Thursday, May 21, 2009

The Polyforum Siqueiros, Mexico City

Standing on Avenida Insurgentes in the Colonia Napoles section of Mexico City, The Polyforum Cultural Siqueiros immediately stands out from it's urban surroundings. It's twelve-sided dodacohedron design, covered with brightly colored murals mark it as distinct from any of the modernist blocks nearby. The various murals of the entire project, comprising over 46,000 square feet in interior and exterior space, were the largest mural grouping in the world at the time of their completion.

The Polyforum represents the last great project of muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros. Built from 1965-1971, the project was completed in the 75th year of the artist's life. The staunchly leftist Siqueiros collaborated with financier Manuel Suárez y Suárez to construct the cultural center, in the process forming an ironic partnership with the capitalist investor. The artist's Stalinist tendencies and participation in an assassination attempt on Leon Trotsky in 1940, kept him in a perpetual state of flux with the Mexican governance that led him into exile (1932-34) and imprisonment (1959-64).

The Polyforum was originally designed as part of the Hotel de Mexico, a complex financed by Mr. Suárez, which was intended as a showcase for Mexico City during the 1968 Olympics, but was never completed during the financier's lifetime. Now known as The World Trade Center, it includes a 52 story building tower, with a convention center, cinema, shopping center and revolving restaurant near the top, all of which were not completed and opened to the public until the mid 1990s. On the other hand, the Polyforum was finished in 1971, the one successful long term component of the overall project.

Entering from street level, one encounters a glass enclosed promenade in the round, punctuated by a clear tube shaped elevator, with distinctive wood detailing. This main floor serves as an art gallery, one that is curatorially problematic due to a low overhang and short sections of wall which comprise an interior circle around the space. Moving upstairs, doors open into the auditorium, a space now favored for theatre productions, rock concerts, and a light show emphasizing Siqueiros' most ambitious mural project, "The March of Humanity", which lines the immense elliptical space.

From his Cuernavaca studio, the artist set out to create the piece, which was conceived as an evocation of human progress from the beginnings of time into the future. Early on, Siqueiros began to experiment with metal attachments, to create an overlapping articulated relief to the surface. As placed in the auditorium, the finished mural is punctuated at either end by a huge faceless figure, seemingly masculine at one end and feminine at the other, the former with hands outstretched as though to grab, the latter as to caress.

Moving along one side, a rhythmic procession of figures moves forward in a forceful gesture reminiscent of Futurism. Their regimented nature contrasts sharply to the organic landscape with nurturing forms on the other side, reinforcing the overall masculine/feminine design motif. The overall design was prefigured in the vortices and orbs of Siqueiros' smaller unfinished mural from 1940 in the auditorium of the Escuela de Bellas Artes at San Miguel Allende.

Critics of the time were divided on his achievement, ranging from the praise of Juan Cervera's, "Siqueiros paints to incite, to move, to awaken consciences," to that of Antonio Rodriguez, who wrote the piece "The Siqueiros Polyforum: Does it really constitute a contribution to the art of our time or is it only a work of large dimensions?" This division was reinforced at the time by the observation that, due to the price of admission, Siqueiros' mural was not accessible to the masses of the Mexican population, ostensibly the very ones who served as the theme of his life's work. Time and a rising Mexican middle class has served to minimize this barrier to his work.

The Polyforum Cultural Siqueiros would prove to be Siqueiros last public project, though he continued to work in his studio, until his death three years later, in 1974. Since it's opening in 1971, the space has proven to be as large and controversial of a presence as the ego and drive of the artist who created it, the result of an unlikely collaboration between leftist artist and capitalist financier.

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