Things To Do Before You Die..........

Most of us expatriates are going to die soon. Probably sooner than our grandchildren and probably not as soon as supercentanarian Bessie Cooper. So before you die there are a few things you ought to do. Here's a few of them essential tasks that will make your remaining years more fulfilled:

Go Yak Skiing

Take a night time tour of a Rio slum

Give Donald Trump a haircut

Become a vagrant

Get a job and get off unemployment benefit for the first time in your life

Have a slap fight with a bear

Go partake in a G20 riot

Paint your house like grass so no one knows where to go to visit you ever again

Establish an anarchic state

or visit La Luna Studio for the Found Art Exhibition or Transformations before it finishes soon.

This latest exhibition comes in two flavours as it were - overwhelming and underwhelming, overstated and understated, brazen and intimate and any other antonym around that idea you care to think of. Lanny Garland, visiting artist from  Patzcuaro, Jack de Vore and the rest of the La Luna pack. 

MazReal staff would generally try and find a way to blag themselves into any opening shindig whether it be the opening occasion of a envelope or a racehorse stud mating viewing as long as there is free booze but this time they did not send representatives to the opening night as there were more important things to do in touring the globe looking for that perfect massage and street ear cleaning experience. However our man eventually found his way to La Luna Contemporáneo at 1121 Niños Héroes.


First the overwhelming, overstated, brazen, amplified, imposing art.

Walk in off the street and this cheap critic was immediately blown back into the street again by the Patzcuaro visiting artist's imagination run riot with symbols of Mexicana and ancient tribes. Sacrifice and ceremony. Masks and colourful robes stiff like samurai armour, crazy turquoise chickens pecking corn down near the window, shrunken heads, a bull head with gold tipped horns and dangly earrings and above the door a male deer with antlers and gold trimmings. I would love to enter this man's mind in a little submersible craft and while away a few hours watching his cogs moving and producing. A drive-in film theatre of his thoughts projected on the back of his brain pan.

Where would you hang Garland's work if you bought it? Unless you had a Hearst House, a Getty House, a Queen Elizabeth II house or lived in the British Museum with a big spotlight to highlight it those'll be the places. But as this critic lives in a hole in the middle of Calle Aleman with three other interlopers I'd choose one of the other artists on show here.

Move further in and you feel a certain relief to be with the local artists' more intimate works. Works that you can lean into and study. These pieces caught my eye.


Mark R Jay's 'Douthitt Diaphragm-control Corporation Series 4L2' camera lens (Christ only knows where he unearthed that piece of kit) with dangling lens cap. A piece entitled  'the camera loves you'.  Press your face close and you can see yourself in the lens. Unfortunately no camera loves me so it was a worthless exercise. Next to it was a piece suggesting that '.....and after a little while his heart was full' , illustrated with what looks like a silver christening spoon and pottery container hanging from a piece of string from a rusty nail over a block of wood all underneath a cute silver heart. I love the components that make up this art work but if I bought it I would not be able to contain the urge to disassemble it and use the bowl and spoon for serving rock salt at a meal and hang them back when finished like when you hang pots in your kitchen. A usable artwork. An interactive artwork where I would hang them in different positions thereby creating my own piece of art every time I served salt. Thumbs up to Mark R Jay.


As you can see they got my imagination working and philosophising which should be the aim of art.

the camera loves you.

Follow onto the equally imaginative intimate works of Lucila Santiago - 'Acantilados, Tiempo Solidificado, and Flor de asfalto'. Lovely pieces from wood, oil, copper, steel, marble, gold leaf and my favourite of her's 'Candado Africano', a bird of wood, paper, ink and golf leaf. (A work that some other person has snapped up and red-dotted before this internationally celebrated critic had had a chance to purchase and place on his extensive wall covered in famous pieces.) 

Candado Africano

Back on yourself to Dave Robb's humorous graphic collages of newsprint covering table settings and a very nice 'Early Bird' rooster with a great haughty expression as roosters do. I'll have this one, it'll make me smile whenever I'd look at it. Reminding me of the Ottoman Grand Vizier  Seljuk Sultinate of Rüm

Early Bird

and  in the small backroom is to be found the always interesting and amusing Nan Robb exhibits. This time amongst others from her a little fat pink clay man with a green butterfly on his chest (to me they looked like a pair of green lungs hanging outside his body but on closer inspection I saw the butterfly) and red cheeks standing arms at his side one foot slightly backwards and small penis sticking forwards with fleshy worms radiating outwards inside a semicircular frame. He is 'Butterfly Man' in mixed media his visage conveying perplexity as his life is sucked out of him by those fleshy worms. Wish MazReal paid us fine writers a wage or even cigarette money (we gotta pay them cheap-skate bastards for the privilege!) 


Otherwise I would buy this one like a shot.

Other works - 


Glen Rogers' painted tinaco cover shield looking good in the sun bright setting. Wish I could do that with my tinaco lid, if I could find the damn thing. Some even cheaper-skate stole it and that was without a famous artist painting it. I reckon he came here saw this artwork and the price, climbed over the adjacent roofs and filched my lid with the hope he could sell it unpainted at Juarez Market for a tidy sum. Next to it  a piece entitled 'Pajaro' with lots of movement but it reminds me of an octopus swimming up the wall.

 Carlos Z's metal exhibit and Jack de Vore's often witty surreal pieces including 'Julia Childs Meets Georgia O'keefe'. Nice piece but haven't clue what the title is about - metaphorical one-liners obviously.

Judging by this latest exhibition from The La Luna Art Pack and visitors it seems that other Mazatlán art galleries will have to put in a lot of work and imagination if they want to catch up with what La Luna Contemporáneo is coming up with. Onwards and Upwards.

Actually what a day out it would be to sit in the collective brain pan of all these artists and watch an electrical synaptic movie of their imaginations at work. I could stay the whole show.

(For more pictures of the exhibition opening bash go here)


© MazReal 2011

If You Thought Mexico Had It's Share Of Homeless People......Check Out Mumbai India.

MazReal staff photographer Skip Church just got back from the colourful country of India at the invitation of the Badshah Nawab Nizam Wali of Swat to photograph his pet dog. 


Stepping out the front door and taking a stroll three hundred metres to the spectacular Victorian Gothic  Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus railway station to take a train to the Nawab's palace he snapped these images.


Enjoy your breakfast, lunch, dinner, four walls and bed..............!

Indian cows get a better deal - their own beach umbrella and food without lifting a hoof........Albeit they are sacred. Crazy place that country.

© MazReal 2011

La Luna Exhibition - Transformations.

An exhibition of art from recycled material and found objects at La Luna Art Gallery (march 30 - April 30) featuring works by these luminaries 

 Jack DeVore, Mark R. Jay, David Robb, Nan Robb,

Glen Rogers, Lucila Santiago, Rafael Avila Tirado, Carlos Z and a great visiting artist Lanny Garland whose life began in the watershed of the Big Horn Mountain. He produces wonderful 'tribal' art from 'hand hammered copper, hand worked silver, gold leaf, and found object pieces in several other materials. Finishes are natural and hand applied patinas along with paint and decorative rivets and chain.'

This piece below is beautiful to me and scary at the same time. I can imagine a priest sitting on his haunches meditating smoking a hallucinogenic spliff in some far gone era ready to place this vestidura over his head before going out into the blazing sun to the sacrificial altar with a machete hanging from his hand where a man is tied, his pale neck exposed, waiting for it to be parted from his body. This piece I find tell a story and therefore that makes it compelling art especially when it is put together from found objects.

The term found art describes art created from the undisguised, but often modified, use of objects that are not normally considered art, often because they already have a non-art function. Marcel Duchamp was the originator of this in the early 20th century with his fountain 

by R Mutt.Duchamp himself described it as readymade art or if you are French objet trouvé. But according to this critic that term is just semantics and R.Mutt 'found' this men's urinal and signed it in what could be 

described as an ironic anti-art gesture or paying homage to the spirit of  DADA. This piece was voted 'most influential work of modern art' by the 

Turner Prize Committee  

Found Art is art because the artist says it is. The context in which it is placed is also highly relevant and although it may now be accepted in the art world as a feasible practice, it continues to arouse questioning. But the artist expects the audience the time to contemplate the object and hopefully it will prompt philosophical reflection and this can only be a good thing. But audiences these days bred on a diet of fast editing, flashing, throwaway images and the attention spans of a gnat can not always be relied on to stand back and appreciate found art because they either want to hang around at the bar  sipping vino or they are outside plotting a coup, having a cigarette or rioting after which they may return to the object and say; 

'What crap, my 2 year can do that.' 

Picasso 1943 Bull Head.

This piece by Picasso, brilliant that it is, consist of nothing but the seat and handlebars of an old bicycle. Of course, the materials Picasso used are manufactured, but it would be crazy to insist that he must share the credit with the manufacturer, since the seat and handlebars in themselves are not works of art.

"While we feel a certain jolt when we first recognize the ingredients of this visual pun, we also sense that it was a stroke of genius to put them together in this unique way, and we cannot very well deny that it is a work of art."

Mmmm let's think about that pompous quote for a bit...

I reckon my Grandpa working in his garage fixing my bike may have put a saddle together with a set of handlebars and thought about a kudu, a badger or even a bull, but it was not art because there was no story behind it, he was not an accepted artist and he did not put it together in a 'unique' way. It was just my Grandpa in a garage in a moment of boredom. Whereas Picasso, an artist obsessed with masculine vitality from Spain the land of bullfighting realised from some junk he could create a bull's head... now that is a story and now my poor Grandpa is totally forgotten even though he thought of it first and is now lying in his grave thinking ..'That bastard Picasso dang stole my dang idea.' And i bet every bicycle shop owner from Calle Teniente Azueta to Bulgaria has at one time done the same thing and thought the same thing.

An artist can put something together in a unique way whereas I cannot and it is not art and  it all could, in this jaded critic's eye, be a case of The Emperor's New Clothes. 

Stuckists, a group promoting going back to real painting say 

"Readymade art is a polemic of materialism".

So let's all open our minds, check this out and hopefully not walk out of a 'found objects' exhibition quoting the Stuckists ..

Man contemplating a refrigerator he 'found' in a corner of a room.
Fantastic piece put together by MazReal staff.

Damien Hirst - 

The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. 

A found shark with a meaningless pretentious name that makes it art.

Colin George Jaffrey
Some crap he found in his kitchen, was going to throw out, then thought lets make a Tea Pot bird.

One thing that does bother us though, is the term recycled art in that it draws one's mind to kiddies art classes where they bring home crappy stuff made from toilet tubes or tin cans or bent forks as wind chimes. It could also be termed SHOESTRING ART we suppose. We therefore cannot wait to see what these esteemed artists and their imaginations do with recycled materials.

(Our regular art critic Eustice Remington is on the plane to Mumbai or if you still think the sun never sets on the British Empire, Bombay India where he will be contemplating various Victorian splendid colonial architectures, studying the Kama Sutra, spiritualizing with the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh II and studying eastern mysticism and sexual freedom. Good Luck Eustice and please don't come back - Ed)

MazReal will not be at the opening (we have decided to go get 'Useless' in Mumbai lock him up in his hovel where he stays until his mystagogue conversion to the Aetherius Society and takes off in a flying saucer so that we can taste the delights ourselves)

 and will give our impressions of the other artists' works later in the month. 

सूरज के दूसरे पक्ष पर उज्जवल चमकता as they say in Hindi!

©MazReal Productions 2011

MazReal Reporter Claymore Jones Reports From Libya

 MazReal reporter Claymore 'The Mine' Jones takes a relaxed attitude whilst waiting for the action to happen out near Benghazi Libya. Christ knows when we will get some feedback from him. It seems that working on your tan is more important than writing copy.

(In reply to our last post anonymous commentator: Thanks for the interest and commentary, but we at MazReal don't use more gas than liquid household products in our car because when we get around we have our Malay servants Wang and Ishmael pushing us. It amazing how much gas we save. We actually get through large amounts of the two most expensive products however - Dom Perignon which we drink and nail varnish which we sniff both in industrial quantities. - Ed)

'Ol Blue Nose Has a Few things to Say....Plus Some Images Pile Up.

All day we at MazReal, now that the Mexican weather is verging on perfect, have been drinking chilled vodka and lazily swinging in our hammocks helped along by the Malay servants doing the physical bit. It is good to shut out the world every so often especially now that we are forcing our collective will on some other unfortunate Arab nation. Now that the French are involved we can feel a lot better about blowing up things and ordering French Fries, applying camembert cheese to our crackers and dabbing No.19 under the ears.

Creatively staring into space and silently philosophizing is therefore good, listening to nothing except the tinnitus and the yappy dog across the road (who one of these days by God we are going to dognap in a cardboard box and leave out by the airport) 

When one is lying in a comatose state Frank 'ol blue nose Snotra usually comes to mind. So here are some Frank quotes. He had to say these kind of inane things just to keep up his aura of cool. I bet the Rat Pack would give him a good ribbing if he came out with this lot in their presence.

Alcohol may be man's worst enemy, but the bible says love your enemy.

Basically, I'm for anything that gets you through the night - be it prayer, tranquilizers or a bottle of Jack Daniels.

I like intelligent women. When you go out, it shouldn't be a staring contest.

I feel sorry for people who don't drink. When they wake up in the morning, that's as good as they're going to feel all day.

Yes, real hats not damn baseball caps.

Frank goes oooooooo.Here he is trying to look interested while Grace Kelly shoves her big camera in his face.

At least if you are going to talk manly about booze all the time like Frank does, it should be sophisticated booze not this backwoods bourbon crap that he bangs on about. Stolichnaya, schnapps, Tom Collins, a Gibson, absinthe, armignac, Campari and Tonic, negroni. We could go on forever as this is a small example we have in our cosmopolitan cocktail bar.

Here's some pictures to look at ..........

I bet this smart-arse male ad copyrighter didn't have any women friends.

Now this is the way we like to smoke. Sophisticated yet utilitarian.

If anyone knows what the hell is going on here in this creepy image, you are free to comment. Looks like something Sarah Palin might be involved with.

"I dunno who the dang hell you are and I dont care if that is not a bible, marry us now or I'll blow you full of holes."

We all want a midmorning conference drinking water with our partner while sitting on a tractor. Yes sirrreeee.

You better keep this handy when your kids come and visit so you know what they are talking about in this modern parlance they use these days on Facebook. So if she brings 'twangie boy' into the conversation you know she's got her eye on some sexy hunk that plays sport and is probably a bit thin between the ears.

Python Lee Jackson ft Rod Stewart... Damn This One takes Me back..

 Python Lee Jackson ft Rod Stewart - In A Broken Dream (Ole Smokey's Ivory Towers Edit) by Ole Smokey

Is Your Marriage on The Skids?

We all know that happily married expats stuck way out in the tropics can sometime begin to drift apart. We all know the British Empire produced the most cases of divorce in the history of this planet. There are many reasons for this:

Lack of proper body maintenance

Excessive wind

Too many servants give you nothing to do all day

Imparting unsolicited advice 24 hours a day

Finger pointing

Nagging

Looking uninteresting

Conflicts over power and gardening

Joining a drug cartel without prior discussion

avoiding his embrace

staring into space

incomplete daintiness

listening to Cliff Richard

Voting for Christine O'Donnell

Save it by:

Teaching your dog to do tricks

Dress up like a cartoon character

Compare yourself to an animal

Pretend you are a tourist.

go rock climbing

assassinate President Chavez

Jump out an airplane with one parachute

Join a religious cult

OR together go visit an exhibition of monotype prints at La LUNA bar and Grill

Rooster by Nan Robb

Our man of the moment 'Useless' Eustace Remington took the short walk down to La Luna Bar for a drink where he came upon an exhibition of monotype. Heading for the bar he was stopped dead in his tracks by some great works. A number which caught his eye especially a print of a cock by that talented, world famous artist Nan Robb. By the time he had elbowed his way through the crowds to the bar, ordered a drink, then another and five later, the picture Rooster by Nan Robb had a red dot on it. Probably the fastest selling print in any bar that he had ever been into and he's been into thousands. Sauntering debonairly around with a drink in each and his cheeks full of delicious bar snacks by that world renown chef Alastair Porteous, many other prints by equally famous artists caught his eye:

Lucila Santiago

Robynn Smith

Katherin Levin-Lau 

Marxist agitators aggressively sitting on the kerbside of Calle Niños Heroes shouting and making a nuisance of themselves.

Egressing for a breath of air and a puff on a cheroot, he spied across the road a louche collection of slovenly dodgy characters drinking home-made spirits asking for handouts for their revolutionary cause and shouting Socialist slogans and spraying graffiti calling for people to 'Recognise Cachaça' (That famous Brazilian Marxist spirit) and to vote for the Keg Party. (the party who call for bars to be open 24 hours and free drinks to all communist party card holders.) The intellectual hipster agitator in the sandals seems to want the illuminati destroyed. Which means he has a beef with that Bavarian secret society founded in 1776, the Freemasons, the Ordi Tempii Orientis and the Gøtterdåmmerung Society. Easy you lefty we think that is taking it a bit too damn far!

Giving them a wide berth Eustice hastened back into the safety of the packed bar where, as can be seen, the four barkeeps are having difficulty fulfilling the orders of the multitudes.

Rafael Avila Tirado

Another great piece by Rafael Avila Tirado. 'Useless' had to view this striking print from afar as it seemed to be guarded by another two characters, one a hoody and the other giving this famous journalist the 'eye'.

The news of this exhibition has gone far and wide as even a sailor had found her way here from the US navy starship USS BlackStarInterprize doing maneuvers above Stone Island.

The organizers and curators of this exhibition have done a fine job and lets hope that they all sell their works. Mazatlán is lucky to have an establishment that hangs interesting art. 

Eustice, you fool, where you just been is not a drinking establishment it is an art gallery!!! You are hereby sacked! - Editor.