Michelle Makarski, Solo Violin Music

Yesterday, an amazing guide at the National Museum of Anthropology gave us a guided tour in which she carefully explained about the Aztec Calendar and told us a little story. 

The Moon and the Stars try to kill the Sun every day, and every afternoon, amidst the battle, the sky becomes stained with the bloody tints of the Sun that finally withers away as the Moon rises in the dark, triumphantly along the Stars. 

The Aztecs notice the agonising Sun and they feed him blood, the essential force of life through it's veins as he rises every morning, avenging his death against the Moon and the Stars.

I always wonder what kind of stories we tend to believe in our personal cosmology. In a way they really make sense to us. 

Take for example Barragán. In his beautiful house, which he built only for himself is one special piece of construction, so carefully edited and pieced together revolving around awe, reflection and luminosity. But if I state it that way it sounds really boring, more like a fact sheet.

I believe Barragán, though highly criticised by some, had a personal inquiry, a sort of evolutionary quest he tried to solve in every room he built. The same formal narrative is repeated but completely challenged on these spaces.

This Orozco's piece above is placed on the border of a wall. Orozco gave him a copy of the original. It hangs, not carefully centered in the middle of the wall, but rather by the edge of the wall that leads to the library. To him, a wall already was saying something and he didn't want to interrupt it's discourse.

Yet the Orozco piece makes so much sense amongst Barragan's cosmology and it's one of the few paintings, besides Goeritz (above) that hangs or rests upon the walls of the house. Orozco told him, this etching could not be real and what he meant by it was that it has an impossible case of simultaneous lighting: a source from above, one coming from the left and another from the right. Unless there's a produced scenery like this, no three-dimensional object in space ever has these at the same time. Yet, Barragán did evolve Orozco's impossibility in the spaces he built, he created little masterpieces of lighting and poetic phrases where a tree pouring over a wall was an idea of mysticism.

One only hopes as an artist, to make some kind of sense, to be as coherent from the inside towards the outside, creating coherent objects with questions we intimately have or obsess with. But most importantly, the intention for beauty should always be somehow pursued.