Momin at Jumex, Nan Goldin Sells, and UBS Closes [Compendium]

Placard for La nada y el ser (Nothingness and Being) at Fundación / Colección Jumex.  Photo: kurimanzutto mailing list

The newest show at the Jumex Foundation's space just outside of Mexico City is going to be curated by Whitney curator Shamim Momin.  The show is entitled La nada y el ser (Nothingness and Being).  We've covered two previous interpretations of Jumex's gigantic contemporary art collection: An Unruly History of the Readymade and Schweiz über alles at La Fundación/Colección Jumex

Other links:

• Nan Goldin is auctioning off works of decorative art and very personal effects at Christies. [via Modern Art Obsession]
• UBS is closing its art banking division, which opened in 1998 and has been a major corporate sponsor of art events around the world.  Place your bets now for the date of the reopening.  [via Art Law Blog]

An Unruly History of the Readymade at the Jumex Collection [Review]

Richard Pettibone. Photo courtesy of fishercott.

[Part 1 of our ongoing feature on contemporary art in Mexico City]

I had never witnessed a piece of art being put to death before. Walking into An Unruly History of the Readymade at the Jumex Collection, though, it’s the first thing one sees. Marcel Duchamp’s notorious Bicycle Wheel (1913) has been slid through a noose and hung from the ceiling of cavernous warehouse. Consulting my guide, I learned that it was actually a sculpture by serial reproducer Richard Pettibone.

Laid out on the floor as a gigantic chessboard that spirals chronologically toward the center of the room, the show (organized by Tate Modern curator Jessica Morgan) comprises about 100 works culled from the collection of juice scion Eugenio Lopez, presenting interpretations of Duchamp’s act of selection that range from the ludic to the staid, the hilarious to the banal.


Ugo Rondione, Love Invents Us, 1999.

Given the sheer abundance of ideas that have been attributed to his work, it’s no surprise that the breadth of artists included in the rambling survey is enormous. A Warhol Jackie (Pettibone’s miniature copy is in a vitrine a few feet away) is hung a few spaces from On Kawara date paintings (with Mexico City newspapers included, of course). Elsewhere, artists like Johns, Jonathan Horowitz, Kippenberger, Kelley Walker, Elmgreen & Dragset, and Jim Hodges are present. Damian Ortega, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Sofía Táboas, and Gabriel Kuri form a portion of the Mexican contingent. (Interestingly, they’re all represented by Kurimanzutto, for which Mr. Lopez seems to have a particular obsession.)


Jeff Koons, Three Ball Total Equilibrium Tank, 1985. Photo courtesy of fishercott.

Sturtevant’s meticulously replicated Johns painting represents the appropriation wing of the party, suggesting the choice of object could actually be another work of art. Warhol’s inclusion foregrounds the readymade as commercial image, Jackie Kennedy’s face plucked from a page in a newspaper. Rirkrit Tiravanija’s polished cooking equipment and its carrying case (shades of Boîte-en-valise) pursues the readymade into every day life, selecting a relational moment instead of a hat rack as the art. Cataloguing the complete set of readymade possibilities would yield scores of factions.

Maurizio Cattelan’s piece Dynamo Secession (1997) is where I paused for the first time, suddenly shaken out of my art history reverie. Twin bikes that can be pedaled to power a light bulb, he reanimates the bicycle wheel, as Duchamp did originally (“In 1913 I had the happy idea to fasten a bicycle wheel to a kitchen stool and watch it turn,” “Apropos of Readymades,” 1951.) It’s cute but also sinister. Simply lighting a bulb in a gallery already flooded with light, it uncomfortably highlights the self-referential (self-reverential) discourse at play. For a lot of people outside the hermetic seal of contemporary art, the readymade represents the moment that modern art became incomprehensible.


Maurizio Cattelan, Dynamo Secession, 1997. Photo courtesy of fishercott.

At the very center of the space, the final work is a banana skin tossed on the ground. Authored by Adriana Lara, the peel is replaced every day after someone from the museum consumes a banana. We can spot the references (to Warhol’s Velvet Underground & Nico cover and the food happenings of relational aesthetics) and get the joke. It may be too easy. The obsessive repetition of its production mirrors Cattelan’s piece. Put another way, we’re just spinning our wheels. There’s a tremendous amount of great, sublime, perplexing work here, and the show is generally crisply edited. There’s also a real danger of falling into a theoretical mise en abyme.

Overhead is a sculpture by Cerith Wyn Evans, a neon text (In Girum Imus Nocte et Consumimur Igni, “We enter the circle at night and are consumed by fire”) spun into a halo. It’s an ancient Latin palindrome, used by Guy Debord for the title of his final film. One thinks of one of the final lines from that film of 1978: “This civilization is on fire; the whole thing is capsizing and sinking.” It will take more than banana peels to confront that.


Cerith Wyn Evans, In Girum Imus Nocte et Consumimur Igni, 2006. Photo courtesy of fishercott.

An Unruly History of the Readymade

Fundación/Colección Jumex

Via Morelos 272, Col. Sta. Maria Tulpetlac, Ecatepec

Through February 2009

Related on 16 Miles: [Top 10 of 2008] #5 - Schweiz über alles at La Fundación/Colección Jumex

[Top 10 of 2008] #5 - Schweiz über alles at La Fundación/Colección Jumex

Entrance to the Colección Jumex.

Colección Jumex is located within the factory of the eponymous juice company, a bunker on the edge of Mexico City, accessible only by taxi. Before sliding open the metal walls blocking the entrance, security guards question you and check your identity.  It's open only via appointment and walled off from the congested streets of the DF.  To put it another way: it would be hard to imagine a white box purer than this.  (In our two-hour stay, we saw only two other visitors.)

Ugo Rondinone, Love Invents Us, 1999, neon, Perspex, transluscent film, aluminum, 310 x 721 x 10 cm.

Above the concrete block walls, a Rondinone sign.  Within the walls of corporate Mexico on top of La Fundación Jumex's storage facility, its admixture of sincerity and irony had never seemed so perfect.


Clever, adorable labels with little icons identify each work.

It was a smart presentation of pleasurable favorites with a needlessly incendiary title. Focusing solely on the Swiss artists in the collection, it presented a simple thesis well: the days of nationalist art are long over, washed away by an entrenched globalism, at least within the art markets of Chelsea, Berlin, and London.


Front: Urs Fischer, Addict, 2006, mixed media.
Back: Ugo Rondinone, Where Do We Go from Here?, 1996, ink on wall, playwood, yellow neon, 4 DVDs, 4 projections, 500 x 1200 x 1000 cm.


Pipilotti Rist, Ever Is Over All, 1997, video installation, dimensions variable.

Any exhibition that features Pipilotti Rist's video of a Dorothy-figure wandering down the street, smashing car windows, and smiling to police officers will instantly earn my affection, but there were other charms as well: little icons identifying the art on display and an installation in the offices upstairs by a Mexican artist named Moris, which required you to climb a ladder and jump a wall, dodging barbed wire.  Containing tabloids filled with stories of gang violence and organized crime, it injected the reality outside the pristine walls into the center of the collection.


Moris, Hermoso paisaje No. 5 (el baldio), 2008, installation.


Free, delicious Jumex beverages are available for all visitors.

The real joy, admittedly, had to do with the exclusivity of the affair, viewing art that only a few are likely to see in an environment that - however ridiculous, elitist, and cloistered - would be hard to improve upon.  The young employees were tinkering happily with a recently-acquired video work; there were free drinks (Jumex-brand, clearly), a gargantuan research library (in which sat a full set of Artforums, their bindings seductively cascading along the shelves), and a seemingly limitless supply of art (attested to by the stacks of burgundy, catalogue binders filling the offices).