Vik Muniz: Reflex @ San Ildefonso

I must say that my most enjoyable hours in Mexico City this August were spent at the Vik Muniz Reflex expo at the Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso (the Jeff Wall expo is a close second). My first contact with this Brazilian artist happened while studying photography at AAVI in Mexico City, but I had never seen his work outside of books. I remembered him as an artist that questioned the boundaries between photography and sculpture.

Reflex was not only surprising for its scope, but it opened my eyes to an artist whom I had previously only admired for his aesthetic quality. Vik Muniz's art is charged with a deep intellectual exploration that became evident as I strolled around the rooms of the incredibly curated expo at San Ildefonso. The work not only grabbed my attention with its inherent visual beauty, but through the photographs, I began to understand Muniz's questioning of our cognitive processes.

It was exciting to stand in front of a peanut butter and jelly Mona Lisa and force my brain to forget Da Vinci, to forget the face, and focus on the materials...to step back and interrupt the way in which my brain automatically assigns names and values to the forms it sees. Or to look at a landscape with a "fake" cloud and realize that my mind cannot escape seeing it as a cloud.

But it was even more surprising to face the "Pictures of Junk". To me, the strong environmental message in "Saturn" and "Narcissus" is truly amplified by the size of the prints and the scale of the objects in the images. Plus, it is inevitable to spend minutes trying to imagine how the artist produced such images. (for details, watch this interview)

The most unique part of the expo was possibly the very last series of photos...the most recent ones. In them, Muniz presents little heaps of random materials mixed together. The materials he usually uses to create his works, the ones that usually come together to represent other recognizable forms or faces, are suddenly shown in formless heaps, full blown and occupying an entire wall. Devoid of the possibility of interpretation, these photographs seemed like a tribute to the actors that made his work possible throughout the years... an ode to the countless pieces of rubbish that Muniz used as clues for patterns that our brains are quick to assemble.

If you're in DF, don't miss it!

Jeff Wall @ Museo Tamayo

Funny. I spend a whole year in Vancouver and I never see a Jeff Wall print face to face. But I go to Mexico City for just a week and I'm suddenly surrounded by some of my favorite photos by Wall at the Museo Tamayo.

As you can read in that link above, the expo was a combination of documentary and cinematographic photos by the Vancouver photographer, and it was curated in such a way that you couldn't tell which were which. Or could you? Well, for those of us who have studied Jeff Wall, the division was obvious. And the museum did provide a simple guide as to which photos belonged to which genre. Yet, I felt that the expo could have provided more clues or background information to understand the importance of Wall's work.

Quoting from Charlotte Cotton's The Photograph as Contemporary Art, "Wall's careful construction of a grouping of peripheral things prompts questions about our own relationship with photographs: Why are we looking at this? At what point in history and our own lives did a corner of a floor represented in a photograph become iconic, worthy of our attention? To what degree does it need to be abstracted by the seemingly innocent frame in order for us to recognize this grouping of non-subjects to be a still life? The beauty of Wall's photography is that, while it raises these complex questions, it still satisfies us as works of art" (131).

Anyway, don't miss it if you're in Mexico City...but definitely read The Luminist before you go.

Rethinking this space

Wow... I haven't posted about a very eventful last week of August and I'm getting a little bit of blogger guilt. But I have a great excuse: my sister came to visit and I've spent the past week and a half as an unofficial tourist guide of Vancouver. This absence made me think that I need to rethink this blog altogether. So please be patient until I decide on how to relaunch this space and end your boredom. (In the meantime, I have some stories, expos, and concerts to share...)

Sweet Song

What am I to do
Someone is really unhappy
Put myself on the knife
It seems I never got through to you
So I'll wean myself off slowly

I'm a darkened soul
My streets all pop music and coke
All our lives on tv
You switch off and try to sleep
People get so lonely

I believe, I believe, I believe
Everything's out to see
I believe, I believe, I believe
I believe it's the way it should be
I hope you feel the same

Everyone is dying
Stop crying now here comes the sun
I didn't mean to hurt you, oh no no
It takes time to see what you've done
So I'll wean myself off slowly

I believe, I believe, I believe
Love is the only one
I deceive, I deceive, I deceive
I deceive 'cause I'm not that strong
I hope you feel the same

And now, now
It seems that
It's falling apart
But I hope I see the good in you
Come back again
I just believed in you.

Radiohead. In Rain.

Thunderbird Stadium. Vancouver. Rain. Moments ago.
































































(special thanks to Trucha and his waterproof camera)

Prelude to Radiohead

It's 12.07 am this Tuesday and I just saw groups of Radiohead fans already walking towards Thunderbird Stadium! In the darkness, I noticed tents, backpacks, and groups of fans getting ready for a night of waiting. I just got home from the airport and the only reason I'm here (in the blog) is to share that the only reason I'm here (in Vancouver) and ended my Mexico trip short was to see Radiohead in a few hours. But the guys camping out there, in the rain, with plastic sheets to cover them during more than 20 hours before Thom sings his first notes, make my little effort of booking an earlier flight seem insignificant. Hoorah Radiohead fans!

Olimpiadas, o la imposibilidad de superar la televisión basura

Ver las Olimpiadas de Beijing 2008 desde México ha sido una PESADILLA. Como muchos, me he tenido que chutar al pendejo misógino del "Compayito", al carita todólogo Loret de Mola, a Brozo y su vulgaridad machista, y a los comentaristas de fútbol superados tratando penosamente de comentar algo inteligente, diciendo que TODO, desde un revés en tenis de mesa hasta una brazada de Phelps, es "contundente". Pero lo más patético es el reciclaje de personal en Televisa y el estilo clásico amarillista que convierte todas las historias en telenovela. Perdón, pero ni sentando a Nadia Comaneci en la silla de huevo de oro me convencen. Triste que con tanta lana, tienen a puros comentaristas expertos en nada.

Pero si le cambio a TV Azteca me va todavía peor. Luis García parado en una pantalla de publicidad eterna dándonos cátedra/quejándose de la zancada sobrenatural de los corredores "morenos". O el racismo también del Eugenio Derbez wannabe que sale a molestar gente en Beijing embarrándoles estereotipos "chinos" y abusando del product placement. Y luego la conductora en mini mini mini falda a la que le hacen tomas de todos los ángulos posibles mientras nos perdemos alguna competencia...porque claro, a quién le importa ver el badminton cuando podemos estar viéndole las piernas a la señorita. Carajo.

¿No le da vergüenza a los patrocinadores? (Me mata de risa ver el enorme logotipo de Bimbo en estas basuraproducciones y pensar en su campaña "por lo mejor". Con dinero, baila el perro.)

(más ideas con Rodrigo)

Connecting flights and other marvels

Oh man, I'm suddenly dreading the unlikely, yet ever menacing event of missing my connecting flight tomorrow and getting stranded in Phoenix. Not that I have anything against Arizona, its people, or its 40 degree weather. No. My terror is simply the result of planning a very tight return to Vancouver, trying to maximize time spent in Mexico City, yet arriving in time to see Radiohead tomorrow at Thunderbird Stadium in UBC. But, as I suspected would happen, tonight, the night before the flight, I'm counting the hours left to my departure from Benito Juárez and thinking of all the typically DF scenarios that could impede my scheduled arrival. This city has an almost poetic way of getting in the way.

And if everything goes right, if the traffic behaves, the "baches" don't kill my car, a 58642 ton truck doesn't get stuck in a Viaducto overpass (the clearance has decreased considerably over the years due to a new layer of asphalt added each year to mend the city's mistakes), and the "sindicato" of air traffic controllers doesn't go on strike, I still have to worry about my plane losing it's direction mid-flight when, strangely, everyone on the plane decides to simultaneously open their laptops, creating a sudden and disastrous magnetic field. Or an El Niño style thunderstorm in Phoenix that was mispredicted and re-routes my plane to Texas, or even deeper into the Bible Belt.

This is insomnia.

Gracias...totales.

Ya me voy, ya me voy. De retache otra vez al hogar 2.0. Pero esta vez me llevo grandes recuerdos, de mis papás muertos de risa subiendo la pirámide de Palenque, de Loren y Mauricio vestidos de tzotziles, de la peor banda del mundo en el Imperial el viernes pasado con Rodrigo, del Chakiraz y Chamo en esa reunión de sombreros, del desayuno con el Ñeri y de toda la banda en la fiesta de Godofredo. De Eva y la hookah de fresa. De Yesi y el combo mezcales con nieves de Roxy. La tlayuda con cilantro del museo de antropología; Mara, Orla, Elyse, y sus primeras quesadillas de huitlacoche. Jeff Wall ayer y Vik Muniz hoy.

En Donceles...

...me topé unos stencils.

Cheating myself

As you may have noticed, I've recently discovered a way to cheat my procrastination and write posts that have a past date. This way, I figure, I can postpone writing about something until I really feel like it, without affecting the chronology of the blog. If only life were as easy as that!

But it defeats the purpose and the supposedly spontaneous nature of the blog...so I'll stop. Abruptly. For a little while. I'm on vacation, even from blogging.