One of the most anticipated events of an overstuffed Mexico City Art Week earlier this month promised to be a surreal collision of architecture, performance art, power, privilege — and horses. Marina Abramovic, the grandmother of performance art, would be presenting her latest works (though she would dispute recognizing them as such) at a house and horse stable designed by Luis Barragán, Mexico’s famed midcentury architect.
As a well-heeled crowd milled in the corral at Cuadra San Cristóbal, the Barragán property just outside Mexico City, event staff passed out pink baseball caps printed with the words “La Cuadra.” That is the new name of the property, which will become a cultural center.
Without fanfare, three brown horses emerged from the stables, their riders dressed in all black and carrying white flags emblazoned with the phrase “Art Is Oxygen.” Behind them was Abramovic, dressed in black Comme des Garçons and accompanied by the Guggenheim Museum’s curator at large of Latin American art, Pablo León de la Barra, who shaded Abramovic with a large red tasseled umbrella. Abramovic sat down in a chair on a small platform in front of the iconic Barragán pink wall.
The horses began to trot around Abramovic and León de la Barra. With camera crews, a drone and cellphones documenting her, she read her manifesto. Some highlights: “An artist should have enemies. Enemies are very important”; “An artist should die consciously, without fear”; “Don’t forget we have art, and art is oxygen.”
She concluded, “We have lunch!”
Once the crowd was seated, at a long row of tables set with silver reflecting orbs, a woman in red approached. She was Abramovic’s final performative intervention, an opera singer who sang the lunch menu. “Taco, taco, taco, taaaacoooo,” she sang as a camera drone buzzed by. “Aye, que rico.”
The two days of programming — there was also a one-day performance workshop — were meant to celebrate the announcement of the new La Cuadra cultural center, spearheaded by Fernando Romero, a businessman and architect.
But rather than offer a collaboration intermingling the vision of two great artists, one Serbian and other Mexican, and facilitated by this new cultural center and its sponsor, the two days served up a disorienting series of happenings that read more as a parody of the relationship between artist and patron. For all the secrecy and buildup to the big day, the most remarkable aspect was that Abramovic and Romero — representing Barragán’s legacy — proved to be disinterested in each other beyond the most superficial clichés.
Abramovic’s fame — and to some, notoriety — stems from her work pioneering performance art as a genre. Her early works tested the limits of her body, emotional endurance and relationship with the viewer. Her 2009 Museum of Modern Art retrospective and performance piece, “The Artist Is Present,” in which she sat in silence for eight hours a day (over three months) and invited museum visitors to sit and gaze into her eyes, cemented her pop cultural standing.
She is 78 now, and just weeks before the Mexico City performance, she had undergone a second knee replacement. Romero, the former son-in-law of the Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim, invited her to perform new works to celebrate the public announcement of his vision for La Cuadra.
The building was formerly known as the Egerstrom house, or as Cuadra San Cristóbal. It is an example of Barragán’s signature “barroco agazapado” style, which applied international modernist principles to vernacular forms of Mexican architecture while making liberal play of contrasting volumes of space and light.
Barragán, who died in 1988 at 86, layered his work with his Catholic faith. Window shades form crosses. Stairs seem to float to heaven. Gold leaf canvases are placed to catch and reflect light in ways that signal the divine. His use of a bright bougainvillea pink, now named for him, as well as primary yellow and blue accents are borrowed from his friend (and artist) Jesús (Chucho) Reyes. One of Barragán’s innovations was to redeploy these Mexican folkloric colors as high modernism.
His unique blend of modernism, spirituality and human scale has inspired fervent devotion and in recent years attracted high profile interventions by international artists. One extreme example: The artist Jill Magid, for her 2016 conceptual work “The Proposal,” exhumed the architect’s ashes and sent a portion to be transformed into a life-gem diamond, which she offered to the owner of his professional archives as an exchange: “the body for the body of work.”
Romero, who cited a similar devotion to Barragán since his architecture school days, has grand plans for the La Cuadra property. They include converting the house into a museum with exhibitions of Romero’s design collection; assembling an art collection; starting an artist residency program; building a collection of pavilions designed by other architects, a library design prize; and more. The center is scheduled to open in October of this year, and the house will be open to the public for the first time.
Romero is best known for his work on the Soumaya Museum (which houses Slim’s art collection), the unbuilt Bitcoin City in El Salvador and a Norman Foster-led redesign of the Mexico City airport (now scrapped).
For the Abramovic Method workshop on the first day at La Cuadra, participants (of which I was one) were greeted with a large photo banner emblazoned with an image of the artist, mounted on a white horse and holding a white flag. It was an image from her piece “The Hero,” an autobiographical video and performance about her war hero father, Photoshopped against the property’s pink wall. The banner stood tilting next to a black Mercedes G-Class.
We were asked to put our bags and jackets into boxes marked with our names. Donning matching white lab coats, we were given noise-blocking headphones, and asked to assume “an attitude of monastic reverence.” The exaggerated blue door yawned open, and we descended into the corral, a camera crew and drone recording our procession.
Then Abramovic appeared. She was dressed in all black and her outstretched arms were punctuated by a red manicure. She cut a stark contrast against Barragán’s brilliant pinks and ochers as well as the pale aqua of the pool designed for horses to cool themselves in the high-altitude sun.
She directed us to sit, surrender our cellphones and watches into a collection basket, and to approach in absolute silence the delicately chopped raw vegetables bobbing in shallow bowls of tepid beet-tinted water before us. “Eat, eat while it’s hot!” she said.
Under her direction, we practiced silent sitting, slow walking and eye gazing. Before the last exercise of the workshop, Abramovic addressed us: “You must finish counting all the rice and lentils you take. Because if you cannot do the rice and the lentils, you cannot do life!” She then rose, said her goodbyes and disappeared through the hedges, leaving us to complete our task in silence. The La Cuadra team captain clapped. “The Abramovic Experience has concluded,” she said. “Please leave your lab coats and make your way to the exit.”
Abramovic did not consider her interventions in Mexico to be artworks — not the workshop, her talk or the manifesto she read while horses paraded around the corral (She did consider another project in Mexico an artwork: a commercial collection of wood and copper-tipped chairs entitled “Elephant in the Room,” created with the Mexican design firm La Metropolitana.)
“You know, it’s something that I really hate,” Abramovic said a few days later during an interview. “Everybody thinks everything I do is a performance. A manifesto is a manifesto. A lecture is a lecture.”
Yet her status as not just as a performance artist, but as the performance artist leads many viewers to consider all of her appearances as artworks. And given her Goop-like business ventures — Longevity Method wellness and skin care products, among others — it’s hard to know where the line is between her spiritualism as artistic inquiry and enlightenment for sale.
This line was more muddied by the clunky collaboration with La Cuadra. Much of what on was on display felt like a best-of album. The manifesto was written in 1997, and has been recited publicly many times, according to her team. The workshop was an abbreviated version of the weeklong version she offers at her Abramovic Institute in Greece, which costs 2,500 euros per person. (This was a free mini version mainly for select Mexican artists.) And hiring an opera singer to sing a menu was related to her operatic piece “7 Deaths of Maria Callas,” but here was just “an experience” for fun, her studio manager said, not a piece she considers an artwork.
Her work at La Cuadra did not in any meaningful way engage with the history of the house, Barragán’s legacy or Mexico. And Romero and his curatorial team didn’t really engage with Abramovic beyond cursory platitudes.
Ultimately, the collaboration felt more like an example of so-called adjacent attraction — a marketing concept in which a celebrity’s embodied values are projected onto a product by association. With the timeless beauty of Barragán’s work reduced to backdrop, the whole endeavor read as transactional. Not a great start for La Cuadra’s future as a museum.
If there was spirituality here, it was more of a branded swag bag than an exploration of the human soul.
