eman-emani: 'INCIDENTS OF MIRROR TRAVEL IN YUCATAN AND ELSEWHERE' CURATED BY PABLO LEON DE LA BARRA AT MUSEO TAMAYO

Incidents of Mirror Travel in Yucatan and Elsewhere, exhibition view, Mayan room

exhibition view with Mariana Castillo Deball's double Chac Mool in the foreground

Fake mayan arch and Frederick Catherwoods 'Views of Ancient Monuments in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan', 1844

Frederick Catherwood
Vista general de Palenque / General view of Palenque
Litografía iluminada
Colección Banco de México
1844

Frederick Catherwood
Cabeza colosal, Izamal / Colosal head at Izamal
Litografía iluminada
Colección Banco de México
1844

photo and publication by Desire Charnay, photographs by Alice Dixon and Augustus Le Plongeon

Claude-Joseph Desiré Charnay
Las ciudades antiguas del Nuevo Mundo. Viajes de exploración en México y América Central /
Les Anciennes Villes du Nouveau Monde, Voyages d’explorations au Mexique et dans l’Amérique Centrale
Librairie Hachette et Cie., Boulevard Saint-Germain 79, París
Tinta sobre papel/Ink on paper
Colección Museo Soumaya
1885

Claude-Joseph Desiré Charnay
Fachada del Palacio de Las Monjas, Chichén Itzá /Facade of Palace of Las Monjas, Chichen Itza
Albúmina/Albumin
Colección Fundación Televisa
1862

Alice Dixon and Augustus Le Plongeon
Ruinas de Chichén Itzá y Uxmal,
Inyección de tinta sobre papel algodón/Impresión contemporánea elaborada por Javier Hinojosa
Colección Fundación Televisa
original ca. 1881

Images of Chichen Itza and Uxmal by esoteric archeologists Alice Dixon and Augustus Le Plongeon, who discovered and named the Chac Mool, and who also believed the Mayans were related to the Egyptians, founders of the Atlantis, inventors of the telegraph, and founders of the Masonic orders.

Leandro Katz
Proyecto Catherwood
Plata sobre gelatina
Colección Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, UNAM
1985-1995

Leandro Katz
Tulum - After Catherwood – El Castillo
Plata sobre gelatina
Colección Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, UNAM
1993

"My appreciation of the drawings of Frederick Catherwood and the paradoxical elements that appear when these drawings are observed next to the restored monuments became a main area of concern in my work. During the summer of l984, I had the opportunity to work in the Yucatan area, photographing the Maya sites drawn by Catherwood from the same vantage points that he used when making his camera lucida drawings. In this way, I started to compile the elements of a work-in-progress called The Catherwood Project, a visual reconstruction of Stephens and Catherwood's expeditions. I continued this project in the summers of l985 and l986, covering other sites in Yucatan and the Chiapas region in Mexico. During December and January of 1987/88 I completed the itineraries of the two expeditions, photographing the sites of Quiriguá in Guatemala, and Copán in Honduras. My intention when starting The Catherwood Project, which resulted in nearly 4,000 black-and-white photographs and l,800 color, was not only to reappropriate these images from the colonial period, but also to visually verify the results of archaeological restorations, the passage of time, and the changes in the environment. In this 'truth effect' process, issues having to do with colonialist/neocolonialist representation became more central, particularly during the last section of the project."
LK

Ruben Ortiz-Torres
The Past is Not What it Used to Be,
Selección de fotografías
Plata sobre gelatina
Cortesía del artista y Galería OMR, México
2003-2009

Rubén Ortiz Torres
Splash, Nasso, Bahamas
2005

Rubén Ortiz Torres
Paisaje Romántico con Estacionamiento Maya, Tijuana, Mexico
2003

"Former sites of ancient civilizations have become tourist destinations. Avid entrepreneurs have recreated some of these sites in different locations around the world far from their original settings. During the 19th century traveler photographers documented the original sites in the Yucatan or the Holly Land to show a European and North American public the exotic marvels of these distant lands. I document the perhaps more exotic reproductions of these marvels that with globalization are popping up all over the world losing their link to a specific culture or nation. I use similar processes like the ones used by the traveler photographers such as salt, platinum and cyanotypes. However to be able to do that I have to make digital negatives using a hybrid process that creates a fake representation of the past like the architecture it portrays. The objective is not just to document a simulacrum but also to reflect on how analog photography has become an archeological relic while digital imagery an illusory reality. I do not use digital software to create the often-absurd montages encountered in the images but some architects and designers probably did."
ROT

Mariana Castillo Deball
'Correr hacia la estatua y encontrar sólo el grito,
querer tocar el grito y sólo hallar el eco,
querer asir el eco y encontrar sólo el muro
y correr hacia el muro y tocar un espejo'/
'Run to the statue and only find the scream,
Yearn to touch the scream and only find the echo,
Yearn to seize the echo and only find the wall
And run to the wall and touch a mirror'
Fibra de vidrio/Fiberglass
Cortesía de la artista
2011

The title of the double sculpture comes from the poem by Xavier Villaurrutia “Nocturno de la estatua”, written in 1928 and dedicated to Agustín Lazo.

Beatriz Santiago
Inventario/Inventory
HD video, 18'
Producido con Laboratorio 060, México
Cortesía de la artista
2006

"The town of Frontera Corozal was created in the 70s as a modernization and urbanization project in Mexico. 601 Chol families were relocated to identical plots of land by the Usumacinta River. Working from the idea of the impossibility of an inventory of the natural world, I asked the citizens of the town to physically draw in space the contours of an imagined natural landscape or of their own constructed space. I worked with the community council (18 comuneros) to make an inventory of all that exists within the town. The inventory was then narrated by a town council member through the makeshift speaker system that serves as the townʼs preferred method of public communication."
BS

fake mayan arch, gateway to the tomb of conceptual archeology

visible structure in the space between the fake walls that sustain the mayan arches

view of the exhibition

Alex Hubbard
Hotel Palenque St. Louis:
Documentación de Hotel Palenque de Robert Smithson, 1969–72
Bootleg Documentation of Robert Smithson’s Hotel Palenque, 1969–72
Cortesía del artista y Gaga, México
2003

Alex Hubbard's documentation of Hotel Palenque can be seen in ubuweb, the perspective makes it kind of seem as if it is shot or projected through a mayan arch!
http://www.ubu.com/film/smithson_hotel.html

Alias Editorial,
Robert Smithson: Hotel Palenque 1969-1972
Translation and publication of Robert Smithson's conference on Hotel Palenque at the University of Utah in 1972.
Commissioned for the exhibition 'Incidents of Mirror Travel..."
2011

"A meaning of the Spanish word alias, now in disuse, but the one we prefer, is “differently” (“de otro modo”). Alias publishes books differently, with a style and form all its own. We propose an alternative publishing mode: by copying the original or adapting to it, Alias detaches the text from its origins and places it in a new context. Alias is the twin book, the “alias book”. Alias Publishing Project’s purpose is to spread the work and ideas of authors who are particularly significant to contemporary art. Creations that, for reasons and circumstances we cannot enter into in this space, have not been translated, published or disseminated in the Spanish-speaking world. Or, if published, then are either out of print or were never distributed in Mexico."
Alias is a non-profit publishing project of artist Damian Ortega.
http://www.aliaseditorial.com

Jeremy Millar
Monument to Entropy (Hotel Palenque)
Framed receipt; safety deposit box key; photographic contact sheets
1999

"In 1999, my wife and I stayed in the Hotel Palenque in the Yucatan region of Mexico, a hotel perhaps now best known as the subject of a piece of work by the American artist Robert Smithson made during his stay in the hotel (with his wife and gallerist) some thirty years previously. Smithson took a number of photographs of the hotel, which he used in a lecture given to architecture students at the University of Utah in 1972. One morning, I replicated these photographs, alongside some new, stylistically-similar images, on a single roll of film. This film was then placed in one of the hotel’s safety deposit boxes; the film was not retrieved upon our departure and I retain the key, the box now transformed into a time-capsule, a document of the hotel as it was that summer morning."

Jeremy Millar
Monument to Entropy (Hotel Palenque Map)
Ink on photocopy, 297 x 210mm
courtesy of the artist
1999

This map, a photocopy of Robert Smithson's own drawing Map of the Hotel Palenque (1969), was used by Jeremy Millar while in the hotel to help determine the positions from which Smithson took his photographs; these were marked in ink upon the map, and his own series of photographs were subsequently taken from these numbered positions.

Sam Durant, Yann Sérandour

Sam Durant
Enmarañado, caótico, discontinuo, sin sentido, invertido, racional, uniforme, estructurado, ordenado (árbol boca abajo)/
Tangled, Chaotic, Discontinuous, Senseless, Inverted, Rational, Uniformed, Structured, Ordered, Reversed (Upside Down Tree)
Fibra de vidrio, madera y espejo / Fiberglass, wood and mirror
Colección/Fundación Jumex, México
2001

Yann Sérandour
Yucatán, desplazamiento de espejos (1-9)/Yucatan Mirror Displacements
Serie de nueve recortes montados sobre espejo,
vidrio y clips de metal/Set of nine cut-outs mounted on mirror, glass and metal clips
Cortesía del artista y gb agency, París
2008

Jonathan Monk
No-sitio de inversión de color con baño privado/Colour Reversal Nonsite with Ensuite Bathroom
Acero inoxidable/Stainless steel
Colección Museo Tamayo, INBA-CONACULTA
Donación del artista y de Casey Kaplan Gallery, Nueva York
2009

Jonathan Monk's 'Hotel Palenque' sign, Tropical Anonymous Carl Andre on floor

Tropical Carl Andre on floor, Cyprien Gaillard proyected on wall

Alias Editorial
Robert Smithson in Campeche
published originally in Robert Smithson, 'El Paisaje Entrópico. Una Retrospectiva 1960-1973', IVAM Valencia, España, 1993. Republished in Robert Smithson, Selección de escritos, Editorial Alias
and
Helen Escobedo and Paolo Gori
‘Todo lo puede la fuerza de un pueblo’, Campeche, México, Paolo Gori, 1969
published originally in Helen Escobedo and Paolo Gori, 'Mexican Monuments: Strange
Encounters', Abbeville Press. New York, 1989.

Cyprien Gaillard
Ciudades de oro y espejos/Cities of Gold and Mirrors
Proyección en 16 mm, 8' 52"/16 mm projection
Cortesía del artista, Sprüth Magers Berlín/Londres
y Laura Bartlett, Londres
2009

Untitled (Carl Andre Tropical)
Piso de concreto y pasta / concrete and paste floor
each tile meassures 20 x 20 cm
overall dimensions variable
Produced by Job García for the exhibition.
Job García: job_garciam@yahoo.com.mx, T: 5558323538

"Actually I feel that these tiles are much more interesting than most of the paintings being done in New York City right now, showing far more imagination."
Robert Smithson, 'Hotel Palenque', 1972

Lake y Verea (Francisca Rivero Lake and Carla Verea)
Cosas en sí Mismas/Things in Themselves
cajas de cerillos Maya / pack of Maya brand matches
2011

"The match boxes in Mexico are odd, they are 'things in themselves'. While one enjoys a cigarette, he can look at his yellow box of 'Clasicos De Lujo-La Central.' The match company has thoughtfully put a reproduction of Venus De Milo on the front cover, and a changing array of 'fine arts on the back cover..."
Robert Smithson, 'Incidents of Mirror Travel in Yucatan', 1969

Cyprien Gaillard, Stefan Brüggemann, Jürgen Brüggemann

Stefan Brüggemann
Espejo invertido #2/ Reversed Mirror #2
Espejo, pegamento permanente/Mirror, permanent glue
Cortesía del artista, Galería de Arte Mexicano, México e Yvon Lambert, París
2008

Jürgen K. Brüggemann
Publications in Vitrine:
¿Evolución o revolución? Ensayos de Antropología, SEP, 1976
Forma y estructura de la arqueología moderna. Tesis doctoral, 1977
Aspectos fundamentales de la investigación arqueológica, INAH, 1982
Zempoala: El estudio de una cuidad prehispánica, INAH, 1991
Cortesía de Stefan Brüggemann

Archeologist of German origin Jürgen Kurt Brüggemann (1942-2004) dedicated 32 years of his life until his dead, to the excavations and restoration of the archeological site of Tajin in Veracruz.

Jürgen Brüggemann, diagram, from Time to Space

"This also brings to mind the concave mirrors of the Olmecs found at La Venta, Tabasco State, and researchd by Robert Heizer, the archeologist... 'The Jaguar in the mirror that smokes in the World of the Elements knows the work of Carl Andre,' said Tezcatlipoca and Itzpalotl at the same time in the same voice. 'He knows the Future travels backwards,' they continued."
Robert Smithson, 'Incidents of Mirror Travel in Yucatan', 1969

Lara Almarcegui
Explorando el suelo/Exploring the Ground
Proyecto realizado en la Sala Moncada, La Caixa, Barcelona. Acción documentada con 27 diapositivas/ Project done at “Sala Moncada”, La Caixa, Barcelona. Action documented with 27 slides.
Cortesía de la artista y Ellen de Bruijne Projects, Ámsterdam
2003

Mario García Torres
Hoja membretada del One Hotel (Objeto especulativo de utilería para una película)/One Hotel Stationery (Speculative Film Prop)
Impresión de linotipo sobre papel/Linotype print on paper
Colección del artista
2006

The “One Hotel Stationery (Speculative Film Prop)” is part of a group of works that together form a film treatment or the beginning of what could be a script related to Kabul, Alighiero Boetti’s One Hotel in that city and the impossibility to understand, represent and react to the current social and political situations in Afghanistan. The work takes as a starting point García Torres’ research on the whearabouts of the One Hotel owned by Alighiero Boetti during the 1970’s in Kabul, Afghanistan.

Mario García Torres (in colaboration with Mario López Landa)
No sé si esa sea la causa / Je ne sais si c’en est la cause
59 diapositivas de 35mm y disco de vinyl / 59 35mm slides and vinyl record
courtesy CIAC A.C.
work exhibited at Museo Experimental El Eco. See it here.
2009

Pierre Leguillon
No-Happening – A partir de Ad Reinhardt/Non-Happening – After Ad Reinhardt
Cartel de exhibición/Exhibition poster
Cortesía del artista y Motive Gallery, Ámsterdam
2011

Poster image: Ad Reinhardt in Mexico, December 1962, photographed by Anna Reinhardt, courtesy Ad Reinhardt Foundation, Nueva York.

Pierre Leguillon, Henry Moore, Tamayo/Moore/Goertiz

Henry Moore
Figura recostada, s/f
Reclining Figure
Bronce/Bronze
Colección Museo de Arte Moderno,
INBA-CONACULTA

"Mexican sculpture seems to me to be true and right. Its ‘stoniness’, by which I mean its truth to material, its tremendous power without loss of seriousness, its astonishing variety and fertility of form invention and its approach to a full three-dimensional conception of form, make it unsurpassed in my opinion by any other period of stone sculpture."
Henry Moore, in 'The Aztec World' by Elizabeth Hill Boone, Smithsonian Books, Washington, 1994, p.132.

Rufino Tamayo with Henry Moore and Mathias Goeritz in Xochicalco
Colección Archivo Olga Tamayo
ca. 1950

vitrines containing books with Piranesi engravings

Giovanni Battista Piranesi
Vista de un gran peñasco. Restos del sepulcro de la familia Matelli sobre la via Appia, cerca de cinco millas fuera de la Puerta de San Sebastián en el caserío de Santa Maria Nuova / Veduta di un gran Masso, Avanzo del Sepolcro della Famiglia de’ Matelli sulla Via Appia cinque miglia in circa fuori di Porta S. Sebastiano nel Casale di S. Maria Nuova
Las antigüedades de Albano y de Castel Gandolfo. Las Antigüedades Romanas. Tomo III, 1835 / Antichitá d’Albano e di Castel Gandolfo. Le antichitá romane. Tomo III
Tinta sobre papel
Acervo Histórico del Palacio de Minería, Facultad de Ingeniería – UNAM

Giovanni Battista Piranesi
Prisiones Imaginarias / Carceri d’invenzione
Primera parte de la Arquitectura y la Perspectiva, 1836 /Prima parte de Archittecture e Prospective
Tinta sobre papel
Acervo Histórico del Palacio de Minería, Facultad de Ingeniería - UNAM

"At one point they evidently decided to build some floors, and decided that that wasn't a very good idea so they demolished them, but left this spiky, irregular, cantilevered effect coming off the side of the wall. It sort of suggests Piranesi, I don't know whether you know of the prison series of Piranesi, but they are full of these floors that really go nowhere and stairways that just dissappear into clouds..."
Robert Smithson, 'Hotel Palenque', 1972

Mauricio Maillé, Gabriel Orozco y Mauricio Rocha
Apuntalamiento para nuestras ruinas modernas/Scaffolding for our Modern Ruins
documentación de instalación en el Museo de Arte Moderno, Bienal de espacios alternativos, Primer lugar/ documentation of the installation done in 1987 at the Museum of Modern Art, Mexico City at the Bienal of Alternative Spaces, obtaining the first prize
Courtesy the artists and kurimanzutto, Ciudad de México
1987

Cerith Wyn Evans' fireworks outside of the Museum, with the Tamayo Museum sign on the background

Cerith Wyn Evans
Aquí todo parece que aún está en construcción y ya es una ruina/Everything here seems under construction and is already a ruin
Escultura efímera construida con fuegos artificiales Ephemeral sculpture built with fireworks
Cortesía del artista, White Cube, Londres and Inhotim Collection, Minas Gerais, Brasil
2004

Cerith Wyn Evans sculpture installed in the exhibition room the following day

exhibition guard sitting in one of the Palenque chairs, next to Cerith Wyn Evans sign/sculpture

view from above of the Maya exhibition room

the reading room in the museum foyer, including green Palenque style chairs done by Plasticos Akele, Corona metal chairs, and beach chairs designed by Mario Garcia Torres with the Bay Tree Hotel logo; also some young banana trees.
Books in the reading chairs:
John L. Stephens, Viaje a Yucatán, 1841-1842, Fondo de Cultura Económico
Désiré Charnay, Le Yucatan est ailleurs, Musée du Quai Branly
Robert Smithson, Escritos, Editorial Alias
Robert Smithson, Hotel Palenque, Editorial Alias
Olivier Debroise, Fuga Mexicana, Gustavo Gili
Adriano Pedrosa, The Traveling Show, Colección/Fundación Jumex
Mariana Castillo Deball, Estas ruinas que ves, Sternberg Press
Mario García Torres, Je ne sais si c’en est la cause, El Eco
Yucatán Travel Guide, Lonely Planet
Revista Rufino with text by PLB on Jonathan Monk's Hotel Palenque sign

"There is a rather wistful palm tree there, well-placed, and it gives you the feeling that you are in the tropics, a sense thaty you have really made it, you have really got down there and are seeing palm trees for the first time."
Robert Smithson, 'Hotel Palenque', 1972

The Tamayo Museum, designed by architects Abraham Zabludovsky and Teodoro Gonzalez de Leon in 1981 in a shape reminiscent of a pyramid or zigurat, the museum is soon to be under construction with a new expansion under way...

first rock or Museo Tamayo's new expansion...

Exhibition dates: hopefully until november 27 if construction works permit it....

*****
Incidents of Mirror-Travel in Yucatan and Elsewhere
with Alias Editorial, Lara Almarcegui, Jürgen K. Brüggemann, Stefan Brüggemann, Mariana Castillo Deball, Frederick Catherwood, Claude-Joseph Desiré Charnay, Alice Dixon Le Plongeon y Augustus Le Plongeon, Sam Durant, Cyprien Gaillard, Mario García Torres, Alex Hubbard, Leandro Katz, Lake y Verea, Pierre Leguillon, Mauricio Maillé/Gabriel Orozco/Mauricio Rocha, Jeremy Millar, Jonathan Monk, Henry Moore, Rubén Ortiz Torres, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Beatriz Santiago, Yann Sérandour, Cerith Wyn Evans and the spirit of Robert Smithson.
a proyect by Pablo León de la Barra
Museo Rufino Tamayo
from July 7, 2011
http://www.museotamayo.org

“The existence of most of these ruins was entirely unknown to the residents of the capital; - but few had ever been visited by white inhabitants; - they were desolate, and overgrown with trees. For a brief space the stillness that reigned around them was broken, and they were again left to solitude and silence.”
John L. Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Yucatán, Vol I, Harper & Collins, New York, 1843, p. iii.

“If you visit the sites (a doubtful probability) you find nothing but memory-traces, for the mirror displacements were dismantled right after they were photographed. The mirrors are somewhere in New York. The reflected light has been erased. Remembrances are but numbers on a map, vacant memories constellating the intangible terrains in deleted vicinities. It is the dimension of absence that remains to be found. The expunged color that remains to be seen. The fictive voices of the totems have exhausted their arguments. Yucatan is elsewhere.”
Robert Smithson, 'Incidents of Mirror Travel in Yucatan', 1969

“This is also in front of the new part of the motel structure—it’s both a motel and a hotel I guess, it’s hard to tell the difference between a motel and a hotel when you come to a structure like this. They seem to intertwine with each other, and lose each other and cancel each other out, so that there is no possibility of knowing where you are.”
"This is really the old hotel and you can see that instead of just tearing it down at once they tear it down partially so that you are not deprived of the complete wreckage situation. That's very satisfying actually to me: it's not often that you see buildings being both ripped down and built up at the same time. They really don't know if they want this part of the hotel or not, so it seems very smart to actually just leave it there..."
Robert Smithson, 'Hotel Palenque', 1972

On October 1939, writer John L. Stephens and his very sincere friend, artist Frederick Catherwood left New York and traveled to Central America, Chiapas and the Yucatan. They made two trips, in 1839 and 1841, in which they explored the region and documented the vast majority of its known Maya ruins for the first time. Their publication, 'Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan' in 1841, and 'Incidents of Travel in Yucatan' in 1843, became immediate bestsellers and prompted a series of explorers, archaeologists and amateurs to follow their footsteps. The first part of the exhibition presents some of the work of these travelers without pretending to construct a linear history of everyone who ever traveled or registered the Mayan ruins; on the contrary, it traces and presents the changes of representation existing in this landscapes of ruins.

In 1969, American artist Robert Smithson traveled to the Yucatan. During this trip, Smithson wrote the text 'Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan' (its title referring to Stephens and Catherwood’s book), as part of the work he installed and photographed twelve mirrors in nine different locations in what he called 'Yucatan Mirror Displacements (1-9)'. Afterwards, Smithson visited Palenque, where he stayed at Hotel Palenque. The building —half under construction, half in ruins— interested Smithson more than the nearby Maya ruins of the same name. Smithson took a series of photographs of the hotel, and in 1972 gave a talk at the University of Utah where he presented the building’s “entropic” qualities.

The exhibition 'Incidents of Mirror-Travel in Yucatan and Elsewhere' is freely inspired in Stephens, Catherwood and Smithson’s travels; it exists in the space created by the reflections, resonances and ruptures produced between their work and that of the travelers, artists, photographers and archaeologists who followed their footsteps. The exhibition also includes a series of works, that although they don't refer directly to Catherwood, Stephens or Smithson, expand the exhibition's scope through artist's research into tourism, archaeology, anthropology or history, and with it further constructing and questioning the landscape of ancient and modern ruins and constructing a new archaeology of the present.

original exhibition drawings by PLB, April 2011

Unfortunately not in the exhibition:

Jean Frédéric Maximilien Waldeck, drawings of Palenque in Maya/Arab/Egyptian style, done before Catherwood, published 1864

Desire Charnay, positive print and negative of Uxmal, 1860

Desire Charnay, Mayan types, 1881

Alfred Percival Maudslay in Chichen Itza with hammock, 1889

Alfred Percival Maudslay in Palenque, 1880-1

Ad Reinhardt, 'How to Look at Modern Art in America', PM magazine, June 2, 1946.
(to be hung upside down, to be located near Piere Leguillon's posters and in front of Sam Durant's upside town tree)

Marcel Duchamp, 'Fresh Widow', 1920

"This is sort of the door. At first you notice right at the back that it's green, right? There's not really much you can say about it, I mean it's just a green door. We've all seen green doors at one time in our lives. It gives out a sense of universality that way, a sense of kind of global cohesion. The door probably opens to nowhere and closes on nowhere so that we leave the Hotel Palenque with this closed door and return to the University of Utah."
Robert Smithson, 'Hotel Palenque', 1972

Carlos Fuentes, 'Chac Mool', short story, 1973
read english translation here
you can see some great youtube videos of USA spanish students acting it here!