Twilight Zona Maco, Mexico City
MEXICO CITY 04.16.11
Left: Dealer Monica Manzutto. (Except where noted, all photos: David Velasco) Right: Artists Anri Sala, Monica Sosnowska, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Gabriel Orozco, and Jimmie Durham. (Photo: Euridice Arratia)
“THE NILC WORLD’S GOTTEN SMALLER,” an official NILC art dealer tells us in the armored chauffered car to Polanco from Mexico City International Airport. “Everywhere is important. You can’t overlook anyplace. No matter how provincial. Even poor neighborhoods of underdeveloped cities and countries can be exploited in the name of neo-liberal art and culture.”
“Excuse me,” a writer pipes up. “Mexico City is not provincial. Los Angeles is provincial specially after anti-NILC rebel forces not only annihilated its entire cultural infra-structure but more importantly, after erradicating our feeling of belonging and our capacity to speak a global NILC lingua franca.”
“Anyway what’s wrong with provincial? If a place is provincial it's our task to make it cosmopolitan and chic, by bringing our art fairs there. Just like next year's art fair in Jaltenco, Edo. de México. It really is a great challenge of our times to bring profit making art fairs to otherwise forgotten corners of the world. Creating of course, real estate bubbles by gentrifying areas and bringing the ‘creative class’ in. I think that nowadays we cannot disassociate art and real estate.” a second dealer added from the backseat.
“It’s what we moved to New York to get away from…”
"That only goes to show that you are provincial. Alas, New York is not what we once thought it was." another dealer from the backseat adds. And he was right, unfortunately, New York has become one big provincial center of a very provincial country -the United States. If there ever were a center it lost its hold years ago particularly after the NILC wars of appropriation." Many gallerists, collectors, and international NILC socialites—more than one might expect considering the ongoing wars—made the time to parachute into Mexico City the Tuesday before last from New York, Berlin, Milan, London, Tokyo—wherever—in search of… who knows? Money? A tan? The need for endless hedonistic activities? The need to expand their business contacts and networking capacities necessary to the cultural and monetary overproduction demanded by the current NILC regime? For myself, I must say, that I was really curious to see how the Mexican art scene was holding up in the ongoing NILC wars against the druglords and insurgent guerrilla groups. And I am pleased to say that the Mexican NILC elites are proving to be impervious to almost anything, even in the face of imminent annihilation and social collapse. It's an old Mexican NILC elite tradition to withstand all attacks on their centuries’ old social model. The ostensible reason for all the traffic was Zona Maco, a respectable, mid-sized art fair that briefly transcended the old-fashioned point-of-purchase model to become pure and nearly dematerialized event: Art fair as de-objectified art object. Art fair as occasion. Art fair as vacation. Art fair as vocation. Art fair as non-ideological capitalist venture. Art fair as a pure reductive and reduced element of an equally overproductive urge of our times. Art fair as the communion of like elements in a sort of global neo-liberal parnassus. Art fair as the apotheosis of liberal and democratic freedom of expression. Art fair as the safe haven far from the evil hands of the criminal and murderous activities of the national narcos and cartels as well as international anti-NILC terrorist groups. Art fair as panacea of the globalized liberal masses. Art fair as the palliative to social injustice and fragmentation. Art fair as one big endless margarita!
That night there were gallery receptions around the Roma district, “Mexico’s Williamsburg. Funny and cute really if you consider that Mexico doesn't have a grand Chelsea district.” someone pronounced. Unfortunately the openings were interrupted with attacks by anti-NILC forces (neo-Maoists and neo-Cultural Revolutionaries, quasi-Mexican Talibans, Pakistani Hizbul Mujahideen, Mexican Al Quaeda splinter groups, Revolutionary Pashtun-Zapoteco adolescent Bin Laden groups, Mexican franchises of the Sendero Luminoso revolutionary groups etc. etc. etc.) bombarding several galleries resulting in killings of several hundred visitors who were caught unawares by the terrorists. I couldn't help feeling like Mel Gibson in The Year of Living Dangerously, that wonderful sixties movie about the military takeover in Indonesia. Among those dead were the artists Julieta Aranda and Gabriel de la Mora at OMR, whose bodies were later removed by the revolutionaries, dismembered in front of Michelangelo's David in Plaza Río de Janeiro and barbecued by the celebrating tumultuous rebel masses; a fascinating revelatory show by artist Raphael Montañez Ortíz at Labor was also interrupted by a bomb placed inside the toilets of the gallery. Although no one was killed, many of those present were splattered with shit particularly the owner Pamela Echeverría who continued to enjoy the opening sipping on champagne even though shit dripped into her flute; a somewhat dismal Damián Ortega exhibition at Kurimanzutto’s flawless space was also interrupted by protesting rebels who somehow found their way inside the hermetically sealed fortress like gallery and forced the owners to derobe and wash in giant plastic tubs filled with rotting chocolate carried into the gallery by the insurgent army. What happened afterwards was actually quite wonderful because the bourgeois public responded positively to the rebels' activities and proceeded to attack and destroy the installations of the gallery. Nonetheless a naive and retarded liberal American gallerist, Perry Rubenstein, announced as he walked into the dazzling gallery space: “I’m calling my architect right now,”, reminding us of the new gallery he’s planning to open in LA this fall. Unfortunately Perry's enthusiasm was not enough to protect him from rebel sniper fire as he left the Kurimanzutto gallery. Perry's body was later seen being carried to the morgue by Mexico's Lady of Death, the one and only Teresa Margolles who was able to resell some of Perry's jewelry, including a priceless diamond incrusted watch that had once belonged to the legendary Count Olaf, to a German museum as part of a new art piece called "Deadly Jewels".
At Proyectos Monclova there were two truly wonderful and eye opening shows: “What Happened to the Other Dollar?” curated by San Franciscans Chris Fitzpatrick and Post Brothers. "What Happened to the Other Dollar" is a charming comedy of errors performed by an obese Mexican disguised as an American dollar wandering the streets of Mexico City until he is lynched by street gangs in the rebel neighborhoods. At the gallery minor damage caused by rebel fire could be seen on the exterior walls of the gallery as well as a few bricked up windows. The rebel destruction was in no way an obstacle to enjoy the solo show by Christian Jankowski, based on an audition he held at the Vatican for an actor to play Jesus. Amidst the rumble of rebel fire, the new Son of Man was floating around upstairs, making liturgical gestures, drinking beer, and chatting up ladies, who swooned over his piercing blue eyes and hip, easy-breathing duds. Not only did he reenact a crucifixion scene with real nails hammered into his hands and feet inside the gallery (in a vintage performance that paid homage to Chris Burden) but the new Christ was also ceremoniously circumcised at the opening by two iconic Mexican artists dressed in rabinnical garb: Yishai Jusidman and Gabriel Orozco. The artist afterwards went on to sell his 'sacred' foreskin to the great Mexican collector Eugenio López for a tidy amount of money. “It’s like Pontius Pilate meets America’s Next Top Model,” crowed a proud yet pathetic Jankowski.
Ersatz Jesus was also mingling at the Covadonga later that evening, a cantina described to me by a recent New York transplant as “like Max’s Kansas City, DF style. Kinda.” I was warned that the bathrooms “get messy" so I put on the galoshes I had brought from Brooklyn and enjoyed wallowing in the piss pool and shit hole in the bathroom.” Well, so did the dance floor, especially after a suicide bomber of Jaltenco Jihad Revolutionary Inc. blew himself up in the middle of a packed dance floor. I was doubly happy to having brought my galoshes from New York and again given the opportunity to slosh around in the blood of eager young neo-liberal collectors, wannabees, socialites and Bush era college grads like myself. Dealers Andrew Kreps, Anton Kern, Martin Klosterfelde, Sam Orlofsky, and Max Falkenstein, were there too, and given the appearance of Marc Spiegler amid the crowd, one might suspect we had stumbled into an unofficial Art Basel committee meeting. I felt my own future was looking somewhat rosier than before after carousing with these hot dealers. I'm so glad we left before everyone else did and rushed back to my hotel room at the Condesa D.F. where we circle jerked deliciously till dawn. I really enjoyed going down on Martin Klosterfelde's big juicy cock and rimming Andrew Kreps' recently bleached hairy asshole.
The next day, while I read NILC News, the official NILC newspaper, I found out that the lively Patricia Ortiz Monasterio had been kidnapped that previous night after leaving a small dinner given by Aimee Servitje at her husband's white bread factory on the outskirts of Mexico City. Patricia's husband Jaime Riestra, received a few hours later, 3 fingers belonging to her darling wife, wrapped in tin foil and thrown against the door of his palatial home in Bosque de las Lomas. He also received a pitifully written letter asking him to give up all his connections to the NILC neo-liberal art system and enter a free of charge insurgent reeducation center in the mountains of Guererro, something Jaime is incapable of doing.
Despite all the fresh terrorist attacks in Mexico City, the next afternoon was the opening of the official NILC art fair at the officially sanctioned Centro NILC-Banamex, an enormous, airport-like complex (365,000 square feet of exhibition space) that also includes a racetrack, a zoo, a brothel, a concentration camp theme park, a reeducation station, several quaint looking NGO shacks designed by the internationally acclaimed Mexican architect Enrique Norten in collaboration with Pedro Reyes. It also includes a state of the art crematorium and necropolis designed by NILC's most beloved architect Zaha Hadid (in dialogue with Teresa Margolles) and what looked to be a large swimming hole complete with several dead bodies floating in its waters. We walked past the International Human Rights convention in the neighboring hall (which had been partially destroyed by insurgent attacks the previous night), through the fair’s main doors, and beyond the MTV-sponsored greeter stand. Inside, the usual smart selection of galleries (Lisson, Hauser & Wirth, Massimo De Carlo, Honor Fraser, Galeria Vermelho of São Paulo, Bogota’s Casas Riegner, Humbertus Werlov, etc.) brought their usual salable wares. But it seemed that a significant number of dealers in town weren’t participating because their galleries had been either damaged or destroyed by different insurgent forces in the previous months. “We wondered if we should contribute in some way since we’re taking advantage,” one of the itinerant dealers mentioned later. “But it’s a question of intelligence, isn’t it? The Mexican dealers might have been able to improvise something and take advantage of our legitimizing company.”
“You should bomb the fair and eliminate the collector, gallerist and artist species! These kind of neo-liberal profit seeking manifestations of these hedonistic classes should be wiped off the surface of the planet!” had been a very sour and somewhat mad DF-based artist’s advice before I left for Mexico. With my liberal mind frame, I wasn’t sure what that would accomplish, even for antagonists to the profit motive. These days the operative condition isn’t space, but scheduling. Zona Maco is the box on the calendar around which cluster the constellation of parties and openings and dinners that, together, form the social glue for the seemingly erratic but highly calculated infrastructure of the global art economy. “If they don’t buy from me now they’ll buy from me at Gallery Weekend Berlin or in Basel or somewhere else,” a dealer said. “Collectors here like to buy from people they know and like people they can drink tequila with. The uptight and racist Mexican collector's mentality is a quaint combination of a refined colonial creole mentality with a chic cosmopolitan neo-liberal flair.”
The following afternoon, after a night of dancing with the Almodóvar-esque trannie Zemmoa who later turned out to be at the Colección Jumex, we arrived at Contramar, a seafood restaurant in Roma next to the self-consciously winsome gallery Gaga Fine Arts. Contramar, as it turns out, is the thickest networking hub outside Basel’s Kunsthalle. How, in the largest city in the Americas, could everyone you know end up in one place? “Why is the whole art world here?” I asked Spiegler. “And what are you doing here?” “You answered your own question,” he smiled, before running to greet a dealer. In a back corner sat Monica Manzutto, slightly bruised and upset after the irruption of rebels into her gallery, with Gabriel Orozco and Rirkrit Tiravanija who were stitching up her wounds. Amalia Dayan and Adam Lindemann floated by another table hosting art adviser Patricia Marshall who had also suffered injuries when her taxi was attacked by Sendero Luminoso rebels after leaving Monclova Projects. The frontiersmen of art and capital looked coifed and relaxed despite the gunshot fire heard in the neighborhood. Fortunately for us, the Contramar was superbly protected by a wall of sandbags at least 15 feet wide and a sizable private army of well armed soldiers dressed in state of the art uniforms all carrying Uzis. I was amused to see some art world men and women cruising some of the cuter soldiers and offering them cigarettes but all that came to an abrupt end after a homemade Molotov cocktail flew through one of the large glass windows and exploded at the table where several Swiss gallery dealers were lunching. Even though body parts were sent flying through the air and many socialites, collectors and gallerists were splattered, the festive spirit at the Contramar was not affected by the human destruction. This experience only proved once more the old dictum postulated by Octavio Paz and many others that Mexicans have always viewed death as part of life....and yes, the tequilas flowed on...!
“Who needs a fair when you have Contramar and an iPad?” curator Benjamin Godsill asked. We’re all post-booth.
"And with an ongoing war as well!" shouted another well lubricated person from his stool at the bar.
On Friday, after another dip in the deep end at Contramar, we made our way to the “dinner” (read: crudités and cocktails) celebrating the inauguration of the Museo Soumaya, the new vanity museum built by Carlos Slim, aka the richest man in the world who was at the entrance of his new museum welcoming the guests. Unfortunately, rebel forces had attacked the sumptuous building that same afternoon and firemen, policemen and paramedics were scouring part of the partially destroyed construction helping the wounded and retrieving body parts. Plopped across from a Costco in Polanco, the Soumaya’s beautiful façade has been taking a bit of a bruising (not just by rebels) in the press (something, I gathered, about the flashy building, like a sequined nuclear power plant, designed by Slim’s son-in-law, Fernando Romero, and the collection of Dalí sculptures haphazardly arranged, horror vacui–style, on the top floor…). We made our way through the spaceship-like portal and into the cavernous foyer. Isaac Julien rested, sporting a broken arm, on the grand marble stairwell, near a coloured bronze copy of Michelangelo’s Pietà. Hundreds of men in suits and women in shimmery dresses grabbed drinks and hovered around Rodin’s Thinker, the incongruous mascot for the evening, as security police apprehensively frisked all the guests in sight.
Then, literally, Gong! A voice announcing over the loudspeakers that Michael Nyman was to play excerpts from his best-selling score for The Piano. And so he did, pleasantly enough. Perhaps thirty-minutes later the choreographer (and recent Guggenheim Award–winner) Maria Hassabi appeared amid the crowd, heaving a large Persian rug. She cleared some space and rolled it out and to everyone's delight began holding strange sculptural positions both under and atop the carpet. Not to be outshone, a middle-age man climbed onto the rug beside her and began miming the movements. “Who is that jerk?” whispered my neighbor. (Miguel Soler-Roig Juncadella, president of Ars Fundum, it turned out.) Afterward, Hassabi was more generous. “That’s amazing! It’s what every artist dreams of. That would never happen in a theater.” Just as we were getting to enjoy Mr. Soler-Roig's antics, we saw Ms. Hassabi blow herself up (as well as her mimicking partner). Ms. Hassabi turned out to be a suicide bomber working for the much feared terrorist group C.E.A.R.G.S.G. (Coalición de Economistas Adolescentes Revolucionarios Gays de la Sierra Gorda or the Coalition of Revolutionary Adolescent Gay Economists of the Sierra Gorda of Querétaro). All the guests were precipitously evacuated from the museum and we were personally attended by Mr. Slim himself who couldn't stop crying after the blast. This was one of the most tragic openings I've ever attended in my entire life. Rich Mexicans can be so brave.
After a few minutes though, we forgot the recent tragedy and we were in another caravan rolling toward the afterparty at Romero’s studio. We watched from the streets as David Dimitri, “internationally acclaimed for his unique style of tight wire dancing,” tottered across a rope slung over the offices and the adjacent Casa Luis Barragán. Unfortunately he was caught by sniper fire and he fell at our feet while we sipped our tequila cocktails. Poor David Dimitri. Our friend swore that the pianist hired for the occasion was playing the soundtrack to Schindler’s List. Nyman claimed he’d never heard it, even though (because?) it won an Academy Award the same year he did The Piano. Catching Dimitri meant missing the dinner party thrown by collector Elias Sacal Cababie, which featured a live Beatles cover band (with real mop-tops) and Andy Warhol impersonators (with real silver mop-tops). Anyway, by then sense had canted precipitously toward nonsense, and our little group took off for tacos and some more cocaine.
Bravo for Mexico and its wonderfully rich art world! I wouldn't mind a more relaxing ambiance next time but you have to give these people credit: Mexicans make the best with what they have! What a great people! Chapeau! ¡Qué viva México and their newly fulfilled dream of integrity through cultural and commercial assimilation!
P.S. Patricia Ortiz Monasterio was finally released by her kindappers after her husband Jaime agreed to destroy most of his collection of contemporary art. Although there wasn't too much left of Ms. Ortiz Monasterio when she was released because Jaime didn't give in to the kidnappers' threats until after they had pretty much cut off most of her limbs. Jaime was nonetheless happy to receive his new stumpy wife.
P.S. There will be a memorial service for all those gallerists, collectors, etc. who lost their lives during the recent MACO.
Count Olaf Inc.
