Miguel Calderón
Miguel Calderon
Aesthetic Material Available
15 OCT 2022 - 05 MAR 2023
Curated by Taiyana Pimentel, director of the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey MARCO.
Curated by Taiyana Pimentel, director of the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey MARCO.
→ Room 6 and patio
¡HOY!
Cortesía del artista y Kurimanzutto, Ciudad de México / Nueva York
Aesthetic Material Available is an exhibition that surveys three decades of work by artist Miguel Calderón (Mexico City, 1971). Known for engaging in dialogue with complex aspects of Mexican society—violence, corruption, sexuality and the dynamics between different social strata—his artistic production ultimately becomes evidence of his own personal experience in the creation of the pieces. The artist, however, transcends this (auto)biographical dimension to give way to a narrative style that—in a conscious existentialism of some sort and far from emotional ties and drama—partakes in the ontological questioning of the human being.
Through an ample photographic and cinematographic body of work, the pieces presented here humorously address themes such as institutional critique, transgression and the analysis of social and cultural protocols, as well as the interplay between reality and fiction. Also featured are introspective installations that reflect on the behaviors of human nature and its relation with animals.
A key figure in the alternative art scene during the 90s, Calderón drew attention to the singularities offered by Mexico City during this period, in turn revealing various aspects of a society of intense contradictions. Following a non-linear approach, this selection of works gives us a glimpse into the development of aesthetic strategies as a binding mechanism; a mechanism that gives way to deep conversations in which the artist interweaves recurring issues, paradoxes and discordances of everyday life.
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In 1999, the Museo Tamayo launched its Sala 7 project room, inviting Miguel Calderón as the first artist to show his work there. The exhibition, titled Joven entusiasta [Eager Young Thing], featured this mural painting that recreated the logo of the mattress store Dormimundo, but with the name of the brand replaced with the word moribundo [moribund]—an allusion to the death of the museum as an institution.
Fundación M
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Taximeter is a piece commissioned by inSITE97, a curatorial project conceived as a binational initiative for the Tijuana/San Diego border region. Calderón's contribution to this exhibition involved embarking on a trip in a classic green Volkswagen taxi cab from Mexico City to San Diego, in order to exorcise the after-effects that the artist had suffered following an express kidnapping (a common crime among Mexico City cab drivers at the time).
By journey’s end—and due to a lack of immigration documents—the cab driver allowed Calderón to cross the border with his own vehicle, a gesture signifying the trust that had been forged between them over the course of the trip. The final piece presented in inSITE97 comprised documentation of the trip compiled in a family-style photo album and the taximeter itself, that kept running since they left Mexico City, quantifying the time the artist and cab driver spent together and the amount Calderón had to pay at the end of the trip.
Cortesía del artista y kurimanzutto, Ciudad de México / Nueva York
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Camaleón is an installation featuring a projection and a series of perches—objects used by falconers to transport their hawks and on which the birds rest perched during the hunts—that are spread across the gallery floor. In the film, Miguel Calderón follows over the course of 24 hours the sleepless life of Camaleón, a bouncer who works all night at a bar south of Mexico City, and who spends his days hunting with his hawk. Being his closest link to reality, Camaleón has developed a co-dependent relationship with his hawk, and can forget about his problems and the hostile reality in which he lives while they are out hunting.
Colección Museo Tamayo / INBAL, programa Pago en Especie, Ejercicio Fiscal 2019
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Juvenile Devils is an assemblage of film fragments from different periods that Miguel Calderón had previously discarded. The video unveils a continuous editing process that gives cohesion to a series of apparently unconnected and fragmented images. In the artist’s words, “It’s an ode to the disillusionment of the 90s, to the disorientation caused by excessive television consumption that gave us the false illusion of a promising future that would never come”.
The piece also documents the way in which Miguel Calderón works, as he instinctively captures everyday situations and behaviors whose strangeness often transcend socially accepted canons.
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In 1998, the Museo Nacional de Arte (MUNAL) invited Miguel Calderón to participate in a group show titled En crudo [Raw]. During his research visits to the museum, several of the galleries were closed for renovation. Since Calderón was unable to see many of the works that make up the MUNAL collection, he decided to approach the staff and asked them to recreate from memory the poses of the classical paintings they remembered best, so that he could imagine them. The employees accepted and posed in their uniforms, using their work tools to recreate the compositions with greater precision. Calderón photographed the pictorial scenes, and then presented the photographs in the exhibition.
Cortesía del artista y kurimanzutto, Ciudad de México / Nueva York
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In 2002, the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) together with the Goethe-Institut invited creators from Mexico and Germany to participate in Agua/Wasser [Water]. This project hosted an exhibition and several interventions in urban spaces, in an attempt to recover the historical relationship between city and water through the participation of the public as a fundamental and active part of the works. Miguel Calderón proposed Mutant, a work consisting in the extraction of a species of fish that inhabits Chapultepec Lake, and its display in a fish tank in the aquarium of the Torre Latinoamericana.
The fish that inhabit Chapultepec Lake tend to mutate in response to the ecosystem of Mexico City and the discarded junk food they consume from park visitors. Mutant is a metaphor that represents the inhabitants of Mexico City, exemplifying the conditions under which they themselves have adapted to in order to survive.
Understanding our nature as human beings, through the lens of other animals and their diverse behaviors, is a recurring theme in Calderón’s work, giving visibility to symbolic and symbiotic exchanges that continuously determine our social and cultural landscape.
The Museo Tamayo and artist Miguel Calderón would like to thank the Dirección de Gestión del Bosque de Chapultepec for their support in this piece.
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This is an experimental film in which Miguel Calderón visually portrays the physical and emotional reactions, as well as the sensations produced by the experience of the loss of consciousness. It is based on a series of episodes that the artist went through during his teenage years, in which he would suffer convulsions and lose consciousness at a moment’s notice. It is also a personal reflection on what it means to exist for an instant without being present and the way in which reality is recovered as consciousness is regained.
Cortesía del artista y kurimanzutto, Ciudad de México / Nueva York
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Cortesía del artista y kurimanzutto, Ciudad de México / Nueva York
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Second Place is a work that refers to the images of Miguel Calderón’s father as a successful racecar driver. Ever since he was a child, these photographs inspired Calderón to break barriers himself and question limitations. Over time, the artist discovered that the most iconic image of his childhood—a snapshot of his father victoriously holding up a first-place trophy—in fact captured the moment that occurred immediately prior to his ultimate disqualification. Despite the various versions that justified the events, the newspaper clipping with the portrait of his triumphant father allowed Calderón to question the narrative capacity that images have to define reality.
Cortesía del artista y kurimanzutto, Ciudad de México / Nueva York
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Balance of Improbabilities is a fragment of Miguel Calderon Loss Adjustment film in which Pedro, a prosperous insurance adjuster, gains access to Mexico City’s art scene by becoming a collector. In an attempt to get away from the hardship of his work, he gets involved into a theater play that takes a higher emotional toll than the catastrophic events of real life he confronts regularly on the job. Narrated in the first person, Pedro’s character finds in Calderón a privileged interlocutor to reflect not only on the parallels between real tragedy and staged drama, but also on how corruption has taken over everyday interaction across a lawless Mexican territory.
The artist Miguel Calderón would like to thank the Museo Universitario del Chopo, Foro del Dinosaurio, Museo Tamayo, Museo Jumex and Juan José Gurrola for their support in this piece.
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During the production of the film Loss Adjustment –of which a fragment is presented in Museo Tamayo’s auditorium– Calderón photographed the Linterna Mágica movie theater, south of Mexico City, which was damaged by a flood and later by the earthquake of September 19, 2017. This image is part of the series titled Balance of Improbabilities, which explores different disaster sites throughout Mexico.
Cortesía del artista y kurimanzutto, Ciudad de México / Nueva York