Mexico's hot palette

Mix together a photograph of a harem of semi-clad teenage girls reclining in a Vegas-style theme room, a performance piece of two sweaty fruit juice factory employees pedalling stationary bicycles, 3D paintings of riot police, and a cathedral filled with video art and you have Mexico City: A steaming megalopolis of 20 million people that is quickly becoming the destination hot spot for the global art glitterati.

As featured in The Globe and Mail.

No longer just a stopover en route to white sandy beaches and tacky tourist centres, the city is attracting a new breed of visitor: museum curators, art critics and art-loving travellers alike who are descending on this volcano-surrounded capital, buying art in La Roma, sipping Micheladas in the emerging neighbourhood of La Condesa and parking their Mercedes in upscale Polanco.

Fuelled by the popularity of films such as Frida, Y Tu Maman Tambien and the art collection in The Royal Tenenbaums, Mexico City is being touted as the new epicentre of cool; what New York was in the art market boom 80s or what London was in the 90s with the introduction of Charles Saatchi's Young British Artists.

In 2002, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in New York presented Mexico City: An Exhibition about the Exchange Rates of Bodies and Values that catapulted the emerging contemporary art scene in Mexico onto a global sphere. Some of the artists included in the exhibition were Gabriel Kuri, Yoshua Okon, Ruben Ortiz Torres, Daniela Rossell, Carlos Amorales and Minerva Cuevas.

All of these artists grew up in Mexico City and their work reflects this. It is a place of violent social contrast and diversity, where wealth and poverty, old and new, murder, corruption and politics have inspired some of the most stunning examples of contemporary art being produced in the city today.

One of the artists included in the New York exhibition was Miguel Calderon. He achieved cult status for his "low-brow" paintings of Mexican motorcycle gangs wearing wrestling masks in the film The Royal Tenenbaums. Crudely executed and deliberately aggressive, the paintings increase the visual narrative of the film and speak volumes about the mescaline-induced state of their owner, Eli Cash (played by Owen Wilson).

Calderon describes his work as a reflection of the reality that he lives in.

"There is incredible violence here, incredible nervous energy, and ultimately great tragedy. My art is just a part of it."

Having just returned from shooting a film in Tokyo, Calderon said he would get bored if he lived in Japan. "Here, you are living with people who live in different times. It's like living in a time machine. People are aggressive. Places are old. There is corruption. That's what I like about Mexico, if you want to do things you just do them."

Far from the spring-break, tequila-chugging persona of resort towns such as Cancun and Cabo San Lucas, Mexico City offers a chance to reinterpret a country that is diverse and rich in cultural history. From the up-and-coming neighbourhood of La Condesa in the south to the sprawling Chapultepec Park in the west (home to two of the best modern art museums and the not-to-be-missed museum of anthropology), Mexico City is an audiovisual virtuoso in contradiction and extremes.

The Zocalo, the city's main square and historic centre, is a focal point of this contradiction, and a perfect place to begin a tour of the city. Built directly on top of the ancient city of Tenochtitlan, it was once a thriving Aztec capital made up of canals, bustling markets and floating gardens -- until Spanish explorer Cortez arrived in 1521 and razed it to the ground.

A symbol of this ill-fated defeat is the Cathedral Cortez, built on an unsteady lakebed, directly on top of a former temple of Aztec worship. The cathedral has been sinking slowly back into the ground for the last 500 years. With walls pulling in several different directions and an uneven floor, a tour of the interior creates the feeling of having imbibed a few too many cocktails consumed at high altitude. (The city, after all, sits at 2,200 metres above sea level.)

Just outside the front door of the cathedral lies the massive façade of the National Palace. This is where one can see how the violence, aggression and upheaval that Cortez brought to Mexico inspired artists such as Diego Rivera, and artists after him, to paint the murals that were featured in the film Frida. (Incidentally, some of the best examples of Frida Kahlo's work are not at her museum but at the Museo Dolores Olmeda on the outskirts of the city. It takes about an hour to get there, but it's well worth the trip.)

Directly outside the National Palace is the massive domed roof of the contemporary art institution Ex Teresa Arte Actual (XTAA). This former convent, built in 1684, was converted into a laboratory of experimental video, installation and performance art in the early 90s. The director, Guillermo Santamarina, is the Mexican version of Dirk Diggler from Boogie Nights: 70s cop glasses, a slightly cocky demeanour.

He is also a visionary curator who has rallied the support of international artists, curators and critics, including Canadian theorist Richard Martel, to create a forum for alternative expression that is clearly not afraid to take risks.

From March 28 to April 25, XTAA will feature an exhibition called The Cosmetic Chilanga, a documentary that uses emergency shelter installations, video files and photos from the city archives to show how the citizens of Mexico City appropriate and resist economic, social and political structures by integrating their own traditions with modern society. (Chilanga is slang for people living in Mexico City.)

Santamarina is also the guest curator for a new exhibition at La Coleccion Jumex, a multimillion-dollar art collection and exhibition space housed in a fruit juice factory in the suburbs of Mexico City. After passing through three levels of machine-gun-toting security and barbed wire fence, a gracious employee welcomed us with a selection of juices, being made in the building next door.

Launched in 2001 by Eugenio Lopez Alonso, a Mexico City playboy and 35-year-old heir to the billion-dollar Jumex fortune, the collection merges more than 600 works representing a who's who of international contemporary art into a massive 1,400-square-foot exhibition space. It's a virtual fun-factory for the likes of Santamarina.

The latest exhibition, called La Colmena, attempts to explore the science behind perfection in nature by using the hexagon as its starting point. For his part, Santamarina plans to install a working hive of bees onto the gallery floor in an ode to Buckminster Fuller and his theories of synergetic energy. When I visited the space, they were still trying to work around the strict "no insects" rule imposed on them by the city's health regulation officials.

Alonso has a reputation for purchasing "difficult" works of art. At the inaugural opening of the space two sweating factory employees in Jumex uniforms pedalled bikes that powered a single light bulb in a performance piece by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan. The price tag? About $50,000 (U.S.). The bikes are now being stored on a rack hanging from the ceiling in the collection archives.

Alonso, however, is also a supporter of all things local, and has established an ambitious program of education, artists' grants and residencies to enhance the careers of Mexican artists locally and abroad. "Sponsored by Jumex" was a familiar tagline at pretty much every art venue across the city: Daniela Rossell, who was included in the exhibition at P.S.1, is among the A-list of artists whose work has been purchased by the Jumex Collection. As with Miguel Calderon, Rossell's work is being scooped up by galleries in London and New York. From 1994 to 2002, she produced a series of images that were published in a book called Ricas y Famosas (Rich and Famous), a Playboyesque case study of the city's prepubescent elite, where the super-rich pose in their vast, kitsch palaces, sneakered feet raised on gilded furniture or propped on the head of a stuffed lion.

Equally intriguing are the "camouflage" paintings by artist Manuel Cerda, recently exhibited at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Chapultepec Park. Entre ver y Aqui (Enter Here and See) is a colourful -- borderline decorative -- patchwork of lace painted on canvas. A pair of 3D glasses, however, reveals a more sinister side: a uniformed policeman in riot gear wielding a bat chases after a young bearded man who is trying to escape. The underlayer, visible only through the 3D lens, turns the "pretty" surface into an image that the artist describes as "a reflection of the present reality in Mexico City -- or elsewhere in the world."

The biannual International Festival of Sound Art is another example of the many events happening across the city. David Peralta, who works on special projects at XTAA, is one of the organizers of the festival. For three weeks starting this October, performers from across the globe will participate in workshops and collaborate on innovative sound projects. This includes Staalplaat, a group of artists from Amsterdam and Mexico, who will come together to create a live "electronic orchestra" by hooking a traditional salsa band into a console and mixing the sound with a fleet of 20 vacuums.

Peralta also owns an independent music label called Ultra Dub that supports the work of a new generation of musicians, such as Wakal and Nortec, who fuse traditional Mexican folk songs and hokey Tex-Mex from Tijuana with modern electronic beats. Along with drum and bass, dub, and techno-house, this new school fusion can be heard throughout the city at places such as Salon Tarara in the historic centre and Café Ina in La Condesa.

"The beauty of living in a city with 20 million people," says Peralta, "is that we have a built-in audience. The number of people who are into this scene is relatively huge. We don't have to wait until a big label recognizes us and releases a record. This just isn't possible everywhere else. The scene is growing. Independent labels are popping up everywhere."

Mexico City is in a constant state of flux. From the 1968 summer Olympics that spurred a boom in ritzy, Knot's Landing-isharchitecture to the modern day contemporary art exhibitions at the Museo Rufino and the chic Hotel Habita, one cannot deny that Mexico City is hip. Of course, any description of Mexico as hip is a somewhat loaded concept, considering that extreme poverty, corruption and art don't necessarily make the best bedfellows. Still, it's a place where violence and beauty coexist as parallel facets of everyday life. It is a pulsating diorama of colour, textures, sounds and smells that is making a major impact in the world of contemporary art and a lasting impression on travellers who choose to linger.

An art tour of Mexico City

Although Mexico City claims the largest urban population in the world, it is by no means inaccessible.

Many highlights are concentrated in neighbourhoods within the greater downtown core and can easily be reached by bus (which costs about 10 cents and sometimes includes live mariachi), subway or one of the many special tourist cabs available at all the hotels.

A few days is enough to give you a taste of what the city has to offer. Start with a tour of the museums in Chapultepec, followed by shopping and dining in La Condesa and continuing with a visit to the Laboratorio Arte Almeda on the west side of Almeda Park along rio Madero to the Zocalo.

Admission to most galleries is about $2; call for opening hours.

ART GALLERIE S AND MUSEUMS

Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporaneo: Paseo de la Reforma y Gandhi, Bosque de Chapultepec;

http://www.museotamayo.org; 52 (5) 5286-6519.

Museo de Arte Moderno: Paseo de la Reforma y Gandhi, Bosque de Chapultepec; 52 (5) 5553-6233; www.arts-history.mx/museos/mam/2menu.html.

Ex Teresa Arte Actual: Lic. Primo Verdad No. 8, Historical Centre; 52 (5) 5522-272.

O.M.R. Gallery: Plaza Rio de Janeiro 54, Colonia Roma; 52 (5) 5511-1179; mailomr@webtelmex.net.mx.

La Coleccion Jumex: Frugosa, SA de CB, Km. 19.5. Carretera Mexico-Pachuca Ectapec Edo; samuel@lacoleccionjumex.org; 52 (5) 5699-1961. Open to the public weekdays by appointment. The best way to get to this gallery in the suburbs is by hiring a taxi (about $50) for the half day trip as public transportation is difficult at best.

Museo Dolores Olmeda Patino: Av. Mexico 5843, La Noria, Xochimilco 16030; 52 (5) 5555-1221; www.arts-history.mx/museos/mdo/home2.html. There is a good map on the museum's website that will explain how to get there on the subway. The trip takes about an hour but the floating canals in Xochimilco are not far off, making this an excellent day trip.

WHERE TO STAY

No longer just a place to drop your bags and take off in search of adventure, Mexico City's hotels are becoming destinations within themselves.

Hotel Habita: Av. Presidente Masaryk 201, Colonia Polanco. Price range: $175 to $275 (U.S.); 52 (5) 5282-3100; http://www.hotelhabita.com. Located in upscale Polanco, Hotel Habita is Mexico City's answer to the Ian Schrager-inspired boutique hotel phenomenon. Boasting the rooftop bar AREA and the ground floor restaurant Aura, this is the place to rub shoulders with the uptown crowd and is within walking distance of the excellent artist-run Sala de Arte Publico Siquieros.

La Casona: Durango 280 Esq. Cozumel, Colonia Roma; price range: $95 to $120 (U.S.); 52 (5) 5286-3001; http://www.hotellacasona.com.mx. Located in the emerging neighbourhood of La Condesa, this turn of the century hotel features claw foot bathtubs, 14-foot high ceilings and all the conveniences of a modern hotel.

Hotel Maria Christina: Rio Lerma 31, Colonia Cuauhtemoc; price range: $60 to $100 (U.S.); 52 (5) 5703-1212. If you're looking to experience the more traditional side of Mexico, this hotel is easy on the pocket book and has a wonderful, tropical garden where you can sit and read the morning paper. The canned muzak, however, is a bit of a turnoff.

Camino Real: Mariano Escobedo 700, Colonia Anzures; price range: $200 to $780 (U.S.); 52 (5) 5227-7200; http://www.caminoreal.com/mexico. Although recent renovations distract this gem of 1970s modern architecture from its former brilliance, it's still a great place to stay or visit.