'Criollo' — When Bauhaus met Mexico City

"This work, titled 'Criollo' and in the 'Currents: Recent Acquisitions' show at the Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum, is by the 35-year-old Mexican artist Edgar Orlaineta, who has a graduate degree from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn but is based in Mexico City. According to its wall label, 'Criollo' is a mixed-media work whose materials include a bicycle, chromed steel, leather, nylon and a reproduction of the famous Wassily armchair — the first chair ever made of bent steel tubing, designed in 1925 by Bauhaus master Marcel Breuer. We asked Orlaineta how his art supplies came together.", wrote Blake Gopnik in an item in yesterday's Washington Post.

The interview follows.

Function Following Form

Q. Marcel Breuer wanted a bicycle factory to make his Wassily chair. Did you have to use furniture makers to make your rickshaw?

A. No, I did the same as Breuer. I went to the people who make the load tricycles in Mexico — these tricycles with a frame on the front like a box, for carrying stuff. You can see them everywhere in Mexico City: One is for selling tamales, one is for selling toys, one is for selling water, one is for selling ladders. That's where the idea came from. There was a formal relationship, and I also knew that Breuer was inspired by bicycles. So I took these Wassily chairs to a workshop, and the load box's frame was exactly the same proportions and size as the Wassily chair. It made complete sense. The idea was that we have these load tricycles that they sell by the million in Mexico and they serve a really good purpose — everybody has one — and they're really popular. But I've never seen this object in any book or in any design history. On the other hand, we have the Wassily chair, and it's very popular, but it's very expensive — and that was not the original idea of the Bauhaus. So we have these two objects that are really beautiful and functional, but they have a different historical status. The piece is about how we deal with these identities in Mexico: having this European ascendance of influence, and then how things come from outside and what we do to these things. It also came from this informalist culture that we have in Mexico City: People pick up stuff, and fix it, and repair it or add something to it.