MuAC

Maria Konta

The present review* does not mean to deliver an in-depth assessment of MuAC’s strengths, or weaknesses. It is, perhaps, too early to embark upon such an enterprise. At best, I will attempt to bring together some speculative remarks about the building and the current exhibition, and the challenges both have to deal with, concluding, albeit in passing measure, with a reflection on the potential MuAC possesses as a University Museum of Contemporary Art. In other words, I will simply try to show what is obscurely at stake in the museum’s proper name.

Regards the building, I will not endorse here the facile criticisms about ‘creative deadlock’ and ‘suspect originality’. We have all witnessed how post-war art has been irremediably eclipsed by more dramatic, yet insufferably narcissistic containers than MuAC, celebrated architectural feats of aggressive spectacularness and touristic astonishment . MuAC escapes such subjectivism. Because it is a University museum, it would be more constructive to ask to what extent it self-consciously made itself out of some particular way of taking responsibility for the disparity between city and university, and realised its design as the centre of a series of vectors, as for instance Peter Eisenman’s Wexner Center for the Arts, at Ohio State University, did (and failed). Which also begs the question whether MuAC’s design will effectively meet its clients’ needs, in this case, UNAM graduate students and faculty alike, followed by the general public. It is enough for me in this review that one have some sense of ‘MuAC the building’ as an educational architecture, whose clients are primarily users and residents rather than audience.

Construing itself as a contemporary art museum means that ‘MuAC the collection’ will continuously have to come to terms with what I see as a double-bind predicament: as contemporary art’s breaking-out has only verified the museum’s long-suspected unsuitability as a means of art’s dissemination, in a further turn of the screw it happily displaced art’s possibility to the form of exhibiting and to the material understandings of the exhibition’s operations . It appears that MuAC takes on board this predicament’s counterintuitiveness at least in three ways: first, by encouraging ‘dialectical’ practices like Ulf Rollof’s Proyecto Axolotl; second, by spreading its collection only in one level, thus thematising the works’ horizontality and aspiring to more difficult, synchronic readings; third, by inviting its museum-goers to open up the narrowness of traditional planning, and to effect their own dérives in the hope of stumbling upon unforeseen encounters. I theoretically sympathize with this unprepared, permutational ‘museum experience’. Practically I find that certain itinerary choices are well anticipated.

A serious question that any contemporary art museum needs to address is whether and how the exhibition, its be exhibited, is that which now works in contemporary artworks and gathers an art-world. MuAC’s one stab at this challenge is ‘to place the local artistic production in a global context’ , as it did with the exhibition Recursos Incontrolables y Otros Desplazamientos. Under the general rubric “Nature”, Marta Palau’s Cascada, 1978 (decoratively placed against an offensively green wall, unwisely echoing the building’s color tones) comes together with a rather inflexible Robert Morris felt piece, 1980. Although there is no historical reason to picture here a version of postminimalism, or ‘sculpture’s expanded field’, or to take Palau as an exaggerated, robust Eva Hesse, it is, I think, under the present hanging, unavoidable to do so. Instead, I would prefer if this room underscored a system of excess and discontinuities more clearly and compellingly.

MuAC is the meeting ground for an ever-expanding series of intersections: city/university, commercial gallery/university, users/audience, etc. Yet I believe that for us MuAC is foremost the name for the moment Mexican contemporary art demands an entry (and loses itself) into the University. This is a difficult call; as I see it, its acknowledgment depends on how neatly ‘MuAC the research center’ will join the seams of history and criticism.

Maria Konta. Posdoctorante del Programa de Becas Posdoctorales de la UNAM con estancia en el IIE. Doctora en Historia y Teoría del Arte de la Universidad de Essex. Es profesora invitada en el posgrado de Historia del Arte en la FFyL, UNAM y profesora de asignatura en el Departamento de Estudios Generales del ITAM. Fue docente en la Universidad de Essex, en el Birkbeck College, University of London y en el Open University, Inglaterra. Sus textos han aparecido en Art History, en diversas revistas de arte contemporáneo y en publicaciones correspondientes a múltiples conferencias.

Se agradece al Programa de Becas Posdoctorales de la UNAM.

*This review was commissioned and written in April 2009.