Полифорум Сикейроса: Монументальное искусство и история Мексики

Building in Mexico City, Mexico

The Polyforum Cultural Siqueiros is a cultural, political and social facility located in Mexico City as part of the World Trade Center Mexico City. It was designed and decorated by David Alfaro Siqueiros in the 1960s and hosts the largest mural work in the world called La Marcha de la Humanidad. The building has a theatre, galleries and more, but the main focus is the Forum Universal, which contains the interior portion of Siqueiros' mural work. Visitors can experience the mural while standing on a rotating stage, listening to Siqueiros narrate.

The Polyforum is a decagon shaped construction with different exhibition spaces that feature David Alfaro Siqueiros’ work. The building is part of a business complex called the World Trade Center Mexico City in the Benito Juárez borough of Mexico City. This complex was designed by architects Joaquín Alvarez, Guillermo Rossel de la Lama and Ramón Mikelajáuregui, and built just outside Parque de la Lama, but the Polyforum was designed and decorated by Siqueiros, who nicknamed it “El coronelazo.” The exterior is in the form of a diamond and the inside has eight sides. The building with its murals is considered to be an “artistic heritage site” for Mexico, registered by the Centro Nacional de Conservación, Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura and Registro del Patrimonio Artístico Mueble. The Polyforum's exterior, a 2,750 ft. area, features a twelve faced sculptural mural painting. Each face depicts a different symbolic concept. The twelve concepts depicted are: Destiny, Ecology, Acrobats, Masses, Decalog, Christ, Indigenous Peoples, Dance, Mythology, Mingling of Races, Music, and Atom. The exterior work is meant to serve as a preview of the interior mural, to entice visitors to enter the building, and to make visitors contemplate the complex meanings of the concepts represented.

The year 1960 marked the fiftieth year of the Mexican Revolution, and the political situation in Mexico during the 1960s was quite grim. The early 1960s was marked by major control by the Left and attempts to create class equality, but these attempts unfortunately failed. In 1964, the combination of both an economic decline and an announcement that allottable land was near exhaustion led many peasants to revolt. In the late 1960s, the Right gained control, which led to many doctor and student strikes that were received with strong resistance from the government. The most shocking example of the murky political situation in 1960s Mexico happened in the form of the Tlatelolco Massacre on October 2, 1968. During a student demonstration that happened ten days before the Summer Olympics in Mexico City, police and military officers shot into a crowd of unarmed students at Tlatelolco Plaza. The final death toll remains a mystery, but it has been reported that four students died, twenty were wounded, and thousands were beaten, jailed, and disappeared. This event coincided with the intended opening of the Polyforum Cultural Siqueiros during the summer of 1968, and demonstrates how turbulent the political climate was in Mexico during the Polyforum's construction.

The Polyforum was designed as part of a major redevelopment/improvement project for Mexico City entitled Mexico 2000. Because of an increase in Mexico City's urban population, Mexico 2000 strived to generate income for the city through tourism and services at its decentralized location at Parque de la Lama. In addition to making arts more accessible to people through Siqueiros’ work at the Polyforum, some of the other contributions of Mexico 2000 included underground networks of driveways, closed circuit radio and television broadcasting, a new system of construction called “Tridilosa” that lightened the weight of the building structure as to allow for more rooms to be created, and expedited travel services for tourists coming into the city. The plaza's major hotel, “El Hotel de Mexico,” is 730 foot high building that was designed to house a large number of tourists. At the time, the hotel was the tallest reinforced concrete and earthquake resistant building in the world, and featured 1,512 rooms and suites with a variety of dining options. Equally important to tourism as the Polyforum, “El Hotel de Mexico” was built for both functionality and aesthetic pleasure through its architectural grandeur.

Although the date is rather uncertain, most agree that the initial commission of the Polyforum happened in 1960 before the radical artist Siqueiros was imprisoned for the charges of attacking police, resisting arrest, firing an illegal weapon, and inciting violence. Siqueiros officially accepted the commission from art patron and industrialist Manuel Suárez on September 7, 1964. The first request of Suárez was for a large mural to be housed in Cuernavaca. The location of the mural was then moved to Mexico City in 1966, and now is known as The March of Humanity. The location change to Parque de la Lama was part of Suárez's larger ideas to both draw people away from the urban center and to promote tourism in an effort to boost the suffering Mexican economy. Creating the Polyforum was a collective act, and required a large team of workers. Several architects, engineers, painters, sculptors, and acoustics experts from all around the world came to work on the massive project. The undertaking was so large that Siqueiros purchased an additional piece of land next to his home and studio in Cuernavaca for his team to complete the project. All of the panels for The March of Humanity were created in Cuernavaca, where Rhode Island School of Design alumni Mark Rogovin worked under Siqueiros. Rogovin attests to the fact that he and a friend were the only U. S. natives to be working on the project, as most of the other members were from Japan, Italy, Argentina, and various other locations around the world. According to Rogovin, Siqueiros was constantly at the studio, putting in long days and making sure that the project was being carried out to his standard. The project was initially to be completed for the 1968 Olympic Games, but due to political and financial complications, the Polyforum was not finished and inaugurated until December 15, 1971.

The main feature of the complex at Parque de la Lama is the Forum Universal, which contains Siquieros’ mural called La Marcha de la Humanidad (The March of Humanity). The building, which contains four floors and has an area of 134,000 square feet, also contains a theatre, two joined galleries and other facilities. Siqueiros’ mural covers the dome on the top floor, and up to one thousand spectators can stand on the rotating platform beneath the mural. Accompanying the viewing experience, a light and sound program that was designed by Manuel Suárez y Suárez plays to educate the viewers about the mural. The next floor down features a space for local and international art exhibitions. Below this floor is a theater that features various performances, as well as a small shopping area called the Universal Forum Emerging Art Space (EAE). The basement of the Polyforum is an open space that can be used for storage as well as exhibitions. Including the exterior panels, the mural measures 8,700 square meters.

This section of the mural depicts a revolution before a time of democratic revolution and is characterized by violence and confusion. There are many figures and forms in different positions, suggesting overall chaos. In the center, demagoguery emerges in the form of a clown who is flanked by militaristic figures. Ninety some figures are pictured in this scene and are compositionally stacked rather than overlapped. The upper register tells a story that begins with two dark skinned, half naked men shown with their knees bent. Next to them, two mothers and their several children walking through a barren landscape that features one large, tree like form in the background. The next figure is an old man who is bent down under a pile of sticks. Next to him is a group of women huddling together who are shown covering their children with shawls. This entire group is shown to be moving toward a white faced, dancing figure with his arms raised. This figure, who appears as a leader of some sort, is flanked by a group of people who are also raising their arms. The lower register features figures that are larger in scale than those in the upper register. The first form is an abstract, humanoid form that is more difficult to recognize than the figures from the upper register. Following him is a brutalized, black male figure who is shown armless and hanged, swinging from a noose. The next figures are two large, monstrous figures with recognizably human anatomy that are followed by a larger group of marchers that are shown in uniform, carrying spears and rifles. This procession of synchronized marchers closes out the frame.

This section shows a man offering industrialization to the west, and on the east side, a woman offering culture to humanize society. Converging lines that come out from the wall behind the figures unify the hands of the man and woman. The man in this scene is the leader who emerged from the amate tree in Section 2, and his return with the female suggests that he has successfully mated and created a new race. These two figures have brought the tools necessary to save humanity through starting a new march towards a better future. In addition, the Siqueiros Foundation preserves a collection of periodicals, audio, video and photography related to the artist, whose digitalization was begun in 2010. This collection consists of 102,908 documents and images with elements such as correspondence with contemporary intellectuals, writers and politicians, including that from the Siquieros was incarcerated in Lecumberri from 1960 to 1964. It also includes 7,000 postcards from Germany alone, and 10,000 photographs of family and 80,000 texts written about the artist.

Over its first forty years, the building suffered significant deterioration to its structure and its murals. The deterioration of the mural work is due to environmental factors and the materials Siquieros used to create the piece. In 2011, remodeling work was begun on the facility to mark its fortieth anniversary. Some restoration work had been performed in 2011, but lack of funds has prevented completion.