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 Vallarta Living | Art Talk | January 2006 
Western Hemisphere's Biggest Metropolis is Coming into its Own
 Reed Johnson - LATimes
| | Why isn't the world beating a path to this world-class art capital? |
The cows are here already. Can the busloads of art aficionados be far behind?
Unfortunately, in this undervalued art capital, the answer is "probably yes." Because although this city is basking this winter in a number of world-class museum exhibitions and other visual-cultural diversions including the aforementioned bovine objets d'art it frequently doesn't get the respect it deserves, either from visitors or, oddly, from its own people.
That phenomenon speaks to Mexico City's historic reputation as a bit of an art world underachiever, but there are some promising signs that this situation may be changing.
First, the good news: Both for serious and casual art lovers, this is a great season to be in the Western Hemisphere's largest metropolis, and you don't even need to set foot inside a museum or gallery.
All you need to do is to stroll down Avenue Reforma or through one of several picturesque parks and you'll run straight into a few of the 200 or so fiberglass cow sculptures that began popping up here in October. The "Cow Parade" is the Mexico City version of a gimmicky but irresistible art-for-charity project that has been displayed in Zurich, Prague, Brussels, New York, Sydney and other major cities.
Many of the punning beasts in the Mexico City edition have been customized to reflect the local culture, including "Aztec-Cow," which sports an imposing indigenous headdress and, inevitably, "Frida Cow-lo," a homage to that other famous Frida who liked painting herself in various states of excruciating physical and emotional torment. Several of Mexico's most prominent artists, including the great English-born Surrealist painter Leonora Carrington, contributed to "Cow Parade," which seems to be extremely popular, judging by the throngs of idlers that stop to gawk while walking or passing by in their cars.
Admittedly, the show's corporate tie-in (it's being promoted here by a major dairy company) turns the four-legged artworks into urban product placements for consuming more calcium. But it's nice to see Mexico City being acknowledged for something besides lethal air and kidnapping epidemics.
More important, from a fine-art perspective, in recent weeks two major exhibitions have drawn thousands of visitors to two of the city's premier venues. "Goya: Prophet of Modernity," at the National Museum of Art, is a significant show of works by the Spanish premodern master, including the four groundbreaking print series he made depicting the disasters of war, bullfights, old Spanish proverbs and the whimsical "Caprichos," or "Caprices."
Drawn from more than two dozen museums and private collections across the globe, including London's National Gallery and the Prado in Madrid, which organized the show with Berlin's Nationalgalerie Staatliche Museen, it includes a number of oil paintings, drawings and other works never previously shown in Latin America. The newspaper Reforma reported this month that nearly 40,000 people had visited the exhibition in its first three weeks, a pace that would put "Goya" on track to draw 150,000 visitors by its March 5 closing. (By comparison, the show drew 200,000 last summer and fall in Berlin.)
Better still, at the National Museum of Anthropology and Chapultepec Castle in the massive Chapultepec Park, is "Medieval Spain and the Legacy of the West," an authoritative survey of the astonishingly rich culture that developed in the Iberian peninsula during the years when it was ruled, successively, by the Visigoths, an Islamic caliphate and the Christian kings and queens who would soon dispatch Columbus to go find India. The show of 350 pieces, many on loan from Spanish institutions, demonstrates how the peninsula's unique fusion of Judaic, Islamic and Christian cultures helped produce the exquisite and varied architectural motifs, illustrated manuscripts, religious paintings, romantic poetry and sensuously wrought jewelry and furnishings that stamped the region.
Perhaps most auspiciously for Mexico's cultural future, earlier this month the city hosted a multi-venue festival of electronic, video, sound and Internet-based art that was the first and largest of its kind here. While Mexican contemporary artists were deemed the flavor of the month in international art circles two or three years ago, recognition in their homeland hasn't been quite as high, or at least as hyped. Though Mexico continues to produce exciting young artists dabbling in cutting-edge technology, much of their work remains sequestered in small galleries, hard even for intrepid culturistas to find.
This, alas, is in keeping with Mexico City's art scene in general. Despite its extraordinary mix of pre-Columbian, colonial and avant-garde architecture, its superb public murals and its thriving (if inadequately funded and publicized) contemporary arts production, the capital is not regarded as an art lover's destination on the order of Paris, London, New York or Berlin. In Mexico City, you don't see many busloads of Japanese or European tourists queuing up at the Museum of Modern Art. Wander the galleries of the magnificent anthropology museum and you'll rarely hear the same linguistic Babel that is as much a feature of the Louvre as the "Mona Lisa."
The reasons for this are complex. Mexico City's simplistic, but not undeserved, reputation as a labyrinth of congested, crime-ridden streets keeps many would-be visitors at bay. More than half the country's labor force earns less than $13 a day; there are more pressing problems here than the lack of bilingual signage for museum art shows.
Many foreign tourists seem to think of Mexico as a place to buy wonderful, low-priced native arts and crafts but not as a place to see Great Art. Yet many of those who come are pleasantly surprised by what they find here. Paris may have a glass pyramid, designed by I.M. Pei, smack in the middle of the Louvre. But how many cities have a genuine 600-year-old Aztec pyramid smack in the middle of one of the world's largest public squares?
Mexicans themselves, particularly those in power, aren't always good custodians of their own cultural heritage. President Vicente Fox has been roundly criticized for cutting back arts funding under his administration. The same upper-class Mexicans who hide behind their electrified fences in swanky neighborhoods and jet off to South Beach and Rodeo Drive to do their partying and shopping may find it easier to gaze at Goyas in the Prado than in the crime-ridden heart of their own capital.
But perhaps the main reason that Mexico City hasn't gotten its due as a world art mecca is the one that Mexicans find most difficult to talk about: The country's historic insularity, and its nationalistic fears of foreign tampering, have produced an art scene that's sometimes less than inviting to outsiders.
Mexicans have good reason to be wary of foreigners casting eyes on their cultural riches. Starting with the Spanish conquistadors, then continuing on with the United States (which "annexed" northern Mexico during the wars of the 1830s and 1840s) and the French (who installed a puppet regime in the late 1800s), Mexico has been plundered of much of its land, its wealth and its cultural patrimony.
When tourists have been hauling off or melting down your national art treasures for centuries, you tend to get a little testy.
Mexico has reacted to this fear of incursions by developing a culture that is proudly, even defiantly Mexican. Its National Art Museum is precisely that: a museum of national, i.e. Mexican, art, rather than an encyclopedic museum of world art such as New York's Metropolitan. Similarly, Mexico City's Museum of Modern Art is not a comprehensive institution that seeks to chronicle the major technical innovations and stylistic masters of the late 19th and early-20th centuries. It's a survey of art by Mexican modernists, many of them brilliant.
Nearly half a millennium since Cortιs defeated Montezuma, Mexicans still look back to their colonial and indigenous past for cultural cues. That sense of history keeps Mexico both grounded and burdened.
Like 16th century Spain, 20th century Mexico often turned its back on the world artistically in order to contemplate its own rich and strange history.
In many ways, it has been a fruitful insularity. But this holiday season offers encouraging evidence that Mexicans are eager to discover more of their own artistic treasures, past, present and future, and to share those riches with the rest of us. |
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