Casa Museo
Luis Barragán
Gilbert &
George photographed in Casa Barragán, photo credit Xavier
Hinojosa
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el aire
es azul - the air is blue
curated by Hans Urlich Obrist
02 November 2002 03 March 2003
Casa Museo Luis Barragán
Gral. Francisco Ramírez 12
Col. Amp Daniel Garza
Mexico City, Mexico
Tel: +52 (55) 52 72 49 45
Email: expobarragan@lcm.com.mx
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el aire es azul - the air is blue
When I visited Mexico City for the first time, Pedro Reyes told me a lot
about the Casa Barragán, which inspired a first visit in the house of
the
same name. After a while, the idea of an imaginary exhibition began to
take shape and in the course of the following year it crystallized in
conversations with the Director of the Barragán house, Catalina
Corcuera
and LCM, a visionary urban laboratory who had already organized several
very intense research projects in Mexico City. LCMs openness and
inventiveness allowed us to define this exhibition as a Laboratory where
the emphasis lies on the process of research and knowledge production.
Throughout the year 2002 the following artists visited the Museum and
made
their research in situ.: Anri Sala, Cerith Wyn Evans, Claudia
Fernandez,
Damian Ortega, Dan Graham, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Dorit
Margreiter,
Douglas Gordon, Gilbert & George, Iñaki Bonillas, Koo Jeong-a, Lygia
Pape,
Niele Toroni, Olafur Eliasson, Pedro Reyes, Peter Fischli / Davis Weiss,
Philippe Parreno, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Roni Horn, Kazuyo Sejima / Ryue
Nishizawa SANAA, The Laboratory year at the Barragan House is about
how
experiments, ideas and concepts work between art and architecture, how
bridges can be built where we go beyond the fear of pooling knowledge.
The two parts of the exhibition, which open in November 2002 and January
2003, aim at rendering public what happened during the one year of
research. The wonderful and enthusiastic organization of this exhibition
through LCM and the Barragán House has been a stimulating and
rewarding
experience, enriched by the vision of the artists themselves. I would
like
to thank all the artists and Fernando, Tatiana, Rita, Jose at LCM
wholeheartedly for making all this possible.
There are many posthumous museums and memorials devoted exclusively to
one
artist or architect, or designed to preserve the namesake's original
working conditions, or living conditions. Much rarer are the museums
conceived by artists in their lifetimes as an environment and preserved
as
such, which - similar to the Sir John Soanes Museum in London - clearly
is
the case with the very consciously constructed house of Barragán.
The project which started to evolve in the Barragán House is the
continuation of the exhibition which Cerith Wyn Evans and I had
organized
in 1999 /2000 at the Sir John Soanes Museum in London, which focused on
the interstices of what happens between the "various narratives,
various
objects, and these extraordinary vistas that you come upon by
accident,
and then you catch a reflection of yourself." (1)
Since the Museum has the dimensions of a home, visitors do not have the
same relationship to the works on display as they would in monumental
museum architecture. The gulf between the museum and the world of living
experience, criticized by Adorno, has been bridged.
An obsession with color and light are a read-thread of Barragáns
universe, Barragán achieved his effects, not through ornamentation or
ornamental reduction, but through space, color, and light. The Museum
reveals various superimposed and merging states of color- light,
constructed by Barragán. Visitors encounter direct, indirect,
reflected,
broken, dispersed, or refracted light, BARRAGAN: SPACE - COLOR -
LIGHT:
INVENTION (2). Color / light also plays an important role for
artists in
their dealings with the Museum.
The garden and pavilion form an inseparable unit of rare beauty, the
artistic interventions will take place both inside and outside the
house.
Both garden and house are accessible and open to visitors who are
invited
to discover Barragán's private library, archives (personal documents
and
photographs), art collections; ongoing conservation of Barragán's
work;
and publications. The exhibition "The Air Is Blue" (title conceived by
artist Douglas Gordon), invites the viewer to see contemporary artists'
interventions, dealing with the water-fountain / garden, the colored
walls, the sky, the sound of the building, the silence, the kitchen, the
garage, the stairways / labyrinth, clothes and textiles, flowing space,
seamless space, stage architecture - "monumental in quality, static
in
feeling" - as Emilio Ambasz defined it. The user introduces the
tension /
presence-absence issue, memory: "Art is memorys mise- en-
scéne".
As Emilia Terragni shows in her text "Art within Architecture",
Barragán's
lifelong search for the integration of the arts and architecture led him
to intense dialogues with visual artists and their work: Jose Clemente
Orozco, Dr. Atl, Chucho Reyes, Mathias Goeritz, de Chirico, Josef and
Anni
Albers, and many others.
In "Origins of Modernism: Luis Barragán, the Formative Years" Marco de
Michelis reveals the importance of several journeys for Barragán's
life
and work: in 1924/25 his first European Grand Tour and his longer stay
in
Paris in 1925 (the confrontation with the works of Le Corbusier, Mallet
Stevens, Melnikov or Kiesler in the Exposition Internationale des
Arts
Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes and the discovery of the garden
of the
exhibition and the related writings of Ferdinand Bac). This trip was
followed by important trips to New York in 1931 where Barragán met
Orozco
and Kiesler. The meeting with Kiesler is particularly interesting for
the
bridges between art and architecture, between art and life.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST
1. Cerith Wyn Evans
2. Lygia Pape
Text on Barragan by Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster:
Walking mentally through the house
A golden square floating above the stairs
Remembering the gray telephone ringing
Ringing several times no answer ringing again
Pink interior walls and green garden darkness
The futuristic reflection of each room into a mirror ball
A spheric and permanent sense of photography
A mirror ball like a mental swimming pool in a room
Diving into reflected space
Built spaces photographed spaces fluid spaces
Photo-spaces spatial image - mirrored space
Intense iconographic metabolism and deep emotional
traffic
Barragan and photography and images - and space
The terrace of the house is the spatialization of an image
A photographic iconographic relation to architecture
its a space-image a reproduced space
A recorded space
A transferred picture
An empty terrace or an empty picture
During the first visit to the house
a clear impossibility to take any pictures
of a space totally connected to pictorial emotions
A visit to El Pedregal Some places dont exist anymore
some parts of El Pedregal only exist through photography
now -
photographic feelings emotional spaces
images in Barragans house paintings, windows,
screens, color walls, mirror balls
terrace-image
surface-image
space-image
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