Help Desk, 2015
Wood, plywood, oil, varnish
200 x 61 x 78 cm
Monday, February 29, 2016
The Art of Administration: On Greg Barnhisel’s “Cold War Modernists”
Here
is a list of some major players in Cold
War Modernists,
Greg Barnhisel’s fascinating and meticulously researched history of
modernist art and literature’s role in Cold War diplomacy: the
American Artists Professional League (AAPL); the American Federation
of Arts (AFA); the Committee on Public Information (CPI); the
Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF); the International Information
Administration (IIA); the Office of Inter-American Affairs (OIAA);
the United States Information Agency (USIA); the United States
Information Service (USIS); and the All-Union Society for Cultural
Relations with Foreign Nations, which, by way of a complicated
transliteration, adopted the acronym VOKS.
Imagine
all of the paperwork produced by one of these benignly titled groups:
the mission statements and monthly summaries, official memos and
interagency notices, budgets and projected spending reports. Then
imagine the size of the file cabinet needed to house all of the
documents for it and all of the governmental, quasi-governmental, and
philanthropic organizations that dealt in foreign policy and cultural
diplomacy between the rise of the Iron Curtain and the fall of the
Berlin Wall (or, to take the slightly more manageable time frame at
the heart of Cold War
Modernists,
between the Truman and Kennedy administrations). This will give a
sense of the archive from which Barnhisel culls his study. And now
imagine the time and patience it would require to find, request, and
read this material, and make it say something about the fate of
modernist literature and art after their initial spark in the 1910s
and 1920s.
Text
by Donal Harris
Thursday, February 25, 2016
Wednesday, February 24, 2016
Monday, February 22, 2016
Quando acidentes se tornam formas
Marcelo
Cidades
Quando
acidentes se tornam formas, 2016
installation
view at Múrias Centeno, Lisboa
20
Jan 2016 - 27 Feb 2016
Saturday, February 20, 2016
The strangest objects we’ve left on the Moon
This
family portrait deposited by Apollo 16’s Charles Duke still lies
where it was left, but is probably now completely bleached
How Many Dahlias till We Die
Because of a Flower (How
Many Dahlias till We Die?) 2016
20
x 20 cm
Inject
print on archive paper
Mathias Goeritz and the Hegemonic Impulse
Long
respected as something of a Mexican national treasure, the
German-born, naturalized-Mexican artist Mathias Goeritz is at the
time of the writing of this text the recipient of significant
international attention, thanks largely to his retrospective, “The
Return of the Snake,” at the Reina Sofia, which ran from November
2014 to April 2015 in Madrid. This traveling retrospective, which
just opened at the Palacio de Iturbide in Mexico City and will
thereafter travel to the Museo Amparo in Puebla, Mexico, offers a
unique and valuable opportunity to appreciate and evaluate the
overall output and ongoing impact of this complex, highly
controversial and protean figure, especially within the context of
postwar modernities. Perhaps more importantly, it offers the
opportunity to not only consider his work then and now, but also the
similarities between his epoch and our current one, as well as some
of the issues at stake in each moment.
Mathias
Goeritz, Museo El Eco (1952-53
Probably
most famous for inventing the term “emotional architecture”
(which is in fact, something of an architectural hapax legomenon),
Goeritz was born in Danzig, Germany (today Gdansk, Poland) in 1915,
and after a stint in both North Africa and then Spain, moved to
Guadalajara in 1949 and then to Mexico City, where he lived until his
death in 1990. An art historian, sculptor, and painter, he came up
with the term and corresponding manifesto “emotional architecture”
at the inauguration of the Museo Experimental El Eco in Mexico City
in 1953, which he designed (also the city’s first museum of modern
art). Devoid of so much as a single right angle, this singular piece
of architecture, which resembles a cross between a set from
Expressionist German cinema and a De Chirico painting, was conceived
in response to what Goeritz saw as the stultifying effects of the
rationalization of international style in modern architecture. Having
arrived in a post-revolutionary, heavily pro-nationalist atmosphere
steeped in the social realism of the muralists, Goeritz’s many
innovations, ranging from non-figurative or abstract sculpture to
monochrome painting, represented a kind of taboo cosmopolitanism, and
for some figures even represented a damnable complicity with
capitalist imperialism. As such, he and his work were severely
criticized and in some cases rejected, and he was ultimately
undermined (for instance, in a well-known incident of public
opposition, when Goeritz was named museógrafo
at the Universidad Nacional de Mexico in 1954, David Alfaro Siqueiros
and Diego Rivera published a letter of protest in the newspaper
Excelsior demanding the repeal of his position, which was actually
met with success).
As
such, it is difficult to call them monochromes in the sense that is
now generally associated with the monochrome, which is more about its
own materiality and color than a means to an end, which in the
Mensajes is light and spirituality, and even more to the point, god
(In hopes of underlining the work’s relationship with light,
Goeritz created dramatic strategies of exhibition in which
the Mensajes
were, for example, lit only by candlelight). According to Garza
Usabiaga, Goeritz was critical of the so-called realism of some
currents such as the Nouveaux Réalistes in France, in the sense that
their work merely replicated and perpetuated the chaos of everyday
life. “To counter this type of practices [sic], Goeritz championed
an art of stable referents, and as he said, God was the most stable
of all. […] Light is a perfect way to represent this religious
referent. The monochrome works in the same way. As the zero-degree of
representation, it is a symbol of ‘the whole and of
nothing.’(2) Almost ironically, once abstraction and the
monochrome later became accepted in Mexico – and largely thanks to
his efforts – Goeritz himself became critical of their apparent
status as mere merchandise.
Mathias
Goeritz, Mensaje,
circa 1959, goldleaf on wood, 53 1/8 x 48 in / 135 x 122
It
is for these reasons that when all is said and done – and this is
admittedly a radically ham-fisted simplification of a very complex
historical conflict – one can finally recognize similarities of
agendas between the muralists and Goeritz. In the truly dogmatic
spirit of the European avant-garde, and whatever their relationship
to the production of objects might have been, they both essentially
saw art as a means to an end, which was as pedagogical as it was
ideological, and which zealously promoted, or rather proselytized a
“correct” way of life. They respectively fought for a hegemonic
position, as it was natural for an vanguard artist at the time, at
the natural exclusion and ideal suppression of all the others.
Therein lies what is possibly the greatest “evil” of not only
modernity, but even contemporary art (unfortunately, this intolerant,
anti-pluralistic, winner-take-all mentality is still very entrenched
in certain parts of contemporary practice). Artistic manifesto
positions of the time can be seen from our times as essentially
retrograde and conspicuously reminiscent of religious fundamentalism,
as they always sought to establish an aesthetic orthodoxy, which
itself inevitably led to conservatism (we know now that orthodoxy
must always be protected from the unorthodox and protected from
heterodoxy). But here’s the good news: The conservative and
retrogressive always loses, historically speaking. For better
or for worse, this is an immutable law of (art) history, and if there
is any lost cause in the history of art, it is the repression or
retardation of change – which, it just so happens is often
enforced by either the academy or totalitarian states. Of
course, for any art professional who is truly committed to what they
are doing, the hegemonic temptation, retrograde in of itself, is
always there, but this is the temptation that must be resisted.
Text
by Chris Sharp
Notes:
(1) Mathias
Goeritz, La Arquitectura Emocional: Una Revisión Crítica
(1952-1968), published by Conaculta, INBA, and la Universidad
Autónoma de Nuevo León.
- Ibid, p. 385
Wednesday, February 17, 2016
Hotel Camino Real
Built
for the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, The Camino Real Hotel not only not
only challenged the conventional standards of modern hotel design and
but consolidated Legorreta’s own characteristic architectural
style, but became a parallel modern art museum of sorts, a building
that perfectly embodied the optimism, creative effervescence and
aesthetic ambitions of Mexico in the sixties.
The
proposal offers an immersive reconstruction; a journey through
different periods, characters and key moments in the history of the
hotel, taking the original collaborations with artists and designers
such as Alexander Calder, Anni Albers, Lance Wyman, Mathias Goeritz,
Pedro Friedeberg, Armando Salas Portugal and Julius Shulman.
Through
historic photographs and documents, reproductions, original furniture
and a 1:75 scale model of the hotel commissioned for the exhibition
and created by Legorreta’s original model maker, as well as
contemporary approaches by artists like Mario García Torres and Lake
Verea, ARCHIVO(S) Hotel Camino Real attempts to rescue the original
spirit of the project and document the transformations the building
has gone through in recent decades.The ARCHIVO(S) series presents a
new approach to iconic projects of modern architecture in Mexico,
working on original archive materials in an open dialogue with
artists, designers and curators. Archivo will collaborate with
leading figures of contemporary culture to rebuild a new
architectural memory around landmarks of Mexican modernism, through
exhibition formats, public activations, reproductions of historical
materials, interventions and original design pieces.
A
proposal by Pablo León de la Barra, based on the project by Ricardo
Legorreta
With
collaborations by
Mathias
Goeritz, Luis Barragán, Alexander Calder, Anni Albers, Pedro
Friedeberg,Lance Wyman, Armando Salas Portugal, Julius Shulman,Sam
Peckinpah,Lily Nieto,Alberto Vivar,Carla Fernández,Lake Verea,
Claudia Fernández, Mario García Torres, Christoph Draeger
Archivo(s)
Hotel
Camino Real
February
4 – May 27 2016
Thursday, February 11, 2016
City Woven by Amnesiacs
A few years later, in another part of the city, Barragán became involved with another subdivision. Backed by former President Alemán and other powerful investors, the Satellite City was the project of Mario Pani.24 Begun in 1954, this covered over 2,000 acres and was intended to house some 200,000 people. It was obviously much less exclusive than El Pedregal, but still decidedly middle class and automotive in orientation. Fresh off his success at El Pedregal, Barragán was invited to design a promotional symbol for the project. He in turn invited his friend, the German émigré artist Mathias Goeritz, to collaborate. The Towers of the Satellite City were designed and built in 1957-1958.25
Drawing
on the Charter of Athens and on then-recent satellite projects in
Europe, Pani's Satellite City was one of many housing developments
built at that time to ease Mexico City's growing pains. It was
located alongside the city's main northbound highway, fourteen
kilometers northwest of the Zócalo. According to Pani, the
Satellite City when completed would be “absolutely
self-sufficient.... a truly autonomous urban entity.”26 Its various
sectors and super-blocks were carefully zoned to provide areas for
habitation, recreation, education, civic and commercial functions,
and parking and transportation. If these last took up a seemingly
disproportionate share of the development's space, Pani said it was
because this was “the epoch of the automobile,” and the Satellite
City was “a city of the epoch.” He called it “a truly modern
city... a city of the future, a city of tomorrow that we are
beginning to build today.”27 In all of this the project was
comparable to the University City, but if its functions were more
genuinely diverse, its architectural forms were notably more
homogeneous. According to one observer of the 1980s: Probably no
section of the capital seems less identifiably Mexican than the
endless sprawling neighborhoods of characterless middle-class homes
in Satellite City to the north. The zone is a monument both to the
middle-class Mexican's desire to own his home and to his fascination
with the American way of life. Beside the multi-lane highways are
huge shopping malls that are reachable only by car. The architecture
of most houses could be described as modern utilitarian, although
wealthier families have followed the American example of building
homes around the golf courses and private clubs. 28
The
towers designed by Barragán and Goeritz stand on a traffic island
at the development's southern edge, surrounded by twelve lanes of
blacktop. They are five in number and wedged-shaped, with their
sharpest angles pointing back toward the city center. Made of
reinforced concrete, hollow inside, they rise from a flat
concrete-paved plaza, from 34 to 54 meters high, but as
their site slopes downward toward the city, they might seem taller
when approached from the south. Originally they were to have been
much taller, as high as 200 to 300 meters, and accompanied by two
additional towers. One was to have been used as an observatory, the
others as water tanks. The ground was to be terraced and landscaped
with steps, lawns, and a fountain or reflecting pool; the design was
scaled back for economic reasons. According to the original scheme,
two were left neutral in color and three were painted with plastic
paints: one red, one yellow, one blue. Collectively they look like a
somewhat miniaturized skyscraper city, or a vastly over-sized model
of one, but either way they read as evident representations of
buildings rather than buildings themselves. They share this
aspect—the representation of modern urban architecture—with
O'Gorman's painted Ciudad de México, but there the comparison ends.
Where O'Gorman placed at the center of his painting a wide boulevard
filled with people and cars, the Towers of the Satellite City present
a peculiarly lifeless and abstract face. The space immediately around
them is almost always empty. They are a quiet and all-but
inaccessible center hemmed in by billboards and speeding cars, not a
distinct place so much as a sign or symbol of something beyond
themselves.
According
to Pani, the towers stood for “man's untamable urge to transcend to
great things...the spirit and the dignity of human works.”29
Goeritz called them a “plastic prayer.”30 More prosaically, they
were advertisements. At El Pedregal Barragán had demonstrated his
ability to turn otherwise undesirable land into valuable real estate
and this, along with his friendship with Alemán, seems to have been
the main reason for his having been invited to participate here. The
towers—unavoidable elements of verticality and dash in an otherwise
almost unrelentingly flat, monotonous landscape—beckoned would-be
exurbanites to come, to stop and to imagine the possibilities of life
in a newer, cleaner, safer, more exclusive “city outside the city.”
They were, in effect, advertisements for urban flight.
In
the chapter on "critical regionalism" in his book, Modern
Architecture: A Critical History, Kenneth Frampton illustrated the
work of Barragán with just one image: the Towers of the Satellite
City.31 One would be hard-pressed to find a less regionalistic, less
inherently Mexican design in Barragán's oeuvre. The towers grew
from earlier projects by Goeritz which were themselves inspired by
the medieval towers of San Gimignano, Italy, and by the modern ones
of Manhattan. Barragán contributed his fascination for the haunting
plazas of Italian painter Giorgio De Chirico, and his interest in
Corbusian tower blocks.32 At El Pedregal he had showcased the native
landscape; he echoed it there in the rambling, abstract, cubic forms
of the houses that he built on his own and with Max Cetto. Patios,
open-beamed ceilings, and rough stone walls referred discreetly to
the site and to Mexican architecture of the colonial past. None of
this sort of historical or geographical situating enters into the
Satellite City project. Its five faceless concrete towers could be
almost anywhere, anytime. What they evoke is not so much the dynamism
of the modern city but an obscure reminiscence of a city of the past,
or many cities, seen through the filter of memory and the flickering
of the mind's eye. They are, say, New York in the 1920s, when
Barragán saw it for the first time. They are the city left behind.
“Nostalgia,”
said Barragán, “is the poetic awareness of our personal past, and
since the artist's own past is the mainspring of his creative
potential, the architect must listen and heed his nostalgic
revelations."33 With the Towers of the Satellite City there is
no longer that sense of history—of specific shared experience, of
justified violence, hard work, and future promise—that fueled
O'Gorman's painting. There is instead a vague nostalgia: history with
all pain (save the poetic variety) removed; in other words, a kind of
forgetting, a flight from the tough truths of present and past, and a
failure to imagine—or a disinterest in engaging— the future.34
Approaching the towers from the south, seeing them in all of their
miniaturized mock urban splendor, one might not be amiss in thinking
of another towered structure of the 1950s: Snow White's palace at
Disneyland near Los Angeles. Both are castles in the air, icons of
escape from cities growing recklessly.
This
is an excerpt from the text "Settings for History and Oblivion
in Modern Mexico, 1942-58," by Keith L. Eggener in :
Jean-Francois Lejeune (ed.), Cruelty and Utopia: Cities and
Landscapes of Latin America, Princeton Architectural Press, New York
2003
Notes
25.
Trained at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, Pani was lead planner
at the University City, and designer of numerous prominent office
buildings, schools, city plans, hotels, and public housing projects.
See Louise Noelle Merles, “The Architecture and Urbanism of Mario
Pani,” in Edward Burian, pp. 177-89; and Mario Pani: la visión
urbana de la arquitectura (México D.F.: UNAM, 2000).
26. G. Nesbit,
“The Towers of Satellite City,” Arts and Architecture 75 (May
1958): 22-23; and Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani, “Luis Barragán:
Urban Design and Speculation,” in Federica Zanco, ed., Luis
Barragán: The Quiet Revolution, pp. 158-59, 252.
27.Mario
Pani, “México: Un Problema, Una Solución,” Arquitectura
México 60 (December 1957): 217.
28.Ibidem:
222, 225
29.
Alan Riding, Distant Neighbors: A Portrait of the Mexicans (New
York: Vintage Books, 1986), pp. 388-89.
30.Mario
Pani, “México: Un Problema, Una Solución”: 225.
31.Federico Morais,
Mathias Goeritz (México, D.F.: UNAM, 1982), p. 37.
32.Kenneth Frampton,
Modern Architecture: A Critical History (New York: Thames and Hudson,
1992), pp. 318-20.
33.Luis
Barragán, "Cómo Deben Desarrollarse las Grandes Ciudades
Modernas: El Creciemiento de la C. de México," Zócolo no.
3,123 (12 Oct. 1959): sec. 4, p. 1. On his interest in De Chirico see
Eggener, pp. 77-81.
34.
Luis Barragán, “Barragán on Barragán”: 31.
Wednesday, February 10, 2016
Monday, February 8, 2016
Guns, class war and a transvestite cat: what a new Beatrix Potter story reveals about the author
A
Beatrix Potter story written more than 100 years ago is to be
published for the first time, introducing a brand new character:
Kitty in Boots.
The
tale, of a gun-toting cat who leads a double life, was found
near-complete in an exercise book – and shows Beatrix
Potter at her darkest, says Gaby Wood
Doppelgängers
and transvestites, guns and gangsters, secret lives: these are not
the first things that come to mind when considering the work of
Beatrix Potter. Yet the creator of Peter Rabbit and Hunca-Munca once
wrote a story that featured all of them. The
Tale of Kitty in Boots was
written just before the outbreak of the First World War but never
published in Potter’s lifetime. Over 100 years later, Penguin
Random House will finally release what they describe as Potter’s
“24th Tale” – a book that may turn everything we think we know
about her on its head.
By
Gary Wood
Drawing of El Eco Experimental Museum
Progressive
Architecture publication, Dec.1956 / Drawing of El Eco Experimental Museum by Mathias Goeritz.
Monday, February 1, 2016
Cartilla Socialista -Republicana
Plotino
Constantino Rhodakanaty,
Cartilla Socialista
-Republicana, 1883
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