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7/5/2013

There are Other Routes than Ours

Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporaneo, Mexico City

In the year 2000, art historian Olivier Debroise curated the show Tamayo en el torbellino de la modernidad, while also calling into critical question the underlying objectives of the creation of the Museo Tamayo. Similar to the life story of the Oaxacan artist, the roots of this institution lie in the polemic between nationalistic muralism (whose maxim was based on David Alfaro Siqueiros’ statement of 1944: “There is no other route than ours”) and the internationalist vision defended by Rufino Tamayo.

The Museo Tamayo has acted as a forum spotlighting international contemporary art in Mexico, subsidized by private initiative. Though distanced from the hegemonic years of the Mexican School, the museum’s mission came about as a consequence of modern disputes between figuration, realism, abstraction, muralism, easel painting and the aspiration toward universal art.

There are Other Routes than Ours is designed to create a field of aesthetic tension between the collections of the Museo de Arte Prehispánico Rufino Tamayo in Oaxaca and this museum of international art in Mexico City. Not unlike the artistic conflicts that breathed life into the Museo Tamayo, the show includes pre-Hispanic, modern and contemporary works of art in order to contrast the different ways that the indigenous aesthetic and mainstream international canons (whether they be from the modern age or from more recent expressions) have been assimilated. To this end, the works and documents included in this show evoke the “realism” of the Mexican Painting School, to the extent that they contrast the nationalistic rhetoric with the abstract languages of international art and the contemporary strategies of the symbolic and critical appropriation of the idealism of modernity.

The selection of works is based on their material pictorial qualities, the ambivalent relationship among abstraction, pre-Columbian figuration, artisanal techniques, as well as rural landscapes and folk and media depictions of advertisements and urban signage. Furthermore, the presence of Josep Grau-Garriga’s large-format tapestry Henequén rojo y negro (1981) alongside Gabriel Orozco’s Mural Sol (2000) and Teresa Margolles’ Muro Baleado (2009), prompt us to think about other narratives that reflect the cosmological and universal modernity of Tamayo’s contemporaries. In general, the relationships among these works are not so much historiographic as they are based on other aesthetic routes, postures and models which confront each other at the same time as they show, in the international languages of art, complex “social realities.”

The works selected for this show include modern paintings as well as some of the Museo Tamayo’s recent acquisitions of contemporary art. The different approaches draw on the similarities and differences among the pieces to raise the question of how museums, their collections and art in general establish aesthetic models to negotiate with reality. When shown in conjunction with specific objects, the emphasis on textural aspects and symbols —and the apparent contradiction between Bill Brandt’s realistic photography and Siqueiros’ claim that there was “no other route”—reveals contrasts between the aesthetic experience of the works and the museum’s exterior “reality” which they frame.

The show highlights the play of forces between the museum’s interior and exterior realities. In this manner, it questions the ways in which museums approach and configure the real, whether in the mythicizing subjection of modernity as compared to archaic cultures, or in the different ways that contemporary artworks insert aspects of reality into the museum. Among the works and textures, figures, symbols and objects there are interwoven experiences that bring reality closer and push it away, that mythicize the past or repudiate folk and pre-Hispanic world views.

After modernity, the museum became a setting for the combination of universal images and the partial visions that could both sublimate and demythologize art’s relationship with the world.
The modern paintings in the Museo Tamayo collection introduce archaic values that reject academicist canons and rethink the surface of the painting as a reality in and of itself. The textural, material and artisanal qualities of the selected works propose an aesthetic organization that strays from the naturalistic representation of the real.

However, these new symbolic “realities” link the past to the present, and configure a mythical vision of modernity. The reality of archetypal textures and symbols implies the intuition of universality, which was the aesthetic position that Tamayo advocated to counter the realism of the Mexican Painting School.

For its part, contemporary art embeds reality within the museum environment. Examples of this are the “bullet-ridden brick wall” that looks like a minimalist sculpture, and a beer ad whose stereotypical and touristic vision of Mexico may be equated to the tradition of official muralism, by means of the comparison between the evocative imaginary of the exported product and the symbolic machinery of the post-revolutionary state.

Artisanal” reproduction techniques—such as Gabriel Orozco’s enlargements of the Cerveza Sol label and the multiple copies made by professional sign painters of paintings by Francis Alÿs—rely on the reproduction of images to break with the paradigm of originality and thus call into question the value of the unique and unrepeatable artwork extolled by modernity.

Teresa Margolles’ sculpture of bricks pierced by a hail of bullets literally brings into the museum a section of wall that shows the reality of a society plagued by violence. In this context, such works force us to rethink the moral and mythologized vision of the artistic gesture as something that defended folk and non- Western cultures during Tamayo’s modern period.

Furthermore, the “struggle” between interior and exterior —symbolized by Carlos Amorales’ confrontation between his self and his masked alter-ego, or Jonathan Monk’s work that reverses and rotates the sign of the legendary Hotel Palenque— results in obscure psychological worlds, or derelict, rural and entropic worlds that invert the popular imaginary of the fantastic.

The modern aesthetic, which rejected Renaissance principles of naturalistic representation, was also opposed to the realistic conventions of muralism. Tamayo’s collection of easel paintings asserted a new universal mystique between international art and the different ways in which local or ancient cultures were assimilated, while contemporary works reinforced a demythologized and critical relationship with their own institutionalization. As such, these practices called into question the contexts created by collections and museums, in the sense that they are marks of international visibility that channel the reception of our social, political and cultural reality.

Eduardo Abaroa’s project, done ex profeso for this show, presents a counterpoint to the institutional exploitation of pre-Hispanic cultures, whether it takes the form of the official realism of muralism, the anthropology museum, or the international museum as a link between the past and the universal supposition of artistic values. Both the cultural policies of post-revolutionary Mexico and Rufino Tamayo’s concept of modernity found in art a successor to Mesoamerican civilizations. This selection of pieces from the collection of the Museo de Arte Prehispánico Rufino Tamayo in Oaxaca casts doubt on the museum context and its strategies of stabilization and inclusion of autochthonous cultures, which stem from nationalistic policies that glorify the past rather than drawing attention to their current social condition.

Communications
Sofía Provencio - Beatriz Cortés T. (5255) 5286 6519 prensa@museotamayo.org

Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo
Paseo de la Reforma 51, Bosque de Chapultepec Del. Miguel Hidalgo C.P. 11580. México, D.F.
Hours:
Tuesday through Sunday, 10 am to 6 pm
Price: $19 / General public
Entrance is free to students, teachers, and senior citizens with valid identification
Sunday free to public

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