Art Objectified

BY MARIA GALLUCCI
The News
Oct. 8, 2009

Imagine a spare button as a shimmering cascade, the light bouncing off its plastic veneer as it hangs from a string with millions of others. Think of a balled up pair of pantyhose as a sheer labyrinth of nylon legs stretching up and down.

Once an unconventional artistic alternative, the reinvention of ordinary household items has permeated the Mexican contemporary arts scene, creating a virtual renaissance of objects for the past three decades.

"Hecho en casa" ("Made at Home"), an exhibit at Mexico City's Museum of Modern Art (MAM) through Jan. 15, 2010, is what the curators call an "approximation" of modern objectual practices. While the display can't promise a complete historical study on this artistic tendency, it does offer an intensive overview on how the movement has influenced Mexican artists.

"Many important artists have been devoting part of their artistic production to this reflection over the objectification of art," said Victor Palacios, who is curating the exhibit alongside Javier Espino and Valentina García.

Palacio said his team and six other researches scoured over private collections and the MAM's assets for nearly four months to compile the 57-piece exhibition, although four works were created exclusively for the event.

"Here, we're not focusing on 'object art' but rather 'objectual practices,' which is much more open," he said, adding that while the former category refers to a specific physical object, the latter can refer to photographs, videos or actions in which "the object still plays a primordial role."

The exhibit, which went up Oct. 2, features the works of more than 40 Mexican artists, with artwork dating from the early 1970s and up to the present.

At the museum, the second-floor showroom looks as if a child's toy box or a storage closet imploded, the contents changing in midair and landing in a completely refigured form.

In "Vestido" ("Dress"), the 2008 work by Xavery Wolski takes an infinite number of dried squash seeds and strings them together into a long-sleeve, turtleneck dress pegged to the wall as if hanging in a closet.

Parblo Vargas Lugo's 2008 piece "Chiquihuite I" takes several thin metal music stands and positions them together like rooftop antennas suspended from the ceiling, the ends illuminated by small blinking lights.

Palacios said the exhibit could also show the humorous side to contemporary art.

"One of the characteristics of objectual practices is that it has an implicit irony and a playful character," he said.

The exhibit is loosely divided into seven categories, each reflecting various interpretations of objects. Some divisions overlap and theoretical lines are often blurred, so each section is equipped with bilingual fact sheets.

Pieces in the section "The object as a form; the form as a sculpture" take an everyday object and give it a new function - like the seed dress and music stands, for example.

The movement got its start in the late 1950s, though it really took off with Andy Warhol's 1964 "Brillo Box," a simply presented package of the coarse soap pads. By modifying elements like scale, color, texture and material, the artist creates a confrontation between the represented object and its cultural representation, according to the MAM curatorial team.

In another instance, Miguel Monroy's 2008 piece "Legolego" takes hundreds of cherry-red plastic Lego cubes and connects them all into one giant Lego brick.

The category "What is a Readymade?" includes pieces that turn prefabricated objects into works of art simply by selecting them for exhibition. "Readymade," a term assigned by artist Marcel Duchamp in 1913, has been reinterpreted for generations by schools such as neo-Dadaism, 1970s-era pop art and post-conceptual art from the 1990s.

At the MAM, Thomas Glassford's untitled 2009 piece stacks small beige plastic saucers and bowls and strings femur bones and gold orbs on a thick chain to create a continuous line from floor to ceiling.

"The Found Object," also known by its French name "objet trouvé," refers to an object's liberation from its daily functions. Similar to Readymade, the artist chooses a pre-made object, but in this instance takes the item out of reality and into art by assigning a new use.

Diego Teo's 2002 "Torre B" ("B Tower") takes a multitude of pink chewing gum pieces and stacks them like the bricks of a castle turret, with yellow gum cubes forming a spiraling path up the side.

Eduardo Abaroa's 2008 work "Sólo necesitamos un mundo más grande" ("We Only Need a Bigger World") is a dizzying collage of map cutouts glued to a giant globe in non-corresponding places; Hungary, for example, takes the shape of Australia.

In the exhibit section "Assemblies," the artwork reflects a hybrid of painting, collage, sculpture and the "objet trouvé." Here, the artist will often juxtapose objects, techniques and materials to create a piece with associated meanings and iconography, according to the MAM team.

Mexican painter Alberto Gironella's 1971 eclectic ensemble "Homenaje a Picasso" ("Tribute to Picasso") honors the Spanish artist who in 1914 gave the "assemblies" category its start with his three-dimensional constructions.

Gironella's piece includes black-and-white photos of Picasso surrounded by a velvet tapestry, old boots, canned food, a trumpet and an actual lion's head protruding from the faded lace background.

"The Documented Object as a Sculptural Gesture" includes mostly photographs of installation pieces with an esthetic purpose; the artist can change the position of an object or modify its visual surroundings.

Mauricio Alejos's "Soñar" ("To Dream") is a 2004 photograph of pillows and folded blankets stacked from the green carpet up to the ceiling of an empty bedroom.

Pieces in the "Objectification of Space" category are mostly large-scale installations. This particular movement took off in the second half of the 20th century and is less about modifying an object and more about objects that modify the space.

Benjamin Torres' 2008 work "Guía de campo" ("Field Guide") takes the pages of a birdwatchers' book and explodes them into the third-dimension by cutting out pictures of birds and sporadically pinning them to a mint-green, L-shaped wall.

In the seventh and final category "Processes," objects become a vehicle or witness to the artistic method.

Gonzalo Lobrija covers all meanings of the category with his multimedia installations. The first, "Psychoplane," is a video that captures the flight of a paper airplane soaring across the city. "Extensions 1 and 2" include a metal sculpture shaped like a paper airplane, as well as 24 black-and-white photos documenting the origami of paper airplanes.

Curator Palacios said, "There is a huge universe of objects and shapes that we can use, and so it's difficult to lose this freshness or ability to surprise."

"There is a a capacity for surprise in contemporary art."