On Saturday I caught up with Jacqueline (the Chilean Engineer I met at Teotihuacan) and we took the open topped double decker tourist bus right around this, the biggest city in the world. It is surprisingly beautiful with huge tree lined boulevards, gorgeous colonial buildings, and lots of amazing statues, open spaces, and well, its kind of like a massively expanded Paris. Who knew?. All you hear about Mexico City is the crime, poverty and pollution and OK OK, they exist and are big things but there´s also an amazing vibrant city that millions of people are proud to enjoy and live in. Over the next couple of weeks I´ll upload descriptions of some of the different museums and art galleries. Here´s my attempt at the first one.
The Museum of Modern Art was extremely funky and about the same size as the one in Sydney, which is to say, not very big. About half of it is filled with the work of one particular artist called Miquel Barcelo who was really into texture. By sticking the canvas on the roof and using a thick drippy paint he achieved a stalagtite kind of formation. He also used a lot of wire and newspaper when he really wanted to create some depth. One particularly awesome piece in blue and white had the stalagtites at a slight angle to the canvas and captured very well what a wild choppy ocean is like. The rest of the museum was full of video installations and some rather ordinary concept art – things like 4 rectangles of aluminium stacked in a certain way. One of the videos was very interesting though. It was a silent movie about life in Shanghai, China and showed, in short clips, the life of a rather bewildered looking guy going about his day of being a bit bohemian in the ancient but brand new city. Hard to describe but way cool.
To see the work of Miquel Barcelo you can follow this link:
www.museotamayo.org/barcelo/index.htm
|  | 
|
