Mexico City
2017
Artists:
Nuria Montiel
Ana Navas
Fátima Rodrigo
Ana Roldán
Press:
Excélsior
Verlag für moderne Kunst
Espejo negro, elefante blanco
Cultural legacy is often assumed to be the automatic and straightforward transmission of customs and traditions from one generation of people, linked affectively and geographically to a place, to another, younger generation – this supposedly grants them a defined identity and a sense of belonging. The accelerated pulse of globalization in recent decades, as well as the flow of images, objects, and people it has provoked, has called the model into crisis; regardless, the complexity of cultural formation and dispersion is not a recent phenomenon but one inherent to culture itself.
With this conundrum in mind, the artists gathered in Espejo negro, elefante blanco specifically question the alleged legacy of Modernism and examine its heritage within the contexts in which they operate, mainly in Latin America. Unlike the artists looking at similar themes through archival research, focused on Modernism’s grand stories and figures, the works brought together in this show come from encounters with forms and objects within everyday contexts and domestic situations. Through varying techniques – some detached from artistic education and closer to those of traditional arts – the exhibited works reveal a latent tension between high and low culture, fine arts and handicrafts, design and the ornamental, and abstraction and figuration. Broadly speaking, the practice of these artists is inspired by the translation and assimilation of different cultures and histories, quite commonly forced to express themselves using an allegedly universal language.
For example, in Etui (2014), Ana Navas presents the replica of a Constantin Brâncuși sculpture acquired from a decor website; this is exhibited on top of a textile piece with abstract motifs that provides a double function: it is both a plinth and a carrying case. Navas references how the bulk of the population comes into contact with the modernist aesthetic nowadays – to a large extent through commercial iterations (such as salt shakers that appropriate the silhouette of an abstract sculpture) or incursions in the sphere of popular culture. Similarly, in Mini Tau (2009 – ongoing), Navas translates the figure of Tau, a monumental, minimalist sculpture made by Tony Smith in 1961, into a flat origami figure, ready to return to three-dimensionality in the hands of virtually anyone. The displacement of one medium into another alters the dimensional perfection of Tau and gives way to crass copies that break with the elegance of the straight lines and abstract outcome.
The appropriation of an object which has accrued an immense cultural capital is shared in Unidad habitacional nómada(Nomad Housing Unit, 2016), a work by Ana Roldán made up of two chairs designed by Lina Bo Bardi and a jorongo, a traditional Mexican blanket-like shawl, upon which a motif resembling a brick wall has been woven. In addition to using wood from Brazil, her adoptive country, Bo Bardi’s designs sought to offer affordable, functional objects of a sophisticated simplicity that could be adapted to any home. Firmly rooted in the modernist discourse, Bo Bardi dedicated her life to promoting design and architecture’s social and cultural potential. In stark contrast, most propagation of modernist architecture in Latin America (where Corbusier’s ideas of functionalism were imported) was state-sponsored with declaredly political ends. The juxtaposition of the chairs with the jorongo, which evokes the housing projects carried out in the region, denotes Roldán’s interest in the problems of the idealism of the modernist utopia by importing them into a radically different context. Currently, such housing projects throughout Latin America find themselves in notorious abandonment and neglect, eradicating any trace of social optimism and enthusiasm to offer a comfortable life.
The range of the “elefante blanco” (white elephant) – a grand-scale political construction aimed at promoting a political figure or administration rather than providing essential services – is felt more directly in the work of Fátima Rodrigo. In the video UNAP (2015), she portrays a Brutalist-style building, the Agronomy Faculty at the Peruvian University of the Amazonia; this appears as a strange entity amid the jungle vegetation. The contrast between its imposing façade and the empty, semi-abandoned interiors, which receive barely any maintenance or operational resources, gives an account of the destiny of the modernist utopia. If UNAP questions the results of the imposition of such an aesthetic, in Tramado (Weaving, 2015), Rodrigo is interested in the meeting point between modernist and pre-Columbian esthetics. The artist uses sequins to inscribe, at times clumsily, different abstract shapes inspired by the geometric underpinnings of the aesthetics of the Amazon and Ataraca peoples. The shapes and dimensions of the work are taken from the museographic displays of the Andean cultures, but the gleam provided by the sequins, as well as the idea of the stage curtain, also refer to the cultural domination of Mexico in Peru. With a robust televisual penetration, even today, the artist discovered modernist forms in the stage settings and other utilitarian elements through programs such as ¡Siempre en domingo!, a famous Mexican variety show that aired from 1969 to 1998.
Nuria Montiel is mainly concerned with the textile tradition in Mexico. Throughout her career, she has been interested in the conditions of indigenous peoples who have lived under cultural, social, and political impositions for centuries. Through a long process of field research, Montiel has learned that –just like languages– material traditions remain, though they are fragmented, in constant mutation, and combined with those of other cultures. Equally, due to high demand for “traditional” products generated by tourism, they face new technological possibilities, immersed in an economic system that has a decisive impact on them. Her installation Repite pero cambia (Repeats but Changes, 2017) is made up of a loom and stenciled earth; the result reflects upon the effect that specific objects and ideologies have had in understanding concepts such as the universal, the traditional, the authentic, and the primitive. Popularly, a black mirror, Espejo negro, is a magic portal that transforms whoever is looking in it –– an object with the power to provide access to a superior reality. The works in this exhibition take on this intended quality with humor and occasional irreverence, frequently ascribed to “primitive” art and artists. They deal with transformation but under a new perspective that is vaguely inspired by sociology and lacking metaphysical pretensions. Espejo negro, elefante blanco is concerned with the role played by patrimonial objects, architecture, and design –as well as the translations and iterations they suffer– in the shaping of cultural identity as a territory in constant struggle.