The Zahir
My art history education started in Sanborns. Currently owned by Carlos Slim, this cafeteria, restaurant, pharmacy and department store chimera was an American transplant in origin. Suspicious characters in suit and tie made phone calls near the restroom pay phones, women dressed in coif, huipil and candy cane patterned skirts walked around enforcing rules of conduct with the rigidity of a governess. On the weekends, the cafeteria felt like a piñata filled with nervous couples having an affair, small groups of men conducting esoteric businesses, young lovers reenacting telenovela dynamics, tired street clowns drinking coffee and children sleeping in booths. There are 197 Sanborns across Mexico, one of them housed inside an 18th century Baroque palace in Mexico City nicknamed ‘La Casa de los Azulejos’, adorned on three sides with blue and white ‘Talavera’ tile. As a teenager, I spent hours at my neighborhood Sanborns leafing through art and photography magazines. Years later, at libraries in college, I was exposed to languaging that “explained” the relevance of the images I was voraciously consuming at Sanborns. To this day, I still remember my exposure to those early artworks with limited understanding but radiating visceral joy: why were this artists acting so strangely?
The focus on semiotics, the emphasis on the process of creation and the involvement of the spectator became champions of 20th century art practice. Chairs leaning against walls, lemons, lightbulbs and urinals became the muses for artists rebelling against academic canons and victorian art markets. In Fluxus art the spectacle of the absurd inherited from surrealism turned its gaze to mundane rituals. Changing a lightbulb was the art, sowing a purposeless garment was the performance and chairs became architectural experimentation without utilitarian value. From the ruins of two world wars, Brutalist architecture emphasized practicality and structural integrity while Italian artists from the Arte Povera movement longed a return to essential materials that revealed the nature of impermanence and decay. Creative discourse steered slightly away from skillful execution and focused on improvisation, entropy and unpredictability. But the fixation on a conclusive object or gesture remained. Impermanence is not final, the artist must always produce something, anything. As the artistic gesture became the object, artists scaled up cosmically and existentially.
A decade after Yves Klein photomontaged himself leaping into the void, Bas Jan Ader filmed himself rolling off the roof of a house and falling with the chair he was balancing on. On his unfinished project titled “In search of the miraculous”, Ader sailed towards Cape Cod wanting to cross the North Atlantic on a 13ft boat. He was lost at sea, his body never recovered. His boat was found by Spanish fishermen and later stolen. A year before Ader disappeared at sea, Joseph Beuys arrived on New York and was promptly wrapped in a felt blanket, carried to an ambulance and driven to a Gallery in SoHo. He spent eight hours for the next three days locked inside the gallery with a coyote, a cane and copies of the Wall Street Journal. At the end of the performance, Beuys was wrapped in felt again and driven to the airport for his flight back home. A decade before the performance with the coyote, Beuys created Fat Chair. This wooden chair held a triangular wedge of fat that covered the entire seat and back. In 1990 Gabriel Orozco punctured the seat of a chair with a monolith of dried liana branches. Ten years after that, Orozco took a photograph of a lemon wheel wedged on the coin slot of a public pay phone. In 1979, James Turrell acquired a 3 mile wide volcanic crater in Arizona to create a monumental installation. Inside the crater, Turrell is designing a network of tunnels and chambers for the contemplation of celestial events and to experience the shifting qualities of natural light. In 2002 Brad Pitt put on a monkey suit to skate through parking lots, roll around in bushes and destroy trash cans in an episode of Jackass.
All this historical Jibber Jabber with the purpose of mentioning the day that I dragged Daniel Monroy through mud and dirt for an art installation. I used to loiter the magazine racks of Sanborns with Daniel. On our free time we wandered at night photographing curiosities and discussing impossible scenarios. Daniel was invited to an art show and the work he proposed involved us dressing in suits and me dragging him through various locations. We video recorded this over a course of a full day and built an installation with the torn fabric of our outfits. When I remember Daniel’s hands clutching onto my ankles, I can feel again the sweat in my back and my troubled breathing, my leg burning after hours of pulling him through empty lots while he accidentally gargled mud water. I remember sunlight coloring in hues of violet and orange around the moon. In our self-imposed suffering there was resolution and puzzlement at the same time. Daniel tied a red scarf to his left ankle. I had a rock inside my right boot the entire time. Why were we acting so strangely?
In 1949, Borges published The Zahir, a story in first person about the belief of an object or person imbued with the ability to cause obsession. The story starts with the death of Teodelina Villar, a love interest of the fictitious version of Borges. After Teodelina’s funeral, he receives a 25 cent coin as change after ordering a drink. This coin is the reincarnation of the Zahir. Borges details the previous iterations before his coin: the bottom of a well, a blindman, a tiger, a compass. He starts his fascination with the coin by ascribing to it a metaphysical quality: “…any coin whatsoever is, strictly speaking, a repertory of possible futures… A coin symbolizes man's free will.” Unable to understand his obsession, he falls asleep: “I dreamed that I was the coins guarded by a griffon.” The next day he gets rid of the coin. Incapable of forgetting his Zahir, he consults a psychiatrist and finds a book by Julius Branch that elaborates on the myth — the Zahir is one of the 99 names ascribed to God. Borges finds out that Teodelina’s sister was committed to a mental institution after seeing the coin that he had discarded. Borges tells that his memory of the coin intensifies over time, In his delusional memory he can see both sides of the coin at the same time. Borges predicts his end at a mental institution, the same destiny met by many before him that encountered a Zahir: “I shall no longer perceive the universe: I shall perceive the Zahir.”
“Tennyson once said that if we could understand a single flower, we should know what we are and what the world is. Perhaps he meant that there is no fact, however insignificant, that does not involve universal history and the infinite concatenation of cause and effect.”
On a late night in Sanborns, Daniel and I discussed the plot of a story where the promethean fire suddenly consumes the creative world, while Prometheus remains chained to a rock snacking on its own liver with a disinterested eagle at his feet. A chair, a lemon, a red scarf and a lightbulb. Jibber Jabber in the cosmic melody of time.