Lurtes of My Life
This text is a fragment of the article “Lurtes of My Life, God Doesn’t Exist,” published in the first issue of <3 Chiquilla Te Quiero. Revista de Arte en México y Latinoamérica (Spring 2020). It bears witness to a visit to the Vicente Razo exhibition New Order (2019), held in Mexico City. A second version of the project appeared in Episode 09 of the podcast Gran Hotel Abismo (2020), titled “New Order/Nueva normalidad,” a program on which Razo developed “the first academic scrolling session,” a poetic reading of memes created by the digital collective @tripsdensos about the day Lurtes. As part of #MUACenlaCiudad, a program of urban interventions curated by Alejandra Labastida and Virginia Roy, Razo presents Nuevo orden (2019-2021). The calendar is scattered at the street level, Sunday becoming a permanent reference to religious, patriarchal terror, Lurtes reflecting a terrifying city.
New Order
On September 26, 2019, Vicente Razo debuted the first version of the exhibition New Order in Mexico City’s Galería Garash. This exhibition was laid out in two sections of the gallery, surgically divided by a text written by the artist himself:
The week is the legacy of the company. The first control code, the (literal) programming of the ordinary. The first order of language: C++ <<M/T/W/Th/F/Sa/Su>>. The first command…insert/escape … enter/exit.
The need to sacrifice the calendar is perhaps the most transcendent political task that we have been putting off: the urgency of the real has cancelled it for us, has distanced us from the cold rhythm of the incredible. How shall we ruin destiny, dismantle agendas, dirty everyday life? Here, we seek to reprogram the present to suggest a change that, while it may not come for centuries, we can already catch a glimpse of: that the week ends.
The thirteenth month, the thirty-second day, the twenty-fifth hour, the sixty-ninth second. Is another time possible? If we begin to name it, perhaps it will come into existence, it’s simply a question of time.
Seeing ourselves distanced by our urgent tasks from the “cold rhythm of the incredible” seems to activate a point of ignition, finding a way to burn it all down and start (each day) as part of a new order: they’re the same names of the days of the week, but twisted; a hypothetical time that trips up the week as the legacy of the company (and likewise of the church), that week of workdays and 48 hours of free consumption, the “weekend”—for that percentage of the population that can and should take advantage of it.
If, after reading the text, we take the hallway to the left, we then become hypnotized by an audiovisual environment. It leads us to a room saturated from floor to ceiling with a series of posters. This room is likewise not disposable, nor is it just another room among many, but is instead a common area for the creative middle classes in Mexico City: a house in the Roma neighborhood with kilos of plaster to simulate a restoration that alludes to a strong Porfirian, post-revolutionary, post-civil war, midcentury housing stock, from the boom of the stock market or the bang of the drug war—whenever it became possible to acquire it—albeit still plated with tinsel.
An ominous, cold element yet with a certain folky warmth, is the omnipresent set of posters affixed directly to the wall, one after another. A sort of exercise in textual and reticular muralism related to lucha libre posters organized in a random, cursed, absurd, visceral order of weekdays: Monday comes after Saturday, Sunday after Friday. These variations take us right up to the limit. Visions that, through the capitalist gaze, seem heretical to the respectable man, one who is perhaps macho, unpleasant and even a bastard: each day demands certain expectations, duties, functions, releases, rests, guilts, gods.
But this reordered week does not put forward a twisted nativist, originalist logic, with pretensions of transforming absolutely everything: it does not await a metaphysical, transcendent ideology—a vice of the utopian, messianic-Christian and unscientific revolutionaries of our days. The intervention probably wants to ask us: What if we break the week like a bottle against the boss’s head? What if we spoil the schedule by reordering its days and, in a game of variations, we lose control over their use value and their logic of exchange? There is a piano at the center of this space and, there, variation goes beyond the cerebral: Razo invited Emilio Hinojosa Carrión and Jorge Solís Arenazas to collaborate on the piece Week/end. As the artist wrote:
In reality, no date is ever repeated.
The posters that change the order of weekdays become a score, indications of other possible sequences of time, the tones and noises that envelop the space are a sonorous reading of these new order, taking advantage of the reflection of the code of the calendar found in the language of music: seven days for seven notes.
Composition is an accidental, subjective biography or calendar. As the memory of each day is distinct, but equal, control by decree gets lost and cheapens the ordinary continuity of time. Harmony, as arbitrary as always, only appears at any time.
The arbitrary synchrony of “seven days for seven notes” denaturalizes order in a key that, perhaps, would have filled Theodor Adorno’s bald head with red curls: the hope that he had found in the dodecaphony of Arnold Schoenberg is deployed in the brutal statement that no date, like no sound, is ever repeated. But the modernist destruction of reflection in the history of music itself also created an explosion in the breakdown of the ordinary patrimony of days. An experimental muralism that would have driven David Alfaro Siqueiros crazy and derailed his task of ideologically transforming his representees in a polyangular fashion.
With our retinas and eardrums altered, if we return to the center of the gallery and perhaps reread the text to see if we understood anything, we can enter the other room. This one is covered with a series of screen prints, one after another, in the apparently traditional register of the white cube. Here the disruptive element, once again, is textuality and its chromatic specters.
Here Razo presents the series Lurtes, consisting of screen prints in three colors: green and red on a white background, with black for the superimposed text (in Courier New). One reads the neologism Lurtes, an especially ugly day of the week, invented or perhaps appropriated by the irreverent creators of the account @tripsdensos (“fucking geniuses,” Razo would say). While the green and the red literally allude to the colors of the Mexican flag, in Razo’s iconography they refer to the neon green and bright red of the now-deleted Instagram account. Here, the suggestion of a day between Monday and Tuesday—or that is perhaps Monday and Tuesday at the same time, or an intermediary climax of mediocre labor, pauperizing, rooted in a logic of consumption that we can’t definitively shake—appears as the typographic lines of a recent tattoo.
In New Order, the days of the week seem to be random, mad, conscious variation, or perhaps a syntactical promiscuity in the key of memes.
Before going out or staying in to get drunk in an ordinary way—that is, until you end up at the next party, or in the middle of the street, throwing up your days in order to keep going until the Friday of the workweek—you see a series of posters rolled up on the table, at an affordable price. A virulent, anti-Franciscan strategy incorporated by the artist into all his exhibitions, almost in the logic of those exhibitions that followed the French Revolution in which, without clergy, aristocracy or the academy, the artist played at getting by on their own merits (and fought to do so).
By Way of Conclusion
As a prelude to the exhibition, Razo designed the invitation to New Order: a black print on white paper quoting the cover of Substance (1987), a cassette compiling the hits of the exhibition’s namesake Manchester band, designed by Peter Saville, who designed the covers of nearly all their albums.
Quote upon quote, gesture, graph, meme and heresy, there emerges the suspicion that one is living among artistic traditions choking on the smell of their own farts, surrounded by allusions to revolutionary, murderous lineages, parodies of holy families that are devoured by their critical criticism. Perhaps in New Order—as in other moments of his career—Razo attacks that contemporary “critical criticism,” mocks the intelligentsia drunk on and ideologically accommodated by dead traditions, instrumentalized to further the plunder.
And within the demolition of the week there appears the liberatory cry of Guy Debord, who, in a mail art series by Razo, simply cries: Guy Debord, crying with Marx in hell (while both, perhaps, scroll through @tripsdensos while laughing at Jake y el Gordo).
Julio García Murillo
Mexico City, Some Lurtes in February 2020
