Duchamp in Colonia Nápoles

(a performance excerpt)

The following excerpt is from the Performance  A Journal of the Year of the Pharmacy, presented in conjunction with an exhibition at the Shirley Fitterman Art Center in New York, opening on Friday, October 15, 2021.

AISLE 1

A bathroom materials showroom in Mexico City.

Arizona walks to center stage.

Arizona

I have recently realized that everything I have truly learned in life has been by walking. I have learned it not through my mind, but through my body.

The thing is, I had not realized this until a few days ago, after many years of going to school and reading, of obsessively going deep into the entrails of knowledge.

Not that reading was not important. My desire of reading was, rather, the reason for my walking.

The most important education I had was in the streets.

I don’t know if I am a peripatetic artist. I only believe in the significance of distances, in space and time. And I believe that walking, also, is a form of reading.

And I grew up in a place, that, if it were a book, it would probably be a strangely translated novel.

I grew up in a house in Colonia Nápoles, in Mexico City. It is a middle-class neighborhood, full of curious street names. For starters, why did someone decide to call the entire neighborhood “Nápoles,” like Naples, Italy? That place has absolutely nothing to do with Naples. Continuing that incongruity, the streets of our neighborhood were named after American cities and states: Oklahoma, Chicago, Indianápolis, Filadelfia. We lived at Arizona ciento seis (106), between Nueva York and Pensilvania. The pharmacy, by the way, was located on the corner of Pensilvania and Rochester.

I try to envision that time. I am about 15 years old and have finally been allowed to walk around by myself. At that age I already know I want to become an artist. I feel impatient, worried that I am wasting my time, that I will never accomplish my objectives if I remain where I am. My family has many books, but very few of them are about modern art- the art books we do have are mostly of historical periods.

I am desperate to connect with the present. And I don’t know where to go.

So I walk out in search of it.

I walk endlessly through the streets of Rochester, Nebraska, Texas, Idaho.

The closest cultural center near our house is the Polyforum Siqueiros, next to what was then known as el Hotel de México. El hotel de México was supposed to be the largest hotel in the country and perhaps in the world. It seemed to be permanently under construction, as if it had been a metaphor of the modern project of Latin America.

The Polyforum had been commissioned in the 1960s by Manuel Suárez, the owner of the Hotel de México to David Alfaro Siqueiros, then the most famous living Mexican artist and the last remaining survivor of the big three Mexican muralists. He would build the largest mural in the world, something larger than the Sistine Chapel.

The mural is indeed the largest, and in addition, perhaps the ugliest, ever made. It is a mass of black metal with grotesque masses of people, entitled “La marcha de la humanidad en la tierra y hacia el cosmos.” It is a kind of narrative of the birth of humanity and its cultural progression from myth and ritual to some kind of social utopia after overcoming tyranny and oppression.

Like the Hotel de México, the mural also seemed somehow unfinished, in particular a huge black metal fence surrounding the Polyforum that also seemed permanently under construction.

Especially interesting to me was the Polyforum’s exhibition space, which had one small gift shop with a single, sleepy attendant at the counter. I went to that gift shop a million times. I must have been the only customer who ever went in.

I purchased a number of books about Mexican art, including Diego Rivera’s diaries, Siqueiros’ own artistic manifesto “No hay más ruta que la nuestra” (“There is No Other Road Than Ours”) and his book on how to paint a mural (which was of course what I wanted to do). I read feverishly, devouring books about the history of Mexico City, which I was in love with.

I would return to the house with my books. The sky was gray some days, typical in the summer in Mexico, before it rains. I loved that gray bright light, walking down those white gray streets. It’s not what one would expect from sunny Mexico, but Mexico City is in some respects a composition of grays. You might think it sounds grim, but it was like being in some fancy European town to me. With my books under my hand, I felt transported, connected to history. I was walking toward a future where I would be the next Siqueiros.

The “next Siqueiros,” mind you, was the son of a bathroom salesman.

The entrance to our house was a storefront that my dad had made by retrofitting the garage. It was called Helguera y Compañía. My grandfather had created a small bathroom and kitchen supply business in Mexico City that prospered, and he had mentored my dad, his eldest son, to lead it. By the time my father took over and my grandfather passed away, the debts, union fights and other financial challenges lead to the business’ downfall. So when I was four years old, we moved to this smaller house in colonia Nápoles, where my father restarted as a new small business.

A row of toilets, sinks and medicine cabinets were lined up at the store’s entrance so that clients could browse the merchandise for sale. Colorful, patterned tile samplers lined a back shelf, showing the products by various fabricators that were available. The space was a bit disorienting, as if, when walking into someone’s house, what you expect to be the entryway or foyer is actually the bathroom.

There is something odd about bathroom showrooms; it feels a bit embarrassing to be in this public space that’s typically a place of privacy, as if you were expected to go to the bathroom in the plain view of strangers. Bathrooms are a place where were we are meant to feel at ease, protected at our most vulnerable whether in the process of cleaning ourselves or easing our bodily needs. And yet, in the store, this room was the most public.

Strange juxtapositions would take place in the confrontation between the public and the private. My dad sold bidets — in fact we had bidets installed in all the bathrooms of the house. Prospective clients would sometimes not know what those objects were, and my father had an elegant way of describing them: “they are designed to aid in the process of making the seat bath more comfortable.”

I could have never imagined that one day I would discover a relationship between that toilet showroom and the Polyforum. That those olive green bidets and Interceramic tiles would one day be connected to that multi-angular concrete building with massive swollen muscular figures and violent perspectives endeavoring to transform the social order of the universe.

My small social order, the social order of a Mexican kid growing up in a middle-class neighborhood with American street names, in a house with a toilet showroom across from a stationery store and a carpenter, would nonetheless become part of my mindset as an artist.

Because you know what? There is a connection between those strangely named streets and art history, between toilets and museums. The language of art, when it becomes internationalized and exported around the globe, names everything in its periphery. Everything gets subsumed in dominant terminology. Arizona Street, where I grew up, is to the state of Arizona as Land Art and process-based art were to my youthful strolls and initial learnings as an artist. Marcel Duchamp and his Urinal were already there, in my dad’s garage in Colonia Nápoles, and I did not know it. Later, when I worked in art museums, I thought of those showrooms. I thought about display.

And I thought about those bidets.