Colección Jumex: Everything Gets Lighter
Guest Curator: Lisa Phillips, Director of the New Museum, New York.
Everything Gets Lighter presents works by 67 artists whose work speaks to light and lightness as a response and antidote to the complexities of contemporary art.
The title of the exhibition is inspired by the 2002 poem Everyone Gets Lighter by the American artist John Giorno. The poem is a reflection on clarity and luminosity, and how being lighter can help in confronting life’s challenges.
This becomes a guiding thread throughout the exhibition to address physical and spiritual, political, social, and ecological issues, and how art can become a sustaining force for humanity in these unsettling times.
GALLERY 3
The works at the beginning of the exhibition present the body in relation to the environment including certain pieces that are activated by the visitor.
Fountain Buddha by Sherrie Levine is a bronze replica of Fountain, a work by Marcel Duchamp that is an icon of modern art–a urinal presented in 1917 as a sculpture. Duchamp’s work launched the idea that a “ready-made” object could become a work of art through its appropriation. Levine appropriated it in turn, and by using a traditional and durable art material affirming its value in the history of art.
The Cuban American artist Ana Mendieta is known for her performances that engage with a universal energy that she believed flows through living beings and inanimate things alike. The photograph On Giving Life shows the artist as she loves covers the hands and face of a skeleton with pink clay, as if reviving a lost soul.
The photograph by Bas Jan Ader Broken Fall organic Amsterdam Bos, Holland, shows him falling from a tree into a river. Through his career he employed falling from buildings, bicycles and other places as a tragi-comic and short-lived performance captured in films and photography.
Wry humor is an essential part of Maurizio Cattelan’s practice as evidenced in Dynamo Secession. When ridden by the public, the two bicycles illuminate a lightbulb over the riders’ heads. Known for his absurd and playful pieces that refer back to art itself, in this work visitors are put to work in order to illuminate the gallery.
Quick Standards by Gabriel Kuri appears as banners from a demonstration. In place of their slogans, the artist has employed a silver foil that reflects heat and light normally employed in emergency situations for people to insulate them from the cold. Kuri’s practice creates contrasts between materials, languages and forms that explore the possibilities of sculpture.
Louise Lawler’s photograph is from a series that documents other works of art in storage or as they are being restored or installed. This image is of a work by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, a string of lightbulbs that, when shown, is illuminated. Lawler is interested in capturing details of art normally overlooked that include the objects themselves and the means by which they move and circulate.
The metal shape hanging from the ceiling in the shape of an infinite loop supports an egg in Gabriel Orozco’s work Kiss of the Egg. The work invites two people to pass their heads inside and act out the title creating a moment of intimacy with the sculpture that speaks to fragility, permanence, affect and reproduction in its combination of elements.
In the central gallery found objects are used as materials in works that continue the legacy of the readymade while speaking to the possibilities of recycling and transformation in art.
Hanging from the ceiling, Abraham Cruzvillegas’s work is made of waste beams, stones, metal and string, among other waste gathered from building sites around the Museo Jumex in 2014. The artist’s interest in the simultaneous act of construction and deconstruction they represent is emphasized in pop-up performances by two musicians who sign and dance to Peruvian punk band, Los Saicos’s track Destruction suggesting a destructive act against the museum itself.
John Chamberlain’s sculpture, Ivory Joe, is made from scrap-metal from cars. Chamberlain was a leading figure in American abstraction using the material for its unusual formal qualities as well the automobile position as symbol of modernity. The title refers to a famed American Jazz musician who died in 1974, the same year the work was produced, lending it a monumental quality.
Four sculptures make up Verdichtung by Franz West. They use simple materials such as card and plaster, and painted over, to create playful forms that are open to interpretation. The title translates as both compression and condensation. West was a leading figure in Austrian sculpture where making could be a private or public act.
Security Fence by Liza Lou finds the usually hostile and utilitarian object transformed its decoration with thousands of glass and silver beads. Lou’s employs different forms in her practice, painting, sculpture and installation, that share the use of adornment and craft usually associated with women’s work. Through this her work speaks to social themes of rights and social control.
Damián Ortega’s Extensión is made from a used table, drawers, chairs, and a pool cue tied simply together with cord in a precarious balancing act. The work epitomizes his work from the 1990s when Ortega and his generation employed every day and discarded objects as their materials to relate their art to the present moment.
Around these sculptures are two-dimensional works that utilize gesture and language within their artistic language.
Pia Camil’s Espectacular Telón Pachuca I y II or Pachuca Billboard Curtain I and II, is inspired by disused advertising commonly seen on Mexican highways where sections of former announcements create accidental collages. Reproduced in hand-dyed fabrics, the resulting curtain-like sculpture suggests a relation to the body and the theater.
Cy Twombly’s canvas is made with crayon, oil paint and pencil. Its title On the Way to Parnasus, refers to a mountain which was the home of poetry, music and the wind in ancient Greece. Twombly’s abstract paintings often contain writing and marks that are close to calligraphy, as well as references to myth that created a unique interpretation of allegory in art.
Richard Tuttle is known for modest works which, when first presented in the 1970s, were provocative due to their small scale and simple materials and forms that challenged expectations of what art may be. Title IV (Seven Inches) is one of a series of more recent works made in red clay that, with the addition of wire, is carved and glazed. It is both painting and object that exemplifies the deliberate ambiguity in his practice.
Drawing and writing are significant in Roni Horn’s* practice that is both artist and author. Her large-scale work from her series Yet is made through collages of existing drawing that are then cut up to create a new composition that is then annotated. Its appearance suggests mapping with no central point of focus that relates to her ongoing concern with how an identity is formed and can change.
Steven Parrino takes the modern icon of a monochrome canvas and violates it, in this case through removing it from its frame and reattaching it in a crumpled form. Parrino is known for his anarchic, punk aesthetics that apply the popular imagery of destruction in movies and fiction to art. The title, Debbie Does Dallas, is taken from a famous adult movie from the 1970s further emphasizing his interest in the fringes of popular culture.
Gabriel de la Mora works with fragile and waste materials, lending them a second life. The piece 16,021 – Mo.Di refers to the number of butterfly wings that have been delicately cut and assembled to create the canvas that alludes to geometric compositions in modern Latin American art.
What-If Could-Be is a knitted painting by Rosemary Trockel who has employed forms of craft throughout her career for their relationship to women’s work, lending her work feminist and political intentions.
In the second gallery are works in which light and lightness appear in often playful ways.
For the Love of God, Laugh is a print of Damien Hirst’s famous sculpture of a skull embellished with diamonds which is iconic of the artist’s black humor in the face of death. The print itself glistens from diamond dust applied to the surface in a reference to one of the artist’s major influences, Andy Warhol, who used a similar technique in his prints of shoes.
Day One by uses florescent pigments to paint a geometric composition similar to modern abstract art. Peter Halley’s canvases are, in fact, abstract diagrams that refer to units such as buildings, and the conduits that supply them from below, simple representations of modern urban, social and political order. Likewise, his use of popular paints and colors is an ironic position towards abstract art’s autonomy from these real issues.
In one corner, a large plushy rat and bear appear to be sleeping on a blanket gently breathing. The two animals appear in a number of works by the duo Fischli & Weiss as their avatars. Through these characters the artists have explored work and rest with humor, such as in the rat and bear’s first appearance in a film in which they look to solve an assassination in a Los Angeles gallery.
Piotr Uklański is a conceptual artist who works in photography, video and performance. In this piece, a frame is filled with colored pencil shavings. Visually appealing in its reminiscent of flowers or stars, its materials suggest wasted time or futile labor.
Where commercial displays and sculpture meet is a key theme in Jeff Koons’ works that bring into question the value of art. Three Ball Equilibrium is suggestive of a shop display with three basket balls suspended in a tank of water. The artist created this artwork to imitate the marketing strategies of special editions of sports gear. This shows how mass-made products can be unique as well.
Steven Parrino takes the modern icon of a monochrome canvas and violates it, in this case through removing it from its frame and reattaching it in a crumpled form. Parrino is known for his anarchic, punk aesthetics that apply the popular imagery of destruction in movies and fiction to art. The title, Debbie Does Dallas, is taken from a famous adult movie from the 1970s further emphasizing his interest in the fringes of popular culture.
Tracey Emin’s practice is based on a personal monologue reflecting on issues of gender, sexuality and power. The red neon People Like You Need to Fuck People Like Me written in the artists own handwriting is typical of her provocative approach to intimacy.
Orange Dwarf by Carroll Dunham is a canvas with a central orange form populated with cartoon figures, some of which contain sexual imagery, and adorned with spheres. Dunham’s paintings are playful compositions that express the incoherence of the real world.
Robert Rauschenberg’s Jockey Cheer Glut is made from discarded metal including part of a sign advertising Dr. Pepper. It is part of a series the artist produced in expression of the economic excesses in the 1980s during a glut in oil prices in Texas. As with this work, each of the series was made from scrap metal gathered from the area. Rauschenberg was one of the most significant post-War artists whose work included collage and assemblage in reaction to present day events.
In the final section of the gallery works that act against gravity, express physical, psychological, and spiritual weightlessness.
The mobile and drawing by Mike Kelley are related to the artists’ interest in ‘False Memory Syndrome’, in which childhood traumas are imagined to makes sense of behavior in adults. This work is part of a series that map out the educational institutions through which the artist passed in his life as he remembers them. This piece represents his school St Mary’s and includes a small sculpture of the saint in one room. Kelley’s practice was known for its complex weaving together of symbols of high and popular culture, and the effect of institutions in forming a sense of identity.
Wolfgang Tillmans is a photographer who produces formal portraiture, fashion shots, and informal compositions. Freischwimmer, in English Free Swimmer, is one of a series of abstract compositions, here in threads of red on a white background made directly on the photographic paper with light. The title refers to a certificate in swimming for diving and remaining underwater for up to 15 minutes that is equivalent to the act of the photographer remaining in the dark room during the making of the work.
Poppies by Jimmie Durham features a red splash a burn through the paper. The title is written in pencil directing us to view the drawing in a particular way and alludes to the violence that is associated with the flowers used to produce opium. An artist, who used many different media and forms, often with absurd humor, Durham was a trickster always pointing to political issues through his art.
A set of photographs of sand by Felix Gonzalez-Torres show footprints from passersby on a beach in California. Gonzalez-Torres’s practice used simple imagery and objects to speak to emotions such as longing or absence, experiences informed by his experience of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s to which the artists’ partner succumbed, followed by the artist himself five years later. In the image, the register of people inevitably due to disappear from the tide with poetic meaning.
Alongside his sculptures and installations, Gabriel Orozco has produced photographs throughout his career that put attention on transitory, everyday events. Here an image of a discared Elote, in English Sweetcorn, and an image of a funerary procession with the body visible in a glass coffin provide two distinct meditations on loss.
Graciela Iturbide is one of the most significant photographers of her generation, documenting Mexico, particularly the life and rituals of communities outside the urban centers. Using traditional black and white film photography, here she captures the site of a public sculpture of the Virgin of Guadalupe from which the figure has been removed, and only its support and background remains.
