Latino Visions#1: MACO (Mexico Arte Contemporáneo) Mexico City

MACO - Feria de Arte Contemporáneo
April 25-29 2007

Mexico is the most exciting place on the planet for contemporary art - you read it here first.

The MACO artfair, held in a partly-built luxury apartment development in the ritzy northern suburb of Llomas de Chapultepec, is one of the more vibrant and energised art events I have attended in a while. Maybe it was the free tequila carts, or the fact that Mexicans smoke indoors like crazy, or the fact that every art student and artslut in DF (Distrito Federal) had managed to get into the inauguración (vernissage), or perhaps it was the blur of the after-parties that makes me procalim this. But I think it was the art.

MACO is a relative newcomer to the international art fair scene, but has become quite an extensive one, with galleries represented from all over the Americas, Europe and further afield, with the common, but not exclusive, focus being artists with some sort of Latin American connection. With the exception of David Zwirner, the New York and London super-heavyweights (Gagosian, Marian Goodman, White Cube etc) stayed away, but a fair number of the more adventurous NY, Paris and Madrid galleries were there, and this may have been to the advantage of the overall vitality of the event. ALL the art on show was, if not great, then at least fresh and exciting. It wasn't quite up there The Armory Show or Frieze, but it made the Mellbourne Art Fair, arguably our most prestigious one, look very tame, if not lame. It made even the curated part of Art Sydney look like a naff interior decoration show. No doubt this is due to a careful exhibitor selection process and the curatorial sophistication of co-directors Zelika Garcia (who invited me to the opening) and Enrique Rubio, but it is also a clear reflection of the quality and depth of Latin American artists in general, and of Mexico's resurgence, straddling the cusp between second and first worlds, as an internationally important force in the visual arts.

I'll come back to the art in a moment, but the well-heeled crowd is worth a mention in itself. If you half-closed your eyes it was much as you would encounter in any of the world's capitals - svelte young women and strikingly handsome men in well-cut dark clothes, with the same half-bored, half-aroused art-lust in their eyes as in Tokyo, London or Sydney. The same stressed-out first-night gallerists drinking too much wine and pressing (too much?) flesh, the same exqusitely delicate girl-interns at the same information desks. And the conversations, in staccato Spanish, were much the same too, with the then impending trio of international 'art-musts' - Art Basel, Bienale de Venezia and Documenta (Kassel) on many lips.

But somehow it is different in Mexico, which after all has an ancient and passionate visual arts tradition. One manifestation of this at the MACO opening was the phenomenon of several Frida Kahlo dress-alikes. One realises that she occupies a place in the national psyche not quite like anything else, anywhere. And then there's Diego Rivera, whose art was unashamedly polemical, aimed at fostering national pride, social change, respect for the worker, the impoverished and the landless. One of the most touching experiences is to visit the Casa Azul (Blue House, now the Frida Kahlo Museum) in Coyoacán and see Frida's little bed, her desk, her paints and brushes and kitchen things, and reflect on the extraordianary times she and Diego had there. The status these two enjoy is perhaps the most obvious manifestation of Mexico's embrace of colour, representation, narrative and symbolism into its national imagination, in a way only equalled by India in my experience. The ornate shrines to saints and 'virgens', the garish Jésu-kitsh, dashboard San Cristobals and exhuberant floral tributes serve a very similar cultural role to the Ganeshes, Durgas and Laxmi's among ordinary Indian people. They are part of life, presiding over homes, markets and businesses, not consigned to the temples. And this is just the post-Columbian stuff - underlying it all are the immense Aztec, Mixtec, Zapotec and Mayan visual legacies.

I think this may be an important difference - the fact that art is everywere in Mexico - from the narrative murals in almost all government buildings to the sculpture in its city squares, rococo churches, malecóns and street markets. Somehow its contemporary artists seem more connected with the visual life of the country. While representational painting remains important, Latin American art is by no means devoid of conceptual depth, cleverness, irony or humour. All the main trends are evident, spreading with viral speed through a globalised artworld. But it seems to me less cerebral, more engaged, more likeable, more human, less theoretical. Mexicans have had a tough time as a people this last 500 years, and sit next to the world's current mega-power, in a weirdly entwined cultural embrace.

It's interesting to compare the chaotic energy of MACO with the excellent, if somewhat sombre, survey of Latin American Art, The Hours, currently showing at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) Sydney. I'll write more about this show in my next post, but somehow the exhibition fails to communicate the exhuberant and irreverent energy of Latino art, and renders it all down to grisaille - the humour and colour has gone missing, or to use a facile metaphor, something has been lost in the translation. Obviously a show representing a whole continent has to be selective, but there are some (to my mind) noticable omissions, for instance the supreme ironist Gabriel Orozco, whose cardboard Mexican Flags (with cut-outs) were exhibited at MACO (by hot Mexico City gallery kurimanzutto), below left.

It's difficult to single out artists from an expo where so much was good, but I'll try in my next post.
Hasta mañana.
'El Flaneristo'

Photos © Le Flaneur