Message 

“The only thing Mathias was interested in was art, art, art,” recalled Ida Rodríguez Prampolini, the distinguished art historian and the artist’s second wife. “Religion was the other thing that mattered to him. He was a Protestant. At home we often had guests who were Protestant pastors, bishops—we were good friends with Bishop Méndez Arceo—, priests of various denominations, to discuss religion” (I. Rodríguez Prampolini, quoted in M. Méndez-Gallardo, “Obsessed with Art: An Interview with Ida Rodríguez Prampolini”, Artes de México, no. 115, December 2014, p. 70). Goeritz had left Europe in 1949, in the aftermath of the Second World War, and in Mexico he persistently probed the meanings of art as prayer, channeling light—across gilded surfaces and through stained-glass windows—as an expression of mystical experience.
A series of spindly crucifixions, Saviors of Auschwitz, presaged the first of his iconic Messages, manifestations of modernist religious art wrought in perforated-metal and, later, gold-leaf monochrome. Begun in the late 1950s, the Messages explore relations of light, color, and (im)materiality that Goeritz had earlier developed in such major works as the Museo Experimental El Eco (1953) and Torres de Satélite (1957). The Messages similarly engage architectural questions of void, volume, and structure, transforming the space around them through the reflective brilliance of their surfaces and, ultimately, evoking pure aesthetic—and spiritual—emotion. Loosely associated with Mexico’s Ruptura generation, which rose in opposition to the Muralists in the 1950s, Goeritz belonged to an international avant-garde, and his monochrome abstraction engaged contemporary currents in Minimalism as well as the material provocations of Group ZERO and Yves Klein, among others.
Goeritz produced Messages through the end of his career, with variations in format and scale, but their origins date to the death from cancer of his first wife, Marianne, in 1958 and to the intentional, religious turn of his practice around the same time. The first works consisted of scrap metal sheets perforated and nailed to wooden supports recycled from local building sites and shantytowns; he referred to them as sudarios (shrouds), recalling the famous Shroud of Turin, as well as clavados (nailed things) and clouages (from the French “clou,” or nail). Titles cite a number of cautionary Old Testament passages, among them Proverbs 20:15: “There is gold, and a multitude of rubies: but the lips of knowledge are a precious jewel.” These early Messages were soon followed by the Metachromatic Messages, covered with gold leaf and without perforations, which sought meaning beyond monochrome through an experience of transcendence. A number of large-scale Messages were integrated within architectural settings, notably the triptych altarpiece (1965) at a convent of Capuchin nuns in Tlalpan designed by his friend and collaborator, Luis Barragán, and the mural Abstracto en dorado (1968), installed in Ricardo Legorreta’s Hotel Camino Real in Mexico City.
The Messages collectively constitute the kind of plastic prayer that Goeritz described in his manifesto, “L’art prière contre l’art merde” (1960), which repudiated the ephemeral, the commercial, and the obscene in favor of the sacred. “Prayer art,” he declared, is:
the pyramid,
the cathedral,
the ideal,
mystical or human love,
fullness of the heart,
the image of nothing and everything,
the struggle against the ego and for GOD,
the rebellion of Dada against disbelief,
the never-reached sun,
the crucifixion of vanity and ambition,
the interior law of faith,
form and color as an expression of adoration,
the metaphysical monochrome,
emotional experience,
the modest line that creates the world of spiritual fantasy,
the irrational and absurd beauty of the Gregorian chant,
absolute service and consecration;
this is ART.
This is PRAYER.
(M. Goeritz, “L’art prière contre l’art merde” (May 1960), quoted in J. Josten, Mathias Goeritz: Modernist Art and Architecture in Cold War Mexico, New Haven, 2018, p. 186).
Goeritz published this manifesto on the occasion of his solo show at Iris Clert Gallery in Paris, inciting reprisals from Arman, among the Nouveaux Réalistes, who included one thousand copies of the manifesto among the garbage with which he filled the gallery later that year in a work called Le Plein. Yves Klein, another of the gallery’s artists and famed for his own monochromes (including “Monogolds”), accused Goeritz of plagiarism. But if Goeritz felt alienated from the European neo-avant-garde and its self-destructive impulse, his Messages found a warmer reception in New York. “He was well known in the United States,” recalled Rodríguez Prampolini. “We often went to New York because there were certain Dadaists there, like Richard Hülsenbeck. He was also good friends with Rothko and many of the American abstract artists” (R. Prampolini, quoted in M. Méndez-Gallardo, “Obsessed with Art,” p. 70).
The present Message numbers among the works that Goeritz showed at the noted Byron Gallery, on New York’s Madison Avenue, in a signal early exhibition of 1964. Writing for the New York Times, Stuart Preston declared the show “arresting” and agreed that “Mathias can do anything,” as the catalogue pronounced. “He appears to be the Jack-of-all-styles-and-mediums, going all-out modern in Picasso-like metal constructions; blocky Stonehenge-like pieces of sculpture; pictures made of torn and rusted metal plugged with holes, and unnamable objects studded with nails or riddled like sieves” (S. Preston, “Galleries are Showing Variety of Items”, The New York Times, 18 January 1964). An eminent Surrealist dealer, Charles Byron traveled often to Mexico starting around 1960; his gallery showed pre-Columbian art and also supported Pedro Friedeberg, a younger artist whom Goeritz mentored and one of “Los Hartos” (“The Fed-Ups”) who took their name from another of Goeritz’s manifestos and the group exhibition that followed. “We would transform the work of man into a prayer,” Goeritz and Los Hartos asserted, “or at least make every effort to do so” (M. Goeritz, “Estamos hartos” (Mexico City: Galería Antonio Souza, 1961), in M. C. Ramírez and H. Olea, Inverted Utopias: Avant-Garde Art in Latin America, New Haven, 2004, p. 479).
Goeritz instilled the potential of art as prayer across his Messages, their luminous surfaces an invitation to the sublime. In the present work, the gold monochrome incorporates three wooden reliefs, placed asymmetrically across the surface. Their geometric shapes recall the moveable pieces—cylinders, cubes, monoliths—presented on a flat slab in the series Do It Yourself, also shown at Byron. Breaking the flat plane, the blocks suggest plastic possibilities of creation and movement; their volumes subtly redirect light and shadow, entering into dialogue with the structure of the wall and the surrounding space. Gleaming and truly iconic, in both an aesthetic and a religious sense, Goeritz’s Messages cultivate awareness of a spiritual presence, ritualizing our experience of viewing and, suggestively, bringing us closer to the divine.
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park