Collectivism after Modernism - autonomous learning - Blogs

The Mexican Pentagon 171
Bellas Artes in 1973, the group accepted the invitation despite their opposition
to government-run spaces. The members of the group decided to use the
invitation as an opportunity to expose Bellas Artes as an institutional space
completely out of touch with its surroundings. 11 Their project, “A nivel informativo,”
effectively opened up the Palace of Fine Arts to the street: while
they did use some of the museum’s galleries (they Wlled them with installations
urging spectators to become active participants in both art and life,
including an installation about passive viewers featuring a room Wlled with
bound and gagged mannequins watching television), the bulk of the “exhibition”
consisted of street actions designed to interact with passers-by.
Two of the actions staged on the street were designed to confront
passers-by with the violence of city life. The Wrst of these, titled El hombre
atropellado (A Man Has Been Run Over, Figure 6.1), pointed to one of the
gravest problems faced by Mexico City in the 1960s and 1970s: the modernizing
boom that, coupled with an unprecedented population explosion,
transformed a city of Xaneurs into a megalopolis of freeways and overpasses.
For this action, the members of the group went out on a street near Bellas
Artes, laid out sheets of plastic on the sidewalk, drew the contours of human
Wgures in red paint, and left them in the middle of the road to be run over
by passing cars, which then left bright-red tire marks on the pavement—an
unorthodox form of “action painting” that read like the bloody aftermath of
a terrible trafWc accident. As passers-by gathered around to watch the simulated
bloodbath, members of the group asked each spectator to describe his
or her reaction in one word and wrote down the responses on pieces of cardboard
that they then arranged on the sidewalk. The result was an exquisite
corpse that read as an ode to the real corpses left behind by trafWc accidents.
For a second street action, titled El secuestro (Kidnapping, Figure
6.3), Proceso Pentágono staged a kidnapping on the streets adjacent to Bellas
Artes. One of the group’s members pretended to be a passer-by, mingling
with the crowd. Suddenly, three men (the other members of Proceso Pentágono)
ran toward him, threw a sack over his head, tied him up, and carried
him away in front of an astonished crowd.
These actions effectively moved the core of the exhibition from
the museum to the street. Visitors who were counting on spending a few
peaceful hours looking at art in a marble-clad museum were instead asked to
go on the street, confront the violence of city life, and engage in dialogue
with unknown bystanders. The title of the project—“A nivel informativo”—
was signiWcant: it stressed that Proceso Pentágono was less interested in making
art than in conveying information, and that the privileged site for a productive
exchange of facts was not the rareWed space of the museum, but the
chaotic streets and sidewalks of downtown Mexico City.