This, in a nutshell, encapsulates my art expedition this year to Mexico City: an unforgettable, mind-boggling journey into the quotidian and the exotic – steeped in tradition and change, the ordinary and the bizarre, a place wondrous in its familiarity and strangeness.
I must confess that I had a somewhat biased notion of the place from all the Googling that I did before my trip. Less hardy travelers would have turned back when faced with the prospect of descending upon a smog-choked city of 20 million swarming with hucksters selling counterfeit Aztec doodads, and fast-talking cab drivers trolling about in their beat-up white and green Beetles ready to fleece you for everything you’ve got. But from the moment I flew into Mexico City’s modernist airport, breezed through the orderly queues at immigration and customs, jumped into my not-half-bad airport limo with more convenience than I would have had at any European airport, and began ruminating on all the fine works of art that I would be seeing as we made our way to the Centro Historico, my expectations had been raised somewhat, and I was prepared to be stoked.
My gung-ho disposition began to unravel, though, as soon as we rounded the bend of the arrival terminal, and found ourselves inside a residential area! And, no, we’re not talking about the spanking avenues of the Fort or Alabang here – more like the numbered streets of Cubao replete with houses that had seen better days. The dilapidated frontages, the hand-painted signs purveying every product and service imaginable, the street denizens hanging about (thankfully, owing to the semi-temperate weather, still fully clothed), and the intermittent humps on the road (!) left me mortified as I broke through dazed confusion to quickly remind myself that I wasn’t in Manila.
I realized then that I had always traveled overseas to places that were more developed, infrastructure-wise, than what I had grown accustomed to. Mexico City seemed, well, far better: roads that did not look like mosaics, more organized public transport, even an extensive metro; but the streetscape was hardly what you would call First World: takatak boys and beggars, mostly of native Indian descent; pedestrians playing patintero with motorists. Up until that time, what I saw as Mexico’s manifestations of stateliness had that roughhewn, frayed quality, a condition which was best revealed when I decided to hotfoot it behind the stately Avenida Juarez (which had all the trappings of a Parisian grand boulevard) on my first night to explore the dimly lit street behind my hotel where a beeline of grubby comidas chinas, nickel-and-cent carts hawking tacos, and second-hand reading materials could be found.
Happily, the next few days would have me condone this unpromising overture, as the full rapture of my Mexican experience began to play out. As I headed to my annual ICOM gathering of university museum directors, I was left greatly impressed by the gargantuan expanse of the Plaza de la Constitucion better known as Zocalo (said to be the third largest public square in the world), and became extremely envious of the resources being devoted to restoration work being done on the baroque altar at the Metropolitan Cathedral. Further on, I was smitten by the Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso, built by the Jesuits in 1582, which had breathtaking frescoes by the likes of Jose Clemente Orozco a torrent of visual stimuli brought to resounding apogee by our meeting venue, the amphitheater with its gold-leafed proscenium painted by the celebrated Diego Rivera.
Seeing these murals up-close reaffirmed my view about the uncanny affinity between the oeuvres of the Mexican modernist vanguard and the styles of our own neo-realist, figurative expressionist and social realist stalwarts. In the attenuated poses of Orozco’s La Trinchera were the shadows of Legaspi. Rivera’s hefty dames could have walked straight into one of Saguil’s early figurative oeuvres depicting genre scenes. The influence of the heavily delineated and struggling figures in many of these murals upon our own visual vocabulary of protest was also very obvious: i.e., the martial law-era prints of Doloricon, or mid-Eighties Baens Santos.
Perhaps the greatest testaments to a society’s civility are the number of temples to culture it has erected. In this regard, Mexico ranks very high on my list of must-see places for art and museum enthusiasts. The Palacio de Bellas Artes, completed in 1934 during the regime of the dictator Porfirio Diaz, outwardly as a testament to the greatness of the Mexican race, but personally a "birthday gift," or so we were told by our incredibly animated and garrulous tour guide, to his extravagant and demanding wife (shades of Bagong Lipunan, no?), stood out: an Art Deco carrara marble wonder that reminded me so much of the Palais Garnier (Paris Opera). Part performance hall (the glass stage curtain designed by the Hungarian Geza Maroti manufactured by Tiffany’s), and part museum, I was particularly taken by the elegant vestibule and grand staircase that provided a discursive counterpoint to the sweeping propagandist murals – their gory scenes of war and rabid protest by the likes of Rivera, Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Rufino Tamayo, O’Gorman and Gonzalez Camarena, exploding outwards like the torpedo-like bosoms of the Mexican Inang Bayan/Delacroix-inspired Liberty in one of the paintings – along the two upper floors of the building’s east and west wings.
The Museum of Anthropology, the site of the next day’s director’s gathering, where I had the unique opportunity to hear about, among other university museum plans, the Harvard University Art Museum’s ambitious expansion and relocation plans from Thomas Lentz himself, was another marvel. The size of an airport, it holds relics of Mexico’s past, with the Stone of the Sun (also known as the Aztec Calendar) – shaped like a giant millstone, it is carved with Pre-Columbian symbols and characters to mark the movement of the sun in relation to agriculture – being the highlight of the collection.
And who would have thought an economics museum could be interesting? A well-considered renovation brought interactive technology and sleek exhibition modules into a heritage-listed palace from the time of the viceroys. Selected as the venue for our spectacular welcome reception, an Hermes-like sentry garbed in gold and the Mexican tri-color greeted our party as we moved into a colonnaded, candle-lit atrium where actors garbed in fantastic costumes drawn from folklore – one, a slithering reptile, the other, "La Katrina," a glowering bogey-woman with a skull’s visage decked out in a bustled dress and Victorian hat (mirroring the Mexican’s preoccupation with beauty and death) – sauntered through the crowd. The program was in itself stunning, featuring a historical narrative that was projected on to a screen, which enveloped the venue 360 degrees, giving the audience the sensation of being completely immersed, and participating in the film.
The Pyramids at Teotihuacan, 45 minutes from "D.F." ("Distrito Federal" as the locals refer to Mexico City), deserve a separate article altogether, but suffice it to say that its sheer majesty is derived not only from the superhuman effort it took to construct the complex, but also from the ritual power it continues to exude. Our Mexican hosts were adamant in dispelling the fallacy, propagated perhaps by colonizers intent to picture the natives as barbarians, that human sacrifices were conducted on these sites. The Pyramids of the Moon and the Sun, in fact, were built for prayer, allowing the original inhabitants to ascend to and "touch" the heavens.
With such a bombast of sensory stimulation, one would have imagined that Casa del Lago, situated at the shore of Lake Chapultepec inside the park of the same name, would provide some respite. This was hardly the case, as the conference organizers made sure to serve up a full course of Mexican hospitality during closing cocktails that included musical numbers and persistent invitations to do the cha-cha (there is nothing scarier than seeing museum people get jiggy on the dance floor).
A sylvan oasis said to be one of the largest in the world, Chapultepec Park houses within its boundaries the Rufino Tamayo Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the National Auditorium, the National History Museum, the Museum of Technology, Museum of Natural History, a children’s museum, the Castle of Chapultepec which used to be the residence of the Spanish viceroys before serving as the ill-fated Emperor Maximilian’s palace, amusement parks, fountains, monuments and Latin America’s most important zoo!
On hindsight, excess certainly has a tendency of becoming gauche, but somehow Mexico City manages to pull everything together with great panache. Its secret lies in knowing where the unbridled passion of individualism stops, and the serious commitment to society begins – the result: a heady mix of art and life that infects and permeates a nation’s soul.
In as much as I would have wanted it to be so, this mise-en-scene was still, sadly, not quite like home.