Museo Salinas
Vicente Razo
Salinas Museum
In early 1995, Vicente Razo was captivated by the way in which thousands of craftspeople in Mexico began to direct their rage against the counterproductive effects of economic integration, organizing attacks against the ex-president Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988–1994). His fascination had a precedent: in prior years, the artist had toyed with the idea of creating objects of power that would enact a form of symbolic justice.
Razo thus interpreted the fetishes of the so-called “salinophobia” as a collective act of witchcraft, and he rushed to amass a collection of the hundreds of toys, piñatas, printed materials, clothing, and images marked with anti-presidential gestures that had emerged from society’s rage against the failure of “modernization.” And so, by the spring of 1995, Razo set up his collection in the bathroom of his apartment and announced the inauguration of the Salinas Museum, opening it to the public.
Razo declared: “If Duchamp put a urinal in a museum, we have to put the museum in the bathroom.” His museum was a kind of inverted ready-made that mimicked the cultural institution by usurping its hierarchy. Razo declared himself director, founder, spokesman, conservator, and chairman of the board of this imaginary institution. His initiative was defined by the museum’s “Organic Regulations and Statues,” which culminated in the slogan: “STOP MAKING READY-MADES AND STAR MAKING MUSEUMS.”
Active for three years, the Salinas Museum embodied an alternative institutional critique: an institution focused on destabilizing cultural and political legitimacy, but also on disrupting the supposed neutrality of contemporary art.
VICENTE RAZO (1971)
Museo Salinas, 1996
Salinas Museum
364 pieces. Piñatas, masks, photographs, books, magazines, newspapers, stickers, audio cassettes, compact discs, mugs, packs of gum, glass miniatures, plastic toys, and lead figurines
Acquisition, 2007
