Abraham Cruzvillegas

An artist and member of the International Taoist Taichi Society, Abraham Cruzvillegas lives and works in Mexico City. In the past year, he participated in Documenta 13 in Kassel, won the Fifth Yanghyun Prize in Seoul, and presented a solo show at Mexico City’s Museo Experimental El Eco. On March 23, he opens “The Autoconstrucción Suites,” a major exhibition of this long-running project at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

1. MIGUEL COVARRUBIAS, PAGEANT OF THE PACIFIC, 1939

   This Mexico City–born artist is best known for his portraits of Harlem Renaissance greats, as well as his celebrity caricatures in publications such as Vanity Fair and the New Yorker. But Covarrubias was also a keen ethnographer, painting a set of six portable, mural-size maps for San Francisco’s 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition (similar to a world’s fair); the charts were published the following year in book form as Pageant of the Pacific. Placing the Atlantic at the margins, this series focused on the exchanges between Asia and the Americas, with each map dedicated to a specific theme: “Fauna and Flora,” “Peoples,” “Native Dwellings,” “Native Means of Transportation,” “Economy,” and “Art Forms.” All of the original works were on view at New York’s American Museum of Natural History until 1959, but as the set changed hands, the last of this group went missing—a true loss given that Pageant’s cartographic innovations are incomplete without the meditation on aesthetics.

   Miguel Covarrubias, Fauna and Flora of the Pacific (detail), 1939, Duco lacquer on Masonite, 12 parts, overall, 15 x 24'. From Pageant of the Pacific, 1939.
2. RO.GO.PA.G. (1963)

   This film in four parts—one each by Roberto Rossellini, Jean-Luc Godard, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Ugo Gregoretti—followed from an experiment in which the directors gave one another total freedom in regard to politics, narrative, and cinematographic language. My favorite segment, “La Ricotta,” is by Pasolini (my favorite filmmaker); for this short, he cast Orson Welles as a director shooting a film about the Crucifixion in an impoverished area outside Rome. The story focuses on an extra (playing a thief also sentenced to die on the cross) so hungry and poor that he must steal food from the set’s catering. Throughout, Ro.Go.Pa.G. shows us how society can be challenged with the simplest gestures.

3. MELQUÍADES HERRERA’S FRACTAL POP

   Expert on Marcel Duchamp and lover of the fourth dimension, artist Melquíades Herrera (1949–2003) produced no objects. Rather, he became an object himself, serving as the center of his own eccentric field of action. To arrive at this special art-as-life/life-as-art portal, he used fractal geometry to manipulate the aesthetics of popular culture and late-capitalist industrial production into explosive mass ornament.

4. DAVID MEDALLA, ESKIMO CARVER, 1977

   For this piece, the prescient Filipino poet and publisher of the influential kinetic art bulletin Signals gathered garbage from around the London arts center where it was to be shown, encouraging viewers to use this local trash for forging knives and drums. Medalla then placed these “tools” on view as though in an ethnographic display. The comment on exoticism was crystal clear. For every subsequent staging of Eskimo Carver, Medalla stipulated that “new” garbage be collected, perpetually reflecting our current native environment: what we consume, what we discard, and why.

   David Medalla with elements from Eskimo Carver, 1977, Fitzrovia Cultural Centre, London, 1977. Photo: Guy Brett.
5. WILLIE COLÓN AND RUBÉN BLADES, SIEMBRA (FANIA, 1978)

   I’ve listened to this album many, many times and never tire of the ways in which it reflects, near perfectly, my main interests in music: It’s rooted in black culture, emancipatory, joyful, sexy, emotional, delirious, affirmative, fragmentary, happy, warm, engaged, indecent, sweaty . . . Don’t miss “Buscando Guayaba.”

6. HASSAN KHAN, JEWEL, 2010

   An ecstatic, ideologically committed work, Khan’s film installation channels the tide of global uprisings—from Egypt’s Tahrir Square to Yo Soy 132 in Mexico—that have ushered in the twenty-first century. Subject to its hypnotic, frenetic rhythm, I entered a contemplative sphere from which I spied a private relationship as though I were a Duchampian voyeur. In this, I became witness to a dialogue, a dream of tolerance, peace, and democracy.

7. WERNER HERZOG, THE GREAT ECSTASY OF WOODCARVER STEINER (1974)

   The sport of ski jumping was more aptly called ski flying after Walter Steiner executed his record-breaking world championship run in 1974. But for this Swiss native, the sport was just a pastime. Wood carving was his primary vocation; his first love, finding forms in the roots of trees. For this documentary, Herzog also embraced seemingly disparate languages, incorporating cinema verité, television, slow motion, and narrative-fictive drama. At the epicenter of this documentary is a human facing the violence of nature—destructive and creative forces alike.

   Werner Herzog, Die große Ekstase des Bildschnitzers Steiner (The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner), 1974, 16 mm, color, sound, 45 minutes.
8. KIM JEONG-HUI, WANDANG SEHANDO, 1844

   Exiled on the island of Jeju, the Korean painter and calligrapher Kim Jeong-hui received a package of books from his apprentice and friend Yi Sang-jeok. Grateful, Kim composed a sincere letter of thanks to Yi in response. Marked with only a few characters, the scroll primarily features a drawing—a house in midwinter, flanked by three dry pines and one bare but solid deciduous tree, which would have been read as representing fortitude in the face of adversity. Kim’s sketch, devoid of any pretensions to virtuosity, is a statement of principles, a philosophical and political legacy, a revolution in writing and drawing, all the while intended, no less, as an affirmation of friendship and solidarity.

9. ESTRIDENTISMO (STRIDENTISM)

   The first modernist movement to originate in Mexico, Stridentism emerged in the 1920s following the Mexican Revolution. Poets, painters, and illustrators, including Ramón Alva de la Canal, Emilio Amero, Jean Charlot, Germán Cueto, Fernando Leal, Leopoldo Méndez, Fermín Revueltas, and Guillermo Ruiz, engaged local issues with a voice that was decidedly avant-garde. “We will put out the sun with a blow from our sombrero!” reads one of their manifestos. But the movement’s work aimed not to alienate the agrarian, rural country these artists called home in favor of some future society. Instead, its members employed didactic visual messages (distributed via cheap pamphlets and flyers or proclaimed through proto-performance art) to go beyond the social utopianism and socialist realism of their time.

   Leopoldo Méndez, Mercado negro (Black Market), 1944, woodcut print on paper, 9 5/8 x 7 1/8".
10. JUAN O’GORMAN’S HOUSE, MEXICO CITY (1956)

    The architect who introduced Functionalism to Mexico City in 1929 shifted gears in the years that followed, coming to be equally celebrated for a wildly organic style (most famously in the mosaic-covered library he designed for the city’s National Autonomous University of Mexico). His work filtered the biomorphic forms of Frank Lloyd Wright through the idiosyncratic construction techniques of local builders. O’Gorman’s own house was a prime example: A cavelike structure built into the volcanic-rock ground, it also bore the influence of Mathias Goeritz’s emotional architecture, Ferdinand Cheval’s outrageous Palais style, the eccentric phytomorphism of Antoni Gaudí, and a heavy dose of pre-Hispanic iconography. Destroyed in 1970, the structure, once covered with O’Gorman’s own fantastical mosaics, is sadly now extant only in photographs.

    Juan O’Gorman in the window of his home, Mexico City, 1959. Photo: Eliot Elisofon/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images.