MEXICO CITY.- On this occasion, Museo Nacional de Arte and Fundación/Colección Jumex join forces to present the exhibition The Practice of Everyday Life, curated by Frédéric Bonnet, an art critic and independent curator who, following a careful study of both collections put together a selection of works dating from between the seventeenth century and the present day.

The show is made up of eighty-one pieces from the permanent collection of Museo Nacional de Arte, by artists such as Baltasar de Echave Ibía, Miguel Cabrera, Eugenio Landesio, José María Velasco, José María Estrada, Rufino Tamayo, Gerardo Murillo (Dr. Atl) and José Clemente Orozco. These works are placed in dialogue with seventy-six pieces from La Colección Jumex, by artists such as Gabriel Orozco, Gabriel Kuri, Andres Serrano, Doug Aitken, Wolfgang Tillmans, Rudolf Stingel and Sofía Táboas.

The exhibition takes its name from the title of a study by French philosopher and historian Michel de Certeau (1925-1986), whose two volumes The Practice of Everyday Life and The Practice of Everyday Life Volume 2: Living and Cooking were published in Paris in 1980.

In it, Michel de Certeau explores the ways ordinary individuals invent resistance strategies as a way of escaping from a dominant social order conceived mindfully around them; i.e., the places they have been assigned within it, the role they play, their consumer patterns, etc.

The author fixes his attention on “ways of doing [that] constitute the thousand practices through which acting individuals re-appropriate spaces ordered by sociocultural production techniques.”

In the words of the curator, “This exhibition does not claim to illustrate the book in question, nor its theme, though it does make occasional reference to them. We have used the title primarily because of the notion of ‘invention,’ both in practices and in ways of seeing. Questions related to reality and everyday life, to the ways they are thought about, viewed, documented by translating them into images and to how forms and contours are invented for them, are the common thread in the MUNAL collection, which also resurfaces in many of the works in La Colección Jumex.”

The Practice of Everyday Life is an initiative of Fundación/Colección Jumex, which proposed this project to Museo Nacional de Arte an institution that welcomed the project, as it saw great possibilities in terms of its originality and its curatorial approach. In this sense, Eugenio López Alonso, president of Fundación/Colección Jumex, commented that, “It was important to us that works from La Colección Jumex be presented in a space that is emblematic of our national culture, in order to establish a creative dialogue between different moments in history, connected by human nature. In this sense, Museo Nacional de Arte was the most suitable space in which to present this project.”

The exhibition will allow the viewer to discover different ways of perceiving and reinventing the everyday: “The Energy of the Everyday,” “Nature of the Landscape,” “Identitarian Strategies” and “Resistance and Anti-discipline.”

The public will be able to explore these topics in depth through talks by guest lecturers, and will also have the opportunity for a sound experience before viewing the exhibition.

1. Energy of the Everyday
The first section seeks to address the most direct, concrete and tangible aspects of everyday life: work, pastimes, consumerism, spirituality, and personal as well as intimate life.

It will be of particular interest to place contemporary, secular pieces next to works with religious content from Mexico’s colonial period, which, in their original context, were also tools for religious conversion. These devotional images take the daily lives or martyrdom of the saints as their theme and constitute a wealth of both didactic precepts and behavioral models, and it is intriguing to compare them with everyday gestures re-transcribed (or re-imagined) by nineteenth- and twentieth-century artists. In addition to a comparison between to the two actions’ evolution, the gestures and postures used to translate certain real-world modes of being can also be compared.

2. Nature of the Landscape
This second section seeks to offer a “breathing space” where the links between landscape and the lived environment are addressed.

The evocation of landscapes is fundamental to the two-sided reflections undertaken by this exhibition. In effect they provide a tangible framework for the playing out of everyday lives; and the ways in which landscapes are portrayed by artists converts them into a territory for spiritual exploration, an escape route from the day-to-day, conducive to “strolling” and even to evasion (as in Rondinone) or to simple spiritual visions (Lugo Guadarrama, Tamayo, Crewdson).

Such representations will serve as testimonies to the nature of the (more or less) immediate world as well as to social transformations and profound changes relating to technological progress (Carlos Rivera, Sarah Morris, Tina Modoti), or to imagining possible uses (Pablo Vargas Lugo ).

Therefore, landscape will not be considered here as the mere description of what is perceived by the retina, but rather as a cultural construct, an element belonging to a metaphorical language that goes beyond visual appearances, to some other place.

3. Identitarian Strategies
In this section, Inventing and living in the everyday world also requires an affirmation of being and the definition of identity. Highly political, identity strategies and representations are fundamental to the history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Mexican art, and on occasion include a nationalistic dimension that impels artists to document, and indeed aggrandize, certain scenes from everyday life. On a parallel path, contemporary practice abounds in identity references, above all in the United States, where numerous artists such as Dan Graham and Paul McCarty pose questions regarding the specific criteria that constitute “Americanness”.

Identity construction also becomes important in the definition of specific individuals, particularly in portraiture like the ones created by Ramón Cano Manila, Hermegildo Bustos, Rineke Dijkstra and Dieter Roth.

4. Resistance and Anti-discipline
This last section is the one most closely related to the thesis espoused in Michel de Certeau’s writing, above all when its author studies how culturally-defined uses are modified—without their being rejected.

In addition to celebrating a marked irreverence toward the political and to often assuming a posture of protest, which can at times take the form of caricature (Posada, Baños Rocher), non-discipline manifests itself by eschewing codes of conduct. Thus it tends to create “pockets” or strategies of resistance to established norms and to already codified behaviors. It does so by inventing alternative ways of being, alternative gestures and alternative visual signs. We also emphasize dislocation procedures regarding object-use itself.