Super Structures
I SPENT MUCH OF THE SECOND WEEK of February thinking about infrastructure. What prompted this fixation, during this year’s Semana del Arte (Art Week)—a catchall name for the scores of gallery openings, museum shows, parties, and satellite fairs that have sprung up around Mexico City’s annual Zona Maco art fair since it was founded two decades ago? Initially, at least, it was a tour that a small group of us took on that Wednesday with the artist Gabriel Orozco. The itinerary followed an ongoing public project the artist undertook in 2018 under the auspices of the federal government (led by beloved populist president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, or “AMLO”). Its aim was to revitalize the city’s “green lungs,” the Bosque de Chapultepec: cultural centers, expanded gardens, a pedestrian bridge extending from one end to the other, even a new cable car line integrating the park’s four sections and the city beyond it. To date, the project has apparently created around fifty thousand jobs, serving dual roles as art and public works project in the tradition of last century’s celebrated public mural programs. That morning in the van, discussions of the park’s conserved lakes and springs turned to the way the colonial Spaniards had continued to use the Indigenous Mexica’s Chapultepec Aqueduct to transport freshwater to the city after the invasion of Tenochtitlan—then, inevitably, the conversation moved to the capital city’s current water crisis.
There are neighborhoods on Mexico City’s outskirts that have access to running water only a few times a day under normal circumstances. Now, during one of the increasingly common droughts facing the country, there are occasions when even those in the city’s coveted areas have to go without. I wondered later that week how many of the tens of thousands of members of the international art elite who had flown to Mexico City knew the full extent of the problem, as I listened to a public conversation between a group of artists and LagoAlgo cultural center creative director Jérôme Sans. How many of us in the audience were considering the art world’s own complicity in climate change as we heard Sans, Julian Charrière, Renata Petersen, Jakob Fenger, Ana Montiel, and Ebecho Muslimova give their thoughts on the center’s current exhibition, “Capitulo V: Heat”?It was impossible not to think about the hours I was spending traveling from one exhibition or opening to the next when Charrière referred to present-day cities, with their cars and furnaces, as “massive bonfires.” Even the most privileged visitors cannot escape the fact that the city’s prodigious traffic can make traveling to an opening in a different neighborhood four miles away last an hour, or that it might take thirty minutes for an Uber to appear and take them to the next event.
While aspects of the city’s infrastructure buckle under the pressure of its roughly twenty million inhabitants—not including tourists and long-term visitors—its cultural infrastructure could not be stronger. Art Week provides occasion for many of Mexico City’s more than one hundred seventy museums and numerous historic sites to host exhibitions of contemporary art. Often, the setting overpowers the art, though it is admittedly difficult to compete with Luis Barragán’s jewel-box Gilardi House or Diego Rivera’s otherworldly Anahuacalli Museum. And there are plenty of times when the art does measure up. Among the most compelling events I attended was a tour given by the artist Pedro Lasch and curator Lucía Sanromán Aranda at the Laboratorio Arte Alameda. The space currently hosting Lasch’s mid-career retrospective was once a Franciscan monastery, later a gallery of colonial art. The monastery’s former chapel now houses a fresco painted by muralist Federico Cantú in 1959 showing missionary Bernardino de Sahagún and his Indigenous “informers.” The larger structure now serves as a contemporary art space—adaptive reuse has been an integral part of Mexico’s culture since the beginning. Lasch’s work captures this very tendency—perhaps most remarkably in his unexecuted public project for the city’s central square, the Zócalo. The artist’s proposal, an unfortunate casualty of ideological disagreements between the federal and city governments, would have repurposed the scaffolding used in the renovation of the city’s cathedral (built atop a pre-Hispanic temple) as an “anti-monument” in the Zócalo’s center. Although one can see why Lasch was devastated that the green apparatus in the model never appeared at full scale, there is something poetic about its lack of existence. The very name “Zócalo” is the Spanish term for a type of pedestal. Following the War of Independence, so the story goes, residents began to refer to the Zócalo as such after the base installed in the square that was intended for a revolutionary monument—one that, alas, never materialized.
The tradition of mobilizing art to draw visitors, as the many organizers of Art Week do each year, is itself an element of Mexico’s cultural infrastructure. During the period after the Mexican Revolution of 1910–20, representatives of the Mexican government installed exhibitions of Mexican objects and murals abroad, in part for the purpose of attracting guests (along with their money and goodwill) from the north. It is telling that the exhibitions on view last week at some of the city’s most important galleries—and their respective booths at Zona Maco—showed work rooted in traditional arte popular, the particular brand of folk art Mexico codified early last century for postrevolutionary purposes: Eduardo Sarabia’s oversize “Talavera”ceramics showing marijuana leaves and bikini-clad women at OMR, Eduardo Terrazas’s geometric weavings at Proyectos Monclova, Orozco’s meditations on the Mexica deity Coatlicue at Kurimanzutto. This is not to say that established artists and spaces are the only game in town—I savored brilliant exhibitions of the work of younger artists Maggie Petroni and Elsa-Louise Manceaux at General Expenses and Pequod Co., respectively: both galleries that opened within the past five years. Yet Mexico has long relied on tradition to propel its way into the future. If the country can find a way to bring its most vulnerable along for the ride, it will be the envy of nations everywhere.
