Las paradojas del internacionalismo (narradas por la colección del Museo Tamayo) Parte I
The Paradoxes of Internationalism is a two-part show that uses the museum’s collection as its frame, with the addition of key loans of artworks by artists who have exhibited at the Museo Tamayo. Part I is presented in the galleries and patio from May 27 to October 29; Part II will take place in April 2024. This conversation between Andrea Valencia and Kate Fowle took place prior to the opening of part one.
Andrea Valencia: My first question has to do with the 1990s as a historical axis for the show. Why do you think that this moment is important?
Kate Fowle: We can look at the 1990s from a number of different perspectives to understand why it is important as an axis for this show. Generally, as I outlined in my introduction, it is the moment when there is a big shift in global politics, following the fall of the Soviet Union and the Berlin Wall. It is also when the geography of the art “world” became more international.
One way to gauge this is to look at the proliferation of biennials in that decade. According to a relatively recent study, 32 biennials were instigated during the 1990s, in comparison to the 27 that were created in the hundred-odd years between 1895 (when the Venice Biennale began) and 1989. Whereas the latter were predominantly in the West (with the Havana Biennial as one of the few exceptions), in the 1990s we saw a far more global spread. For example, Dak’art was launched in Senegal in 1992; the Asia-Pacific Triennial was instigated in Queensland in 1993; Bamako Encounters in Mali (1994); the Gwangju and Johannesburg biennials were both initiated in 1995; and Shanghai, Mercosul, and Manifesta biennials all began in 1996. This meant more opportunities for a much broader constituency of artists and curators to meet, which in turn created new networks of collaboration. This all coincided with the internationalization of the Mexican art scene, which also started in the mid-1990s, in part as a consequence of NAFTA—signed in 1992 during Carlos Salinas de Gortari’s administration—which made travel and trade easier, and in part because a new generation of artists born after 1960 congregated in the capital.
And lastly, focusing on the 1990s is important because the turn of that decade was the end of the Tamayo’s life. Rufino dies in 1991 and then Olga passes in 1993. This greatly impacts the Museo Tamayo and how the collection subsequently grows. For example, the acquisition process became increasingly reliant on the In-Kind Payment Program of taxes by artworks: a system unique to Mexico that was first created in 1957 and has played an increasingly significant role at Tamayo once the Program allowed artists to decide to which institution they wanted to donate their works to. With artists from all over the world now living in Mexico, the concept of international begins at home.
AV: It’s been interesting to observe that when you started this project you began by researching the collection, which eventually led you to into the history of the Institution and then to the history of Rufino Tamayo himself. Could you tell me something about what has interested you in those histories in relation to this show?
KF: Well, I think it has to do with the way that Magalí Arriola, the director of Tamayo, invited me to make a show that used the collection to explore internationalism at the Museum, following the 40th-anniversary celebrations of the Institution. It is a project that opens the next chapter of research into the histories of the Tamayo by focusing on its position as the first international museum of contemporary art in the country. This status was something that Tamayo was very vocal about throughout the years of its development. So, to me, it seemed logical to start my research with the collection that he and Olga built, so that I could better understand how his acquisition choices reinforced his international narrative. It is interesting because you can really see how Rufino’s own opportunities as an artist—along with the influence of the war-ravaged decades during which his career developed—had a strong impact on his vision for the Museum.
Tamayo first went to New York in 1926 and lived there intermittently until 1948, both benefiting from and essentialized by the “enormous vogue for things Mexican” as the craze was described by the New York Times in 1933. The artist thrived in the cosmopolitan city, benefiting from the interwar European immigration and frequenting many artworld circles and artists, including with Marcel Duchamp, Wifredo Lam, and Helen Frankenthaler - who he taught - and who are now in the collection. Then, having long-held France in high esteem as “the wonderful disciple and teacher of the contemporary world,” Tamayo moved to Paris from 1957-1964.
With diplomatic status from the mid-1960s, Tamayo traveled widely. Then, from 1979 the artist regularly showed his work with Marlborough Gallery in London and New York, increasing in critical attention internationally. It was through the proceeds from his artwork sales and his friendship with Pierre Levai at Marlborough, as well as the guidance of curators Fernando Gamboa and Carla Stellweg, that Tamayo amassed the Museum collection. So you can actually track how the international aspect of the museum was ultimately borne out of his own opportunities and personal taste.
I think you can go as far as to say that the core collection creates an eclectic portrait of internationalism in accordance with Tamayo’s personal experience of living through two world wars and their global impacts, which is really fascinating. There’s a moment—when Tamayo is in his seventies—when he starts to articulate what it has all meant to him, which I found very useful as a frame for the first part of the show.
He says: “I think in terms of universality. [Art] grows out of the earth, the texture of our lives and our experiences. […] Immediately after World War II and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I started thinking about the implications of a new space age. […] Now I think of man confronting not his world but infinity. I’m praying that a new humanism may emerge, in which man, harnessing the technology he has invented, lives more fully as a man. I’m haunted by the fear that technology will reduce men and women to robots and calculating machines, if it even lets them live at all.” His words, born out of his firsthand experiences, bring such a personal touch that helps us to get into a headspace where we are able to look at works by artists in the 1940-60s who were “worlding” so differently from the way we do today. Now we have both harnessed and drowned in the technology that filled Tamayo with apprehension.
In particular, Tamayo's interest in humanism and universalism—common desires connected to the distinctly Western and colonial versions of the “international” within his generation—are very different to the way that younger generations of people might think about what it is to be international today.
AV: My next question is about internationalism itself. Could you give us a very brief history of the term? How is it connected to the title of the exhibition The Paradoxes of Internationalism?
The word ‘international’ was created in 1780 by a British philosopher, jurist, and social reformer, Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832). At first, it was used in relation to establishing law between countries, as I briefly outlined in my introduction to this project. To me, it is interesting how the word’s origins are totally tied into colonial and imperialist rule, which explains the centering of Western prerogatives as the term gradually absorbs the cultural concepts of universalism and humanism. After the Second World War, the term came to imply “one world” between nations as exemplified by the formation of the United Nations and other intergovernmental organizations.
In art at that time, the whole flattening of difference and the appropriation of cultures through the so-called common concerns of the atrocities of war and spiritual crises, is what fuels the first notions of an international artworld. This is of course fraught with problems, hence the use of the word “paradox” in the title. There are so many paradoxes in Tamayo’s life, in his intentions for the Museum, and in his logic for acquisition, just as there are paradoxes in the art movements—Expressionism, Surrealism, and Modernism in general—that he is accepted and rejected by. Not to mention the paradoxes embedded in the social, cultural, and political constructs that give definition to each era.
The revived use of the term “international” in the 1990s art world was a catchall that elided nuances of cultural translation: the idea of a “new” international embraced the historical meanings while acknowledging globalization’s zealous focus on “progress” through embracing the developments of previously marginalized nations to create an ever-expanding world stage for Western ideals. This was also the moment when the use of the word international began increasingly to replace the word “foreign,” to indicate something, or someone, unfamiliar, or “other.” Alternatively, when used as an affirmation—as in “international curator” for example—the term suggested an astute understanding of the self in relation to a broad and open worldview: one which in its implied reach is impossible to achieve. In other words, the term international came to be used as shorthand for how individuals experience, share, and understand (or not) multiple context-specific situations, regardless as to whether the complexities of such ways of experiencing the world were even partially comprehended.
AV: In our conversations, as we prepared the project, it has come up that there is an impossibility of telling this story. What is this about?
KF: I think one of the key works to address this in the show is the film dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y by Johann Grimonprez. It is absolutely central to acknowledging this impossibility by looking at history through the story of hijacking, from the first transatlantic hijack in 1969, to Russia in 1993 after the collapse of the Soviet Union, interspersing fact and fiction using archival news footage, diplomatic training films, airline promotional films, and home video.
Grimponprez has said: “dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y is like supermarket history: there is so much available, and history cannot be understood as singular. If you punch the word "hijacking" on the internet, or look for footage, you get so much information that you don't know where to start. You are already lost in push-button history, so you have to zoom in on specific aspects. In focusing on hijacking, I chose one detail which revealed history in another way. Looking at details is much more concrete because history, after all, is the conflation of the personal with the global.” Using the parameters of the Tamayo collection and exhibition program to explore internationalism is not dissimilar – it creates the parameters within which to build a story around a vast and contradictory topic.
AV: Can you talk a little about the sections of the exhibition? It is interesting how you divided the works into five sections: a prologue around the last touring show of Rufino Tamayo; one section about the core collection he formed for the museum; a section about war and the 1990s; one about the city; and one about the instability of internationalism.
KF: The sections enable us to create frames around various extracts of the story of internationalism that make sense of the selection of works from the collection. As you say, the first section is a prologue, wherein the paradoxes of internationalism literally coincide with the end of Tamayo’s life and his last traveling show, which takes place in Sapin, Russia and Germany just as communism is collapsing. The second room gives examples of works that demonstrate the modernist international perspectives Tamayo sought in building the collection.
The third revolves around war, which is the ultimate tool to assert boundaries in defining the very institution of the nation-state, which in turn is what creates the possibility of the “inter” national. However, the justifications and duplicities in so-called world wars, cold wars, culture wars, wars on drugs, wars on terror, military coups, revolutions, genocides, colonial and corporate land-grabs are in a perpetual false dichotomy with the potential of world peace. Amidst the propaganda, artists give us more nuanced perspectives on headline news, destabilizing political, scientific, and journalistic accounts that are used to establish “official” histories. The Tamayo collection is full of works that enable us to look at the nuances of war from a cultural perspective.
Then there is a section on geographies and the importance this plays, as portrayed through numerous works in the collection – especially artists making work in the 1990s on. Whether parsed through the aspirations of cosmopolitanism or the wandering flaneur “botanizing the asphalt” as philosopher Walter Benjamin put it, artists—as much as cartographers and architects—shape our perception of the built environment and record its evolutions, as well as the footprint we leave behind. Some, like Berenice Abbot—whom Tamayo met while living in America—are compelled to document New York’s futuristic transformation on the eve of the 1939 World’s Fair, while others are drawn to express the topography of shock, exhilaration, and alienation, or to evoke liminal spaces, or to make material use of urban excess. Then finally the last section—which is also the prologue to the next chapter—offers cosmologies that are a conflation of fact and fiction, which is ultimately the fuel that charges artists and helps us imagine our lived experience beyond our immediate surroundings.
In this section, we start with the fact that in 1943, the volcano named Paricutín emerged from the ground in a cornfield in Michoacán and continued to erupt for nine years, captivating the world and igniting the imaginations of scientists, writers, filmmakers, and artists alike. From within the earth and beyond the stars, new cosmologies evolved where nightmares and fantasies conflate, where prayers and hauntings come from the same breath revealing an increasing tension between creative energy and destruction. It creates a kind of limbo, or haunting within which artworks can give us new perspectives on what the concept of international might be in the future.
AV: And finally, what can we expect to see in the future iterations of the exhibition?
KF: Next up is the juxtaposition of two major works from the collection by Danh Vo Untitled, Part 4 (2018) and Piere Huygue’s Día del ojo [Day of the Eye] (2012), which you will encounter in the courtyard area at the heart of the museum. It will be the first time the Danh Vo piece is presented in the Museum and the first time in ten years since it was commissioned, that the Pierre Hugyue site-specific installation is revealed.
Following that, next March in Gallery 6, we will be working with the collection to tell another, more contemporary version of internationalism, which are stories of migration, the environment, and disappearing indigeneities that unite us in concern today no matter where we are living.