As you can tell, I've been hitting the museums this week. Here's another show I highly recommend:
The Antiguo Collegio de San Ildefonso (Justo Sierra 16 in the Centro Historico) always presents shows of high quality; it’s one of the city’s best museums. The current show offers photographs by a Brazilian artist, now living in New York, Vik Muniz (b. Sao Paolo, 1961). The work is presented in chronological order, allowing us to see clearly the artist’s development. Muniz often starts with borrowed images—journalistic photos from back issues of Life magazine, old master paintings, photos of movie stars—and then copies them, or re-creates them using a variety of unusual materials (dirt, chocolate, diamonds, plastic toys, etc.). The resulting images are then photographed, sometimes manipulated in the process. At first, I had that sinking feeling I sometimes get at contemporary art galleries that the artist had spent too much time in graduate school, resulting in objects that are far less interesting than the text which describes them: ‘art as idea’ rather than ‘art as art’. By the end of the show, however, I was won over by Muniz’ prodigious technique, which merits close inspection. The photos are the end product of the artist’s labor as painter, sculptor, etcher. This guy knows how to draw, although after the first series of photos, you won’t see signs of pen or pencil. His double ‘Mona Lisa’ (after Warhol) done in peanut butter and jelly, a gigantic ‘Raft of the Medusa’ (Gericault) in chocolate syrup,
Goya’s ‘Saturn Devouring his Child’ fashioned from discarded scrap metal, and a portrait of Bela Lugosi in caviar are some of his more audacious images (it sounds funnier than it looks). Others, made from sugar, dust, or miles of thread, are more subtle. The images become more alluring, even decorative, in his recent work; a series made from colorful pastic toys are pointilist masterpieces. The show closes September 14. You can visit the artist’s website at www.vikmuniz.net
While at the museum, one of the city’s great monuments of colonial architecure, be sure to see Diego Rivera’s 1922 mural ‘La Creación’. It’s to the left as you enter the museum—not well marked, so ask for help finding it.
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