Nearly everyone has heard about the dangers associated with visiting Mexico City, an enormous urban center that is often referred to as polluted and overcrowded. But beneath all the negative associations, there is a huge art scene flourishing in this bustling metropolis. While the city may be plagued with vices like corruption and violence, unstable societal forces often drive socially concerned artists to create some of the most vibrant and dynamic art in the world today.
Melanie Smith is one of these artists. Her show entitled "Melanie Smith: Spiral City & Other Vicarious Pleasures," now on view at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, displays a wide range of works created throughout her career in Mexico City.
Smith, who was born in Poole, England, left her home in 1989 to visit Mexico's capital. Today, Smith remains there, creating works that vary greatly in their medium, scale and subject. Each work demonstrates a conscious effort to convey Smith's experience of living in this chaotic urban environment. She uses found materials, consumer products and photographic evidence from Mexico City to give viewers a real sense of what life is like in this part of the world by examining the metropolis on a micro and macro scale.
Upon entering the exhibition, the viewer is thrust into a crowded, noisy space that evokes the feeling of navigating one's way through Mexico City's bustling outdoor markets. The effect is overwhelming at first. Confronting the viewer from every angle are flashing television screens, bright theatrical lighting and whirring sounds that make it seem as if the gallery itself has been transformed into a city.
One piece that is especially relevant in this sense is "Jam Side Up, Jam Side Down" (1992). Smith created this work by erecting two wooden forms to create a narrow passageway that the viewer can walk through. Hanging from both sides are large plastic objects that relate to both consumer products and the human body; they are composed of mass-produced materials, yet their thin outer layers resemble skin. The piece has a very claustrophobic feeling and seems to make reference to the excess of street vendors in Mexico City, which the government has unsuccessfully attempted to regulate at various times throughout history. Although this work deals directly with experiencing the city on a personal level, other pieces in the show depict the megalopolis through much more objective perspectives.
An example of this type of work is "Spiral City" (2002), which is arguably Smith's most famous piece. This video installation was created ten years after "Jam Side Up, Jam Side Down," and it examines the urban landscape in a much different manner. Instead of focusing on a quotidian event, this piece takes the viewer up and out of the city. Smith, in collaboration with the artist Raphael Ortega, created "Spiral City" by videotaping Mexico's capital from a helicopter, presenting the viewer with a bird's-eye view of the sprawling metropolis.
The image starts rather close to the ground but then slowly spirals upward and around the city. This dizzying effect is multiplied by the fact that the video is accompanied by the droning sound of the helicopter in flight. Here, Smith depicts Mexico City as a place that is empty and colorless, a vacant grid that is completely void of inhabitants or greenery. The spiraling movement is also important because it relates Smith's piece to Robert Smithson's famous film, "Spiral Jetty" (1970), and his ideas on natural forms and entropy. "Spiral City" shows how Smith has decided to engage with her environment in a completely different manner in order to present an objective, map-like view of Mexico City, stripped of all its energy and vitality.
These two particular pieces show the range of methods that Smith has used to explore the different aspects of her adopted home and how she has chosen to present them to a public that is most likely unaware of the dynamic nature of this urban center. It is necessary, however, to visit the show in person in order to view all the works and fully appreciate Smith's unique outlook on a place is that so undervalued in today's world. It is possible that the exhibition may even inspire viewers to muster up the courage to plan a vacation to this fascinating location.
