Rolando López

Proyectos Monclova presents the exhibition Evidence of the Palpable Loss of Aesthetic Qualities: Museo Guggenheim Aguascalientes by Rolando López.

Recent years have seen a growing, worldwide discussion about museums’ role in society and scrutiny of the colonial structures that sustain them. Museums founded in the United States and Europe in particular have built their collections by looting and pillaging the cultural goods of other colonized countries, and the resources used to finance them originated from wealth generated by the mining industry, the extraction of fossil fuels, and arms sales, among other activities. For example, the creation of the large cultural institutions we know today in the United States dates back to the historical period known as The Gilded Age (1865–1898), a time characterized by the accelerated industrial development of the country. Such personages as John D. Rockefeller, J. Paul Getty, Henry Clay Frick, and Andrew Mellon, to name only a few, amassed great wealth while destroying the environment and exploiting their workers. Their profits enabled them to build their art collections and found cultural institutions.

The Guggenheim family, now renowned in the cultural realm for its museums and philanthropic support of culture, was dedicated to the mining and metalworking sectors in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, at a time of outright expansion and high demand for industrial metals—a favorable context that enabled the family to grow its business and consolidate it as a large transnational corporation. To achieve this, they established various mining projects and foundries outside the United States, which enabled them to extract other countries’ natural resources. In 1910, the multinational bought Chuquicamata in Chile's Atacama Desert, which was considered the world's largest open-pit copper mine at the time. The area is now uninhabitable due to the high degree of contamination, environmental damage, and adverse health risks. The Guggenheim brothers’ businesses were mostly active in Mexico from 1890 to 1923, with several investments coming through the Guggenheim Exploration Co. (Guggenex), M. Guggenheim's Sons (MGS), and American Smelting and Refining Company (Asarco), the last of which being the most important thanks to the large quantity of properties it held. They installed five lead and copper foundries in the Mexican states of Aguascalientes, Chihuahua, Durango, Nuevo León, and San Luis Potosí, while also acquiring mines to supply these factories.*

This family's imprint on our country has been truly devastating, in response to which the Aguascalientes-based artist Rolando López has devoted himself to constructing a critical memory and a space of resistance through his Museo Guggenheim Aguascalientes project. Since 2012, López has been carrying out extensive research on the activities of La Gran Fundición Central Mexicana (The Large Central Mexican Foundry, 1894–1925), a plant installed by the Guggenheim family. This bid has enabled the artist to organize collaborations across several different artistic, social, and cultural disciplines, in order to construct a complex framework that has enabled him to retrace the Guggenheims’ toxic path of destruction through diverse ecosystems in our country.

Each of the project’s action areas, understood as phases of research, has led to “public programs” like those that a museum might offer its publics, just as each intervention in a white cube has been like a new instalment in its exhibition program. Several of the pieces produced, presented, and circulated by the Museo Guggenheim Aguascalientes use the toxic waste known as slag as their raw material, which has been collected from the Cerro de la Grasa in Aguascalientes. López also uses photographs, as both art objects and documentary records, to show the changes to the Mexican landscape wrought by the Guggenheims' metalworks. Each of these exhibitions features a model which presents an architectural prototype for a dystopian museum whose muddy, opaque walls are meant to be built with the slag extracted from the area.

For this, his latest exhibition, Rolando López presents Evidencias de la sensible pérdida de cualidades estéticas (Evidence of the Palpable Loss of Aesthetic Qualities), the title of which comes from an environmental impact assessment completed by the firm Siica so it could expand the El Porvenir mine in the state of Aguascalientes. It is the third instalment of the cycle El dilema de unir los puntos (The Dilemma of Connecting the Dots) curated by Néstor Jiménez. The show includes several pieces to have come out of the Museo Guggenheim Aguascalientes’s programs, as well as works produced especially for this exhibition.

Three of the works in this show were made using the wet collodion photography process. They feature three contracts filed at three key moments of Mexican history, two of which were signed in the nineteenth century and one in the twenty-first. One of them is an 1894 contract between then- governor of Aguascalientes, Alejandro Vázquez del Mercado, and entrepreneur Salomon R. Guggenheim, establishing La Gran Fundición Central Mexicana. By contrast, the Manifestación de Impacto Ambiental (environmental impact statement) for the Jales El Orito dam project reveals how the overexploitation of natural resources from the same community in Aguascalientes continues unabated, with no act of reparation to the community.

The panoramic photographs on view do not present us with a bucolic landscape or a reference to some hidden archaeological site, but instead feature the toxic residues that still remain and have been brutally modifying the areas around Aguascalientes, Nuevo León, and San Luis Potosí for centuries. The portrait of a white owl perched on the tip of a rock is not a beautiful image of wild fauna, but a statement about the dearth of animals that have remained, attempting to adapt to the toxic habitat in which they now have to live.

The set of ceramics comes from the Museo Guggenheim Aguascalientes's Trastornos y colapsos (Disorders and Collapses) program, which explores sculptural qualities through the peculiar formations of slag and its light refraction capacity, while at the same time incorporating artisanal techniques that the master craftsmen in the municipality of Real de Asientos still use in the zone devastated by the Guggenheim family. This exhibition also features homages to figures who have contributed both to the workers' struggle and to the study of Mexican culture, including Práxedis Guerrero, an anarchist poet who championed the workers' struggle in various states of the Mexican Republic, and Anita Brenner, an anthropologist, journalist, and writer born in Aguascalientes, who dedicated herself to studying and promoting Mexican art and culture.

In sum, visitors who encounter this critical museum for the first time are getting a glimpse of a tiny portion of the research and work that the artist Rolando López has been pursuing for more than a decade of resistance. The Museo Guggenheim Aguascalientes is an effort at collective memory and action that articulates a local counter-narrative of what lies behind the colonial structures that sustain cultural institutions, philanthropy, transnational corporations, and even art collecting itself.

— Adriana Melchor Betancourt

*Marı́a de los A. ngeles Cortés Basurto, Historia de una empresa minera: Los Guggenheim al frente de la American Smelting and Re:ining Company en México, 1890–1922 (PhD diss., El Colegio de México, 2022), 12.