N.A.S.A.L. is pleased to present the collective exhbition Olvidemos la Modernidad pero no su Estilo in its Mexico City space.
“(…) Mexican modernity is seen, felt, and made present not only through unusual technological innovations condemned to remain perpetually futuristic, but also through the disorder produced by the post-revolutionary period, in which morality, decency, and normality were cast aside to welcome impudence—opening, like the two doors of a cantina.
This Mexican virtue empowered the union leader to enrich himself in unexpected ways and crystallized the possibility of amour fou in a country determined to rid itself of the old regime and its good customs. On that day, not only was Mexican radio inaugurated, but Manuel Maples Arce also read his poem TSH, dedicated to the radio, with a strident expectation that it would be heard clearly in cities such as Monterrey, Guadalajara, and Veracruz, thanks to wireless telegraphy. What was spoken and sung in the studio—located on the property that would later become the Alameda Cinema—could be heard across Mexico.
Rivera’s concerns about Mexican modernity are contained within his tentacled curatorship, which reaches from the abuse of mining in the Popocatépetl volcano in the nineteenth century, to the tourist policies of the 1970s (Magical Mexico!), to the radioactive gardens imported from the United States in 1950 to assuage consciences about the “good uses” of radioactivity after the lesson of Hiroshima, to architectural genius placed at the service of an institutional revolutionary state, to the problematization of maguey plants as nationalist landscape elements that, peaceful in nineteenth-century painting, become combative warriors. It extends further to massive acts of modernity in the chilanguísimo Azteca Stadium, placed on the pedestal of El Museo de lo Mexicano, where icons of national culture appear reproduced in the stands by the coordinated grace of the community; to line actions shared by construction workers and painter-artists; to Mexican science fiction embodied in sculptural props; to the establishment of socialist education in Mexico; to the auto-parts maquila in Tijuana in the 1990s and its repercussions on social, family, women’s, and political life in the north of the country; to the revenge of Los Pinos for the betrayal of one of the most important oil union representatives of the twentieth century; to work uniforms seen from the panopticon of the foreman; and finally, to the modern sculptures of a contemporary artist. (…)“
Exhibition text by Aldo Sánchez Ramírez