A project by Miguel Monroy
at the Museo Experimental El Eco
The idea of eternal return is a philosophical conception that refers directly to time through the events that enunciate it or that make it visible as a circular, non-linear fact. It is also the thought of a mark in history that points to the beginning and end of something, signaling its repetition in a kind of atavism, which prevents the upward progress of man and which subordinates it to repetition, to “the same”, not only of behaviors, but also of thoughts, opinions and other beliefs that make man a subject of the world. There are many reflections that have been made from the philosophical conception of the eternal return, from the mythical figuration of the Uroboros, as an animal that consumes itself by biting its tail, to the literary work of Friedrich Nietzsche: everything returns and returns eternally, something to which no one escapes … the principle of the persistence of energy demands the Eternal Return… the measure of force “as dimension” is fixed, but its essence is fluid… the world is a circle that has already been repeated countless times and that will continue to be repeated in infinitum…
In all the artistic and literary works made in this regard, the main theme coincides with the way in which the physical space-time relationship behaves from the succession of the human being in the world, which never detaches itself from its carnal condition, transforming itself only from its wear. This situation of physical and symbolic wear and tear can be seen represented in Pina Bausch’s choreography entitled Café Müller of 1978 or in the short film Tango by Zbigniew Rybczyński, filmed and edited in 1980; in these works the repetition of actions of the characters, which reaches levels almost of automatism, underlines the wear and tear of their own life circumstance, generating a new meaning: the real evidence of the situation, as a dramatic, critical and ironic state of the human condition. These types of language strategies, within the poetic construction of art, are elements of constant interest within the artistic work of Miguel Monroy (Mexico City, 1975).
Monroy’s work deals with the possibility of fracturing different structures, codes or systems in which the Western-utilitarian way of seeing the world rests, creating visible alternatives within the nature of art, which build a broader reflection of the place where we are.
Canon is the title with which Miguel Monroy enunciates the multidisciplinary exercise that was carried out in the Daniel Mont Room of the Eco Experimental Museum as part of the 2012 exhibition program. This exercise consisted of the review of the functioning of the exhibition space as a space of actions that continuously alter the place, through the assembly process before each exhibition, resulting in a pattern of regular activities that constitute the exercise of cultural production within the museum institution.
Canon is also the term by which Monroy expands its work system, by incorporating artists into its project for the configuration of a video. The video presents the exhibition space as the engine for the generation of situations that allude to the utilitarian reason of the museum, and that is represented from the repetition and confrontation of common actions, carried out by characters that evoke the normal transit of the cultural space, in a state of altered repetition, generating an ironic vision of the work in that place, placing the exercise of the art exhibition in a kind of metaphor that is related to the Nietzschian idea of the eternal return.
David Miranda
January 2012