Dwelling poetically: Mexico City, a case study, Centre for Contemporary Art
The mystery of millions of unknown lives behind the endlessly varied walls of Mexico City unfolds in this exhibition.
In 1928, the same year he wrote the singular and hyperbolically obscene surrealist novella The History of the Eye (l’Histoire de l’oeil), Georges Bataille (1897-1962) published an essay on the Aztecs, musing on the paradox of a civilisation with a savage heart:
The life of civilised peoples in pre-Columbian America is a source of wonder to us, not only in its discovery and instantaneous disappearance, but also because of its bloody eccentricity, surely the most extreme ever conceived by an aberrant mind. Continuous crime committed in broad daylight for the mere satisfaction of deified nightmares, terrifying phantasms, priests’ cannibalistic meals, ceremonial corpses, and streams of blood …
Mexico has remained a place of extremes. After independence from Spain in the early 19th century and the loss of vast territories to the US in the 1840s — coinciding with a staggering level of political instability and endemic corruption — the country was modernised under the able but autocratic rule of Porfirio Diaz, president from 1876 to 1880 and 1884 to 1911. Increasing demands for liberalisation and constitutional rule, however, as in Russia, China and Persia in the same years, led to Diaz’s resignation and departure for exile.
He was one of the lucky ones, for most of his successors met brutal ends during the ensuing decade, known as the Mexican Revolution, in which up to two million Mexicans were killed, about 10 per cent of the population. When relative peace was restored, the military strongmen and the corruption also returned, albeit with episodes of socialist reform, particularly the nationalisation of the oil industry in the 1930s. Today, Mexico still has a remarkably high murder rate, at 16 per 100,000. To put this in perspective, Australia’s count is less than one, and even America, with its notorious addiction to guns, has less than five.
Ever since the period between the wars, the country in general and the capital in particular have attracted European and American artists, writers and intellectuals, drawn by a hybrid European culture, ethnically and culturally blended with the pre-Columbian populations, set in an exotic land, and alive with a chaotic dynamism of constant growth and destruction. As Robert Smithson wrote about the Hotel Palenque in Mexico, in a passage I quoted a couple of weeks ago, “it is being simultaneously built and torn down at the same time”.
Among figures who may be forgotten today is the wealthy and eccentric Englishman Edward James, friend and patron of Magritte, and the model for La Reproduction interdite (1937), in which we see the back of a well-dressed young man staring into a mirror that reflects not his face but once again the back of his head, perhaps something of an insight into the elusive personality of James, as well as a typically Magrittean conceit. James later moved to Mexico and built a rambling surrealist house that was an even more deliberate example of the organic processes Smithson describes.
Smithson is, as it happens, directly quoted in the video work that occupies the far end of the main room of Dwelling poetically, an exhibition of artists, many of foreign origin, who live and work in Mexico City. Melanie Smith’s Spiral City is a view of a section of the city filmed from a helicopter flying in a spiral pattern. From high above, the city is obviously vast, but also clearly laid out in a grid pattern, perhaps a legacy of the so-called Porfiriate or some subsequent vision of modern and rational urbanism. At a certain point, however, the film fades to white, and when the image returns the point of view is much closer, the helicopter flying at lower altitude: and now we can see that all the tidy blocks of the chequerboard are filled with dilapidated buildings, betraying poverty and neglect.
Smith’s film is in black and white, but from the entrance of the same room a colour film, set up on a standing screen so that it can be watched with the other in the background, fills in our image of the city with a close focus on its picturesque street vendors. Each of these has a characteristic cry or musical signal, recalling the famous cries, in past centuries, of the street vendors of London or Paris: the knife-grinder has a little tin whistle in the form of miniature pan pipes, repeatedly signalling his approach as he cycles through the streets. The gas man calls out “Gas!”, while the scrap-metal buyer walks from door to door calling out “Ferro!”, the vowels drawn out each time into a long and stylised cry inherited from generations of men before them who have plied the same trade.
All of this is woven into traditional Irish songs — the artist, Jaki Irvine, is Irish — accompanied by a violin, cello and piano. The result could have been incongruous but ends up being a kind of rhapsody to a city’s human soundscape and to actions and gestures passed on from one generation to the next, a social and cultural performance that transcends individual identity.
On the walls around this room are five paintings by Andrew Birk that evoke another aspect of the city, the grimy and graffiti-plastered walls of the impoverished quarters through which the artist walks each day on the way from his house on the periphery of the city to his studio in the centre. The artist has simulated the effect of rough surfaces repeatedly painted and plastered with inscriptions and posters, which range from a graphic image of sodomy to the sentimental “te amo”, above which are stuck leaflets for a medical service that promises care for the infirm and the elderly either at hospital or in their own homes, while further stickers advertise businesses that purchase cars or gold coins.
Other paintings have a troubled expressionistic figure or the word “ALIEN” in capital letters, and one has a couple of posters for a lost dog — a shih tzu described as wearing a yellow knitted jumper, next to a poster put up by someone who has found a lost dog and is appealing for its owner to call him. We feel the pathos of the tiny creatures lost in a huge and restless city of millions of people, many living in poverty. Yet above that world of squalor are suspended the sculptures, not quite mobiles, of Martin Soto Climent, who has painted the blades of venetian blinds and turned them into exuberant forms reminiscent of birds of paradise.
The two smaller rooms include a variety of works. One of the most interesting is a conceptual piece by Ramiro Chaves, on rows of sheets of paper, on architectural forms of the letter “X”. This is likely to be completely incomprehensible to anyone not familiar with a particular aspect of Mexico’s cultural history, which is explained in a text by the artist that serves as an introduction to the series. At the time of the foundation of the colony of Mexico, there was a debate about the orthography of Spanish, and specifically whether the new colony should be spelt Mexico or Mejico, both of which would have been pronounced in the same way.
In the end, Mexico was adopted, but later the letter “X” acquired another special meaning, symbolising the crossing of the Spanish colonists and the native inhabitants to produce a new mixed or Mestizo people. This model of a single unified population, strongly promoted after the revolution, was meant to replace and erase the elaborate and precisely calibrated casta hierarchy of the Spanish period, in which social rank was based on proportions of Spanish, Indian or, less commonly, black ethnicity. But although today the great majority of Mexicans more or less fall into this category, it has been criticised for masking the disadvantage suffered by the remaining 11 per cent or so of the non-Mestizo indigenous population.
There are other works in the exhibition, including a film of a Francis Alys performance work pushing a large ice block through the city until it melts, but the most remarkable of all is a film piece by one of Mexico’s most famous contemporary artists, Abraham Cruzvillegas, hidden behind a discreet curtain at the back of the room with a warning sign that is no doubt necessary but, with the label, does constitute a spoiler. Ideally, visitors should go in and watch the work first, and read the label later. The film is long and surprisingly absorbing, and bean bags are provided for the comfort of visitors.
The artist has chosen the environment in which he grew up and which has inspired much of his work, a district called Ajusco, a kind of shanty town to the south of Mexico City. The camera surveys rambling structures built informally and sometimes precariously, almost cheek by jowl and yet somehow leaving room for nature to spring up between the residences. The work is quiet, slow and meditative, pausing to give us time to contemplate the forms of buildings rather than panning restlessly over them, and evoking more vividly the question implicitly raised by Melanie Smith’s film: the mystery of thousands, millions of unknown lives behind these endlessly varied walls.
Then suddenly we are inside one of the buildings, and a naked man and woman are making love. The camera angles are relatively discreet, but there is no doubt we are witnessing a real couple, not actors, in the private rituals and routines of sexual intimacy, as though alone. Because we recognise their actions and gestures as real and spontaneous, the scene is touching as well as erotic. It is also patient and unhurried; then we are back to contemplating the silent streets until the next interior episode, of which there are four in just over an hour. The intimate scenes not only reveal glimpses of the secret interior of Ajusco’s urban fabric but also serve another purpose: as expressions of instinctive and primal life force, they evoke the vitality inherent in the improvised architectural environment. These extraordinary buildings, a kind of collective act of bricolage, are assembled from recycled timber, used galvanised iron and old window frames; they are the result of a constant, organic activity of making, and making is the original meaning of the word poiesis. Dwelling poetically can thus be imagined as the very activity of constructing our own environment, of improvising the places in which we lead, indeed make, our lives.
Dwelling poetically: Mexico City, a case study
Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne. Until June 24.
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