MACAY

29Jan08

The other day, a group of us visited the MACAY – the Museum of Mexican Contemporary art. What I’ve come to realize simply about Mexican architecture, is that almost everywhere one goes, it is an open courtyard with balconies and rooms all around it. Although this has been quite apparent from all of our other excursions, not really sure why I was expecting a museum in the sense of an art gallery in the US. Right as we walked up the stairs, there was this huge piece that was a patchwork of corrugated cardboard, numbers, and just random colors just thrown together – very abstract looking. The first exhibit we were able to see was one dedicated to people with Down’s syndrome. Some pieces were abstract, a few were black and white, but what really struck me was that the majority of them were very colorful, while still conveying a sense of sadness. As we went upstairs, after being chastised for taking pictures, there were many rooms, each with different exhibits and collections. The first room we went into held prints of many very well known pieces: Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, Michelangelo’s Academia was on a wall, as well as a few Frida Kahlo pieces. Not sure why, but I found it sort of odd that they would have prints of all these well known, and not Mexican, artists in their museum of contemporary art. Many of the next rooms held sculptures made out of iron. The majority were bulls, with a few being of people. While walking through, I started to wonder what actually defined Contemporary art – granted, it is easy to tell impressionist and modern apart, but what is the defining characteristic of contemporary? As we continued on into the ensuing rooms, I personally decided that contemporary simply means something that makes people think about what the artist was trying to convey. Personally, I could never be one that critiques art, because for the most part, what I think a painting could mean is usually way out in left field to what the artist was trying to say. Anyways, the one room that really caught all of our attentions, started off with semi-normal paintings of royalty with really interesting gold relief in the majority of them, as we continued on, they started to get odder and odder – very strange S&M type pieces along with an entire room of one set of paintings all set against the same backdrop. It was a view of a room with 4-poster bed and a table. In each progression, the people were in different arrangements, and small little details were changed. In a few I remember seeing that an arrangement of 3 oranges on the table was different, the mirror was wrapped up in another and I’m sure if we analyzed it further, we would have found many more subtle differences. As we got the end of that exhibit, the artist had actually made the mirror that hung on the wall, and had put all of the pieces of that set inlaid in the mirror itself. It was very strange to say the least. I think we were all expecting to see something that clearly said “Oh, this is Mexican art”, as weird as that sounds. While it was somewhat apparent with many of the pieces centering around bulls and a few other aspects of life that are clearly Spanish. I decided that contemporary art is simply something that makes you uncomfortable and stop and think – usually with a very confused sense of what the art is trying to say. At least that is how I felt walking through :-P. I started to compare what I was seeing to the other museums I had been to in the States, and found that it really wasn’t all that different, with the exception that the captions and such were all in Spanish. Art really does have the same effect that music can – no matter where in the world you are, everyone can find a common theme or thread that ties that they can apply to their own lives.

This week has also marked the beginning of the Maya course, taught by Rebecca Hill from Tulane. Each day we start off with an hour and a half of Maya class, short break, Bio class, another short break, then end with 2 hours of Maya class. It’s really interesting to start to know about the sites we have already visited, and realize a bit where they came from and the mentalities of the people who lived there. There are so many unanswered questions about what happened to them, but it is amazing at the same time how much they were able to leave behind for us to find. This coming weekend we are going to visit Chichén Itzá and Ek Balam. I’m not really sure what to expect from Chichén, simply because from what I know, it’s an incredibly touristy site and was just declared a Wonder of the World. I don’t really know much about Ek Balam, so that should be really interesting.