico City. Taken Sunday. Doesn't it look like a set piece from "Total Recall"? That lanky figure with the red sweater you see down on the right is fashion designer Marvin of Marvin & Quetzal. Click on the photo for a larger view.

* UPDATE: Video from their show at TheCityLovesYou and at Couturtour.

* Off topic: Is D.F.  scene fatigue setting in? There's just too much going on. After Fashion Week, MACO opens tonight. And there's a major opening at the Jumex Collection, "Brave New Worlds," over the weekend. Jeppe is DJing Thursday at Pasaje America. Ollin Kan started. And there's some free concert at the Zocalo. And ...

* Saludos, siempre, desde Chilangolandia.

Cupcakes and crystal meth: Shifts in central Los Angeles

This is a view going east on Sunset Boulevard to its main strip in Echo Park. On a curve, that billboard is prime advertising real estate, and apparently no better place to have a PSA about crystal meth right about now.

So among the many revelations during my few-days return to L.A, I was reminded how 'big' crystal meth remains in the States. Also in right now: cupcakes, cute, decadent, not-too-pricey cupcakes, in kill-me cute cupcake shops; tacotrucks with LED light displays in Koreatown; and nu-rave-inspired art at the Chinatown galleries (lots of crass neon at work right now at High Energy Constructs and Daniel Hug).

And, at parties, lots of black. Lots and lots of black.

Blouse-cape & black heels: Festival season approaches

Fashion Week Mexico starts April 14, featuring Marvin & Quetzal, Paola Hernandez, Ricardo Seco, Te Amo, Julia & Renata and many others. Then there's MACO. And besides all the new clothes and new art, there's all the new parties.

* Photo above, from designer Carlos T.E.M.O.R.E.S.

'Phantom Sightings' arrives in Los Angeles

What is Chicano art? The question gets to one of the defining tensions in the modern Mexican American experience -- to live with the static struggle of dual cultural identities in the context of a wildly flattening, globalizing, media saturated world. The exhibit "Phantom Sightings," which opens at LACMA on Monday, may offer some new and challenging answers. It is a survey of art produced mostly by Mexican Americans in a variety of media after the peak of the Chicano Movement, generally seen as the late 1960s through the early 1970s, to today.

The show may be the most anticipated art exhibit in Los Angeles museums this year. And the impact may be lasting. "Phantom Sightings" is scheduled to travel to other U.S. cities as well as here to Mexico City, where modern "Chicanos" remain mostly a foreign entity to the local cultural intelligentsia. Yet there is clearly more to the show than the rehashing of unresolved identity politics. There is a very apparent thematic undercurrent being communicated, dealing with temporality, the refraction caused by multiple media perspectives, a sort of active marginalization.

Two media previews for "Phantom Sightings" currently in circulation: Agustin Gurza in the L.A. Times and Adolfo Guzman-Lopez at KPCC. Also, early blog buzz from Pachucoville, Marshall Astor, and Ken Burns Hates Mexicans.

In his piece, Gurza writes:

Contemporary Chicano artists are working in a social environment vastly different from the days of the Chicano movement. In Los Angeles, to begin with, the Latino population has boomed, putting demographic pressure on cultural institutions to respond. Recurrent waves of immigrants constantly revive the issues of marginalization and social acceptance, even as the offspring of previous generations progress up the social ladder, taking leadership roles as politicians, academics and curators, which were practically nonexistent 30 years ago.

"Phantom Sightings" is curated by Rita Gonzalez, Howard Fox, and Chon Noriega. Here again is my LA Weekly piece "The Art Outlaws of East L.A.," which previewed the show last June and discusses the history and legacy of Asco, the collective now considered the foundational spark for "post-Chicano Movement" art.

Other online sources and related browsing: Ruben Ortiz-Torres, Harry Gamboa Jr., Mario Ybarra Jr., Sandra de la Loza, Sickly Season.

There are many posts in Intersections that are related to the art, artists, and themes dealt with in "Phantom Sightings." Here is a sampling: On Asco, on Shizu Saldamando, on the Pocho Research Society, on LACMA's locura, on L.A. as the new brown capital, on binationality 1, on binationality 2, on the romance of cholos, on the murals of Estrada Courts, on Vincent Valdez, on the Night Stalker, on historic L.A. gang glyphs, on freestyle, on art from Tijuana, and on Arte No Es Vida, a show recently mounted at the Museo del Barrio in New York City.

* Image above, a drawing from a series by Tijuana-born Julio Cesar Morales that depict actual immigrant smuggling methods. That's a modified automobile dashboard.

Happy face in San Miguel Chapultepec ...

... On a narrow street behind a church dedicated to the archangel Michael.

Bust of Che Guevara before sleepy plaza

"¡Hasta la victoria siempre!" reads the inscription below this bust of Che Guevara. "30 aniversario de la caida del Che en Bolivia. 1967-1997. Mexico." Stumbled upon it near the main entrance to the gorgeous Academia de San Carlos. In the plaza there, homeless men slept on the benches in hot midday sun.

View inside the Casino Metropolitano

This is a shot of these interesting light boxes hanging on the second-level of the exhibition space at the old Casino Metropolitano, a gallery in the Centro Historico of Mexico City. One of the walls in the space has a really nice mural honoring Roma laundry soap. Specific information about the works was not available, but the show is titled "Los Compadres Outsiders," according to the flier.

Plants and robots: A contemporary art recorrido

Mexico City artist Jeronimo Hagerman, who is fond of plants, has an interesting installation at the Casa Vecina cultural space in the Centro Historico. "Malas Madres," 2007, consists of 35 houseplants hanging from rope in an atrium in a neat grid. The ropes are pulled tight and the plants hang at different angles and heights. On the roof of Casa Vecina an artists collective installed a wooden ramp that rakes probably about 20 ft. into the sky to a platform. Viewers at the opening were instructed to climb it one at a time in order to participate.

Also, the other night, Garash gallery in Col. Roma opened a show by Gilberto Esparza. The exhibit is built around a bunch of barebones mechanical toys modified with wire antlers that function to fruitlessly push around trash on the floor. Esparza also has a piece at the Casa Vecina show. It is a robot operated by cell phone (which viewers must call to activate) that moves on small wheels and sprays dull industrial paint over government documents taped to a wall.

Figures and filth: Wolfgang Tillmans at the Rufino Tamayo

If you missed the travelling Wolfgang Tillmans show at the Hammer in L.A. or any other place it's been recently, its final stop is in Mexico Ciy, at the Rufino Tamayo contemporary art museum (which by the way really gives me in its design and lay-out the beautifully Brutalist Berkeley Art Museum at the UC campus). The retrospective's opening here was last Thursday. A handsome crowd came out to take in the show of large-print photographs of naked people, people making out, dirty floors, branches in windows, crumpled linens, hair, etc., and collages of headlines and news articles. Then it seemed everyone went to the Covadonga, the gentlemanly old Spanish cantina that has long been adopted by the local art and cinema folks.

Tillmans won the Turner prize in 2000. My gut reaction: Gee, these are good MySpace pictures.

* Also, this week the mavens and mavericks of the film industry meet in Mexico City for FICCO. The opening Tuesday night was a red-carpet event at the glittering Antara mall in Polanco. The marquee feature was "Eastern Promises," screened in the super luxe Cinemex theaters. They serve gourmet food, at your reclining leather armchair if you so wish. Afterwards, downstairs, Don Julio tequila for everyone, without limits.

Scenes from a manga comic convention in Mexico City

These are just a few of many shots I took at the Expo Manga Comic TNT over the weekend at the World Trade Center. It was a huge, three-day comic con even a San Diegan could love, with blaring video game consoles, archery, sword jousting, live bands, and lots and lots of people in highly detailed costumes.

Trust me, based on interviews and observation, kids in D.F. know their manga. And Marvel characters. And Harry Potter. And ninja gear. And home-made magical cyborg samurai mouse creatures like homie does below. (He said he got help for his razor-sharp cosmetic dentures from his dad, who is a dentist.)

* More later ...

Art ≠ Vida: Conceptual actions from Latin America

"In December 1983 the Argentine Conceptual artist Marta Minujin and a group of helpers spent 17 days building a full-scale model of the Parthenon in a public park in Buenos Aires," begins the Roberta Smith review of the current exhibit at El Museo del Barrio in New York City. The model was built with books that had been banned by the Argentine juntas. It "stood for about three weeks. Then the public was allowed to disassemble the piece and keep the books," the article says.

"Arte No Es Vida: Actions by Artists of the Americas, 1960-2000" looks like a rich survey of Conceptual art happenings from Latin America and a worthy precursor to what promises to be a landmark exhibit upcoming at LACMA in Los Angeles, "Phantom Sightings: Art After the Chicano Movement." That show opens in April, and I've been told it will be traveling to Mexico City. The East L.A. "art outlaws" Asco are set to be a prominent thematic force in "Phantom Sightings," as I wrote in this LA Weekly piece. Interestingly, the New York Times piece on "Arte No Es Vida" notes that Asco works are present in that exhibit. The implication is that in the new narratives of art history, Los Angeles is a location within Latin America.

Clowns in the machine: The surprises of 'Schweiz Über Alles'

"Swiss Above All Others" is the English translation of the creepy title for the first exhibition of 2008 at La Colección Jumex, the contemporary art collection belonging to juice magnate Eugenio Lopez Alonso and said to be the largest private collection in Latin America. The gallery is located at the stark industrial Jumex plant on the northern outskirts of metropolitan Mexico City, and we were there Saturday night for the opening. The sparse but satisfying show, organized by Jumex curator Michel Blancsube, features mostly Swiss artists such Urs Fischer, Peter Fischli & David Weiss, Ugo Rondinone, Thomas Hirschhorn, and Pipilotti Rist.

Today, my feature piece on the show was published in The News, the city's recently revived English-language daily (and incidentally where I started my career). There's no Web version, though, so I'm going to reprint an excerpt below:

Perhaps the final surprise in "Schweiz Über Alles" is that the most commanding piece is not by a Swiss artist at all, but by a rising Mexican. The Jumex foundation commissioned a young Mexico City-trained artist known only as Moris for an installation he titled "Hermoso paisaje No. 5 (el baldio)."

The piece is tucked away upstairs, to the right of the collection’s private library. To take it in, the viewer must use a ladder and bedding to climb over a rough wooden wall topped with barb wire. You descend to the ground by stepping down several platforms made from crates. Along each platform is an array of found objects from the streets of the megacity. First tools, then small toys, then watches and rusty jewelry, then piles of used shoes, then bundles of the "red note" daily La Prensa, a local paper famous for delighting in the blood and gore of crime and accident scenes. On the floor, footprints from previous visitors are visible in a thick layer of dirt.

"The street is my laboratory," Moris told reporters last week. "I like to say it’s like entering into Hell, and returning with the evidence."

And below, an image from the Moris installation, taken during Thursday's press conference at the plant.

* Contact me if you would like to view the whole text to the piece.

Living testimony from Tlatelolco, 1968

* Above: They survived the bullets, then were rounded up.

The contemporary art conference known as SITAC opens today at the Centro Cultural Universitario Tlatelolco, a facility recently inagurated by Mexico City's UNAM and housed in a breathtaking temple to Mexican modernism, the old Secretaria de Relaciones Exteriores at Tlatelolco. The former government complex has been converted beautifully to an arts and exhibition space.

What drew me there on Wednesday however was the new exhibit at CCUT dedicated to 1968, the year that marked worldwide political upheaval in the last century, and specifically to what happened at the nearby Plaza de las Tres Culturas on 2 October 1968: the repression of Mexico's student-led reform movement at the hands of the government and military. Untold numbers of unarmed demonstrators were injured, jailed, or slaughtered and disappeared.

The exhibit uses political graphics, photography, news media clippings, video testimony from survivors, and other footage to chart the build-up to Tlatelolco, including the global context of similar showdowns in the United States, Europe, South Africa, and elsewhere. Then it lays out the events and aftermath of 2 October 1968 in explicit detail. With the actual site of the massacre just steps away, the show is emotionally challenging on many levels. Here are a few images:

As far as I understand, the 1968 exhibit at CCUT is permanent. Admission is 20 pesos. * Previously, "Nada Paso: Contemporary responses to Tlatelolco, '68."

Time-travel to Mexico Cities past, in postcards

Take it from a life-long postcard collecter and sender, the modest little show currently on the second floor of the Museo de la Ciudad de Mexico, in a colonial building in Centro Historico betweeen Pino Suarez and Zocalo stations, is a fascinating portal into the life of the metropolis, told through postcards. Apologies for the quality of the images as I'm using a standard Sony Cyber-shot (You can see my reflection in some of them), but here is a sample of some of the postcards on display.

The portrait postcards that give you that Gilded Age decadence feel are the trippiest. Other interesting ones celebrate the 1968 Mexico City Olympics in Modernist colors and lines, or idolize past national heroes and presidents. (The museum provides magnifying glasses to examine the cards more closely.)

El Chopo to Teotihuacan: Leopards ancient and recently alive

Here is a shot Nina Tahash took on our second visit to El Chopo, the punk goth hippie rasta emo ska hip-hop street market in Mexico City, near Buenavista station. Nina of course felt right at home.

At a stall run by an older, animal skin-obsessed artisan punk, Nina found an almost unbelievable hand-made shoulder bag built around a real, full-size armadillo shell. He also made the bag with leather, snake skin, alligator skin, leopard hide, and feathers. Below, Nina descending into the metro at Guerrero a few blocks from the market, with her new accessory.

And for a final touch of indulgence before returning to our regularly scheduled art-culture-politics blogging, here we are posing with an ancient leopard-snake bust in an off-limits archeological area we had "stumbled" into at the grand pre-Hispanic urban zone of Teotihuacan, just outside of Mexico City. We climbed the Pyramid of the Sun and felt "la energia." *

* More on that later. Reminder: all photos are thumbnails, click for larger views.

Hillary Clinton: Always, always a bad girl!

In honor of the suddenly interesting Democratic Party presidential primary season back home, here's a brilliant music video celebrating "strong women of the ages" by YouTube spoof electro-pop band Treble & Timbre. Chelsea Clinton makes the cut, her momma does not:

Tremble & Timbre are just one of the many characters created by L.A.-based indie comedians Michael Lucid and Amanda Barrett, known as Pretty Things. They also parody a TV newsmagazine interview journalist, a sexed-up prep school, "dudes," 90s ravers, and MTV's "Sweet Sixteen." Enjoy them all.

Previously, "Tell your momma about Obama!"

The suspicious sparkle in Oaxaca City: No ghosts, just ...

* Above, a very old-looking retablo image (check the all-seeing eye on the deity in the middle) near the altar at the baroque temple Santo Domingo, Ciudad de Oaxaca, Oax., Mexico.

In Oaxaca these days there is no sign that not too long ago the city was in a state of civil conflict between the state and federal government and the APPO. Nothing. No standing monument to the dead, no memorial to Brad Will. Not much ghost graffiti, minimal police presence, and not a protester in sight. What lessons were learned? What will history say? A two-day pass-through won't render much perspective, I know, but still, something about the place made me feel uneasy, distrustful.

Over the New Year's week Oaxaca City was pristine, sparkling, and filled with a lot of foreigners and tourists, primarily Americans. When foreigners and tourists in a Mexican city spot each other they often exchange a silly, suspicious look-over, a glance that vaguely expresses a sentiment of competition and mutual disdain, like, 'What are you doing here?' Curiously, many of the women tourists wear the indigenous huipil at a far greater proportion than actual indigenous or mestizo people, a fact that seems to register no irony among the younger tourists who move in dorky packs of ten or twelve and gather at the only club that's open on a weeknight in the dead-except-for-tourists Centro Historico, Freebar, to dance wildly to bad remixes of Eminem and Shania Twain.

Suffocating, we returned to Mexico City desperate for the noxious smog, the noise, the traffic, the familiar, unfiltered contradictions of extreme poverty butting against extreme wealth, the pulse. Anything to get away from that college kid from New England in a highly self-aware leather jacket who proudly announced under the pulsating Freebar disco lights: "I'm here shooting poverty. I'm shooting a family a few villages from here that's living in poverty."

Christmas in Mexico City: 'Are we in Disneyland?'

This was Nina Tahash's response to downtown Mexico City in colors and lights on Christmas night, that it looked and sounded like Disneyland, ice rink and all. Nina, an all-around L.A. original, stylist, misfit, and underground muse, is in town with me for the holidays. This is us the night after Christmas outside one of the grimy cantinas on Republica de Cuba street in the Centro:

Notes from a (young, emeging) Mexican art fair *

The first Feria de Arte Contemporaneo Emergente took place over the weekend, concentrating exclusively on young artists in the early stages of their careers.

It was largely an experiment: a first-time fair where the artists represented themselves, not through galleries, which is how virtually every other fair in the world operates. This resulted in unusual moments of direct contact between artists and collectors. While the set-up was nice -- food and drinks, DJs, great views -- I heard many artists complain that there just wasn't enough foot traffic. Maybe because whatever community of serious collectors there is in Mexico had already taken off for Basel in Miami?

In any case, there was some strong work here and there, and most people seemed to have had a great time overall. Here are a few works that caught my eye.

Above, Mexico City painter Rafa Uriegas at his booth, standing before a piece of many little versions of himself with beer bottles.

Puebla artist Marcelino G. Barsi collects used bars of soap from public restrooms and displays them in boxes, as if they were rare specimens of insects. His pieces were sold at the subversive little "Changarrito," a mobile art "stand" modeled after the countless snack changarros that crowd the city's sidewalks. The Changarrito is organized by artist Maximo Gonzalez and friends in Mexico City and Puebla who sold work this weekend. These included Carmen Puente and Armando Miguelez. (*See here for the Changarrito debut at ARCO in 2005.)

Queretaro artist Valerio Gamez made the news in 2002 when he held an open "casting" for the new face Juan Diego during Pope John Paul II's visit to D.F. for the 16th Century Indian's canonization. At FACE he presented Catholic Industry, a fashion-conceptual project of Christian symbols decorating racy ready-to-wear.

The most formally refined work I saw belonged to Mariel Quevedo, a chilanga painter who layers organic color forms to create these rich abstract compositions. Her piece in the VIII Bienal Monterrey currently at the San Idelfonso museum I thought was that exhibit's standout.

I really enjoyed the work presented by Gabriel Boils Teran, of Tijuana. He takes promotional paper toys found in prepackaged junk food and lays them out in these simple, symmetrical patterns, on lacquer-covered wood. He says his work is a re-envisioning of pre-Hispanic codices. To drive the point home he had books containting images of actual codices for browsing at his booth's table. The pieces are clean, sharp, funny.

Boils Teran told me he was interested in getting some of his work to L.A., as he had heard somewhere that reclaiming indigenous American symbols, myths, and spiritual practices was really big there. I could only tell him that he was right.

The farther you go the more towers you see

And even on the edge of Polanco, you can find McDonald's arches. These are views from the Centro de Arte y Diseño terrace, site of this year's FACE art fair, taken this afternoon. Discussion is forthcoming.

(Keep in mind all my images are thumbnails. Click and get a larger view.)

Political graphics and public art in Ciudad Neza

When you see on the covers of books about Mexico City a vast urban grid, the horizon of which is only hinted at by a colorless cloud of smog, you’re looking at Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl, Neza for short. The city is an autonomous municipality that is technically not within the Federal District, but just across its border in the state named -- clearly not in the interest of clarity -- Mexico. Still, Ciudad Neza is considered a part of the Mexico City metropolitan region, like Pasadena or Long Beach is to L.A.

Spent all day there with a local painter, and met a few artists and musicians. There is lots of creative activity in Neza, much of it with a political progressive bent, but most people in D.F. have a wild, misplaced fear of it for its rough reputation. To me Neza and its people felt sensible and fairly middle-class, although I'm told this is a relatively recent development. The image above is work enjoyed at the Centro Cultural Jose Marti, a place that reminded me of Self-Help Graphics & Art in East L.A.

Above, a view inside Neza's palacio de gobierno. The main stairwell features a large canvas painting by a local artist named Francisco Urbina. The piece, from 1983, gives a visual history of Neza from its pre-Colonial founding to its present-day hugeness. Check out the valiant, proud indigenous figure on the right. Faded murals adorn the outer walls of the government complex, which is shaped in some parts like a stepped pyramid.

The best part though was the plaza outside, where someone decided to start a business renting motorized play vehicles for kids bored brainless while they wait for parents to tend to bureaucratic business inside. Awesome:

* Much more to come in future writings.

French street artist Fafi in Mexico City

The famed Fafi was in town this weekend to paint a mural for the new Adidas store in Condesa. She painted (along with a couple local female graffiti writers) on Friday afternoon on a wall outside the neighborhood mercado, while hyper-dressed hipster kids milled out, watching, taking pictures, checking each other out.

Later she handled a bunch of press interviews inside the new space and got some fresh kicks for her and her homegirl Jeanne. The party was cool, but weird. They were playing mid-90s Top-40 hip-hop, basically, and not ironically. Then Diego Jimenez, who does a lot of everything here, took us to an opening of a new design store.

Fafi's work is notable because she belongs to graffiti culture but uses acrylic and brushes. She's easily one of the most celebrated street artists in the world, and in Mexico she was treated as a bona fide star. A few years ago my brother Sergio took Fafi to paint in Tijuana, where Sergio has pieces all over the place. The little girl in one of these shots is my niece Analiyah.

Homenaje a Cuitlahuac y la vistas de la ciudad

It's difficult to convey in words or images how the vertical, muscular environment of Mexico City creates awesome visual effects with scale and depth, but the above shot I hope comes close. It shows some (surviving) apartment towers at Tlatelolco and a monument to Cuitlahuac on Paseo de la Reforma. The base is pyramid-shaped. Cloud formations above the Valley of Mexico are frequently spectacular, and the lines and angles created by a maze of overhead powerlines often enhance the megalopolis's arresting views.

The umbrella in the foreground covers one of the many stands at the Lagunilla market, which specializes in antiques and vintage goods such as watches, eyeglasses, jewelry, books, small appliances, toys, records, hats, lamps, pendants, and big old chests with metal locks. Below, a sidewalk shot. As ever, every price is negotiable.

Mexico as muse for Anni and Josef Albers

* Image above: Josef Albers, untitled lithograph, 1942.

"Mexico is truly the promised land for abstract art," Anni and Josef Albers wrote in 1936 to Wassily Kandinsky, "for here it has existed for thousands of years." This line, from a letter to the founding father of abstract art, is reproduced in a dim corner on a wall at the Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso museum in Mexico City's Centro Historico. It expresses the essential argument behind the exhibit "Anni y Josef Albers: Viajes por Latinoamerica," which charts the couple's extensive travels in Mexico and lays out the enormous influence that indigenous Mesoamerican architecture and design exerted on their celebrated lives as artists.

It is a dazzling show that pairs photographs, videos, letters, and pre-Hispanic artifacts against dozens of original pieces by the Albers couple which bear the unmistakable impressions of Indian civilizations, from before the Conquest and during their times: in the manner of the work's geometric principles, the uses of color, and the stark structural formalism drawn from Mesoamerican pyramids. In some instances the correlation is striking, yet with the Albers works you get the added tastes of the various artistic movements that overlapped with their careers in the 1930s, 40s, 50s, and 60s.

San Ildefonso, one of the finest museums in Mexico City, is my personal favorite because it is situated in one of the city's oldest colonial landmarks and is graced with Revolution-era frescoes by Jose Clemente Orozco that would alone be worth the cost of admission (free on Tuesdays). Also currently showing, photographs from around the world by Rene Burri, contemporary works by young artists from the very strong VIII Bienal Monterrey -- Mexico's major northern metropolis -- and a terrific exhibit of turn-of-the-20th Century photographs by H.G. Peabody and Guillermo Kahlo (Frida's father).

That show has Peabody and Kahlo in playful dialogue, highlighting photos both men took of the same cathedrals and historic structures in cities in central and southern Mexico.

For the gods, 'all is play': Paz on the pyramid

From a 1972 edition of Octavio Paz's "The Other Mexico: Critique of the Pyramid," translated to the English by Lysander Kemp, which I've just finished reading on the metro ride the other morning on Linea 1 from the Centro Historico:

The metaphor of the world as a mountain and the mountain as the giver of life materializes with astonishing literalness in the pyramid. Its platform-sanctuary, quadrangular like the world, is the theater of the gods and their playing field. And what is the game of the gods? They play with time, and their game is the creation of destruction of the worlds. [...] Creation and destruction are antithetical notions to man, but identical to the gods: all is play. In their games -- which are wars which are dances -- the gods create, destroy, and sometimes, destroy themselves.

The chapter "Critique of the Pyramid" is stellar. In it Paz examines the truncated pyramid symbol at the core of Mexican civilization and argues that a sustained critique of the Mexico of monuments, museums, and myth is essential to be free like "a liberated dream":

The true heirs of the pre-Columbian world are not the peninsular Spaniards but ourselves, we Mexicans who speak Spanish, whether we are Creoles, mestizos, or Indians. Thus the museum expresses a feeling of guilt -- except that, by a process of transference and unburdening which psychoanalysis has often studied and described, the guilt is transfigured into a glorification of the victim. At the same time -- and this is what seems to be decisive -- its ultimate exaltation of the Aztec period confirms and justifies what in appearance condemns the museum: the survival, the continuing strength, of the Aztec model of domination in our contemporary history.

[...]

Independent Mexico, in its turn, explicitly and implicitly prolonged the centrist, authoritarian, Aztec-Spanish tradition. I repeat: there is a bridge that reaches from tlatoani to viceroy, viceroy to president.

Paz wrote these essays partly in response to the massacre of untold hundreds of students at the plaza at Tlatelolco, on 2 October 1968, a turning point for modern Mexico.