Ángela Gurría_1998:olympika

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Research Notes

The Route of Friendship:

A Cultural/Artistic Event of the Games of the XIXOlympiad in Mexico City - 1968

Karel Wendl*

Every edition of the Olympic Games has been unique and a landmark in the his-

tory of the Olympic Movement. The following were some of the most important pos-

itive and innovative characteristics of the Games of the XIX Olympiad held in

Mexico City in 1968.

- They were the first Olympic Games held in a “developing country.”

- They were the first Games held in Latin America.

- They were the first Olympic Games at which the running events were held

on a “tartan “ track, i.e. a track made of synthetic material.

- For the first time a female athlete lit the Olympic fire at the opening cere-

mony of the Games.

- They became known as the Games at which numerous African athletes,

especially long distance runners excelled, thus drawing attention to the enor-

mous athletic potential of the inhabitants of that continent.

- They were the first Games held at a high altitude above sea level; which

lead to an extraordinary development of sports medicine and of the study of

the effects of physical effort and training on the human organism in a high

mountain environment . Thus for example outstanding performances were

achieved especially by the athletes competing in sports and events requiring

speed and dynamic strength in contrast to those requiring endurance and a

* Karel Wendl is former Director of the IOC Research/Archives Department in

Lausanne, Switzerland. A dual citizen of Mexico and the Czech Republic, he

resides in Prague where he is retired.

OLYMPIKA: The International Journal of Olympic Studies Volume VII 1998, pp. 113-134



114 Olympika Volume VII - 1998

prolonged effort.

- Excellent artistic and cultural events were held in connection with these

Games throughout several years before their inauguration and during the

Games themselves . They were part of the “Cultural Olympiad of the Games

of the XIX Olympiad”. Outstanding works of art from many parts of the

world as well as poets, dance groups, musicians and artists of all branches

visited the capital and other cities of the country and thousands of Mexican

and foreign spectators enjoyed an extraordinarily rich cultural life especially

in the two years prior to as well as during the Games. The success of this

Cultural Olympiad became a model and an inspiration for future Olympic

Games.

One of the cultural artistic realizations of the Mexico City Olympic Games was

the planning and execution of nineteen abstract, monumental, concrete sculptures on

the Southern part of the “Anillo Periferico”, the superhighway leading around thecapital of the country. It was an example of team work on a large project of an artistic

nature made possible especially by two distinguished personalities, architect Pedro

Ramirez Vazquez, who was the President of the organizing committee of Mexico’s

Olymic Games, and Mathias Goeritz, a German sculptor who was the creator and

director of the project.

At that time architect Pedro Ramirez Vazquez had already received both national

and international acclaim for having designed the acclaimed National Museum of

Anthropology, the Aztec Stadium, and other outstanding buildings as well as hun-

dreds of public schools built by local labor and materials. He later became a memberof the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and, together with his Swiss col-

league, Jean Pierre Cahen, designed both the administrative building of the IOC and

the Olympic Museum in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Mathias Goeritz was a noted sculptor, born in the free city port of Danzig, who

had to flee from the Nazis because he was partly of Jewish origin. He settled in Mex-

ico after the Second World War. In 1957 Goeritz had designed a group of concrete

towers called the “Torres de Satelite” in the suburb “Ciudad Satelite” near Mexico

City. These tower-sculptures were conceived with a direct relationship to a super-

highway. Today they are situated in a densely populated area of the huge megalopo-

lis.

At the time this project began to be considered , i.e. in 1966, I lived in Mexico,

my country of adoption and of which I am a citizen. I had the good fortune of being

named as the project’s “international Secretary.”

In 1966 Mathias Goeritz proposed to Pedro Ramirez Vazquez that the organizing

committee of the Games of the XIX Olympiad convene an international meeting of

sculptors in Mexico as one of the cultural events of the Olympic Games. Numerous

meetings devoted exclusively to aesthetic questions had already been held in the past

in different parts of the world, but the idea was that this one should give the artists a

specific task or theme. The meeting was supposed to gather together sculptors from

every continent, from all ethnic groups and from all the main political trends of the

world at that time. It thus had an idealistic and humanistic nature that transcended

aesthetics and was in conformity with the fundamental principles of the Olympic



The Route of Friendship 115

Movement. It was to be an international event with the unifying theme of brotherhood

of all the peoples of the world. The particular problem the sculptors were to solve lim-

ited their artistic liberty by the following restrictions: the sculptures had to be made of

concrete, be monumental, and abstract. Furthermore, the sculptors were supposed to

have in mind solutions related to being located adjacent to a superhighway. The Pres-

ident of the organizing committee gave his full support.

The nineteen monumental sculptures were executed along the “Anillo Perifer-

ice”, on both sides of the Olympic Village. At that time this expressway which was in

the process of construction passed through zones outside the city as well as urbanized

areas. It also went through parks and sparsely inhabited zones which later became

part of the city.

At the opening session of the International Meeting of Sculptors in Mexico City

on June 17,1968, Mathias Goeritz said, among other things:

Modern man’s environment is becoming increasingly chaotic. The growth of

population, the socialization of life and the advance of technology create anatmosphere of confusion. The ugliness of many indispensable elements and

of advertising in general, disfigures urban communities, particularly in the

suburbs and on the highways. The latter in this century of accelerated tempo,

and the automobile, have acquired an unprecedented significance . As a con-

sequence, there is an urgent need for artistic design focused on contempo-

rary town and thoroughfare planning. Artists, instead of being invited to

collaborate with urban planners, architects and engineers, stand apart and

produce only for the minority that visits art galleries and museums. An art

integrated from the very inception of the urban plan is of fundamentalimportance in our age. This means that artistic work will have to leave its

environment of art for art’s sake and establish contact with the masses by

means of total planning.

These fundamental thoughts motivated Mathias Goeritz to proceed with the

“Route of Friendship” project. Mexico was the ideal country for its realization

because of the nature of its landscape and its stage of development at that time. Goer-

itz had full responsibility for the direction of the overall project. He had, however, to

explain and justify his ideas and their realization to Pedro Ramirez Vazquez, the Pres-ident of the organizing committee who encouraged and fully supported him. He orga-

nized a team of collaborators. Mexican architect Enrique Langenscheid became his

right hand man for the coordination of ideas and their execution by engineers. Chris-

tian Soucaret, a French sculptor, was technical adviser to the invited sculptors for the

execution of their works. Mexican critics, Jorge Hernandez Campos and Francisco

Reyes Palma, architects Oscar Urrutia and Luis Martinez del Campo, as well as engi-

neers Enrique Ochoa and Ernesto Olguin, all helped to carry out this complicated

project.

This project was very ambitious and has become the object of both praise and

censure since it came into being. The intention of giving the event a universal,

humanistic quality and of gathering sculptors from all over the world made the project

team face a series of non-artistic considerations which caused problems . Some sculp-

tors whom Mathias considered highly qualified were not invited, while others were




chosen because they fulfilled certain prerequisites which were not exclusively related

to their artistic work. It was, for example, impossible at that time to find a black

sculptor in Africa whose work would adequately fit into the “Route”. That is why we

invited a black artist from New-York. The selected African sculptor was a Moroccan.

Since there was a black sculptor from the U.S.A., we also invited a white one. Simi-

larly, since the African sculptor came from the Arab world, we also invited an Israeli.

In some countries, especially the European ones, there were so many eligible sculp-

tors that the selection became difficult. This was also the case in New York City. The

sculptor from Asia was a Japanese artist then living and working in Mexico.

Mathias Goeritz preferred not to play a formal role in the selection of the sculp-

tors and he therefore arranged for the creation of a committee for that purpose com-

posed of an architect, an art critic and a representative of the “Instituto Nacional de

Bellas Artes.”

Unfortunately, the original aim of redesigning the entire road to make it one

unique artistic work could not be fully achieved in the short time available. That is

why, after many changes in the decisions about the space available for the sculptures,

it was finally decided that they would be erected alongside a seventeen kilometer

stretch of the “Anillo Periferico” with the Olympic Village in its center. The sculp-

tures are about one and a half kilometers apart, except for some portions of the road

near the Olympic Village and inside the latter where they are closer to one another.

As already mentioned all the works had to be realized with concrete. This mate-

rial, apart from being the same as that of the road pavement, offered more possibilities

than any other construction medium for erecting sculptures of a large size at a rela-

tively low cost. Mexican firms generously supplied, free of charge, the necessary

cement and steel. The sculptures had to be very large if they were not to look ridicu-lous and puny in the greater landscape.

Mathias Goeritz decided where each of the sculptures would be erected and what

exact size each should be. For this purpose he assembled photos of the models of the

sculptures which he then glued onto photos of many of the sites in several positions

and he carefully studied them before taking a decision. He even had models made of

some of the especially difficult sites .

Since Goeritz knew each of the sites on which the sculptures would be erected

and was responsible for obtaining a maximum of overall unity, he had to increase or

decrease the size of individual projects as he thought best. Of the nineteen sculpturesalong the route, ten were executed in the size originally proposed by their authors, six

had their size decreased (by fifteen to fifty percent) and three had their size increased

(by twenty to one hundred and forty percent ). The increase in the size was welcomed

by the authors, whereas the decrease caused dissatisfaction, even though none of the

sculptors whose work had suffered the latter, refused to have his work exhibited. The

Route of Friendship would look even more majestic in its surroundings if the sculp-

tures were bigger, but their size had to be adapted to the existing financial possibili-

ties.

The sculptors came to Mexico in June 1968. They were invited for two months inorder to supervise the most important part of the execution of their own sculptures.

When they arrived, the necessary calculations and technical designs for their works

had already been made and the foundations of their sculptures had been built.

In a few cases, artists who had little experience with concrete made life compli-




cated for the committee. Their models were difficult to execute in full scale. At the

beginning some of them felt that their requirements had not been met adequately but

later on, thanks to the prevailing spirit of teamwork, they all manifested a high degree

of understanding.

Another problem was the design of the landscape around the sculptures. Some

artists had a fixed idea of what the base or floor and the treatments of the surround-

ings of their work should be like. Forced by circumstances to make simplifications,

gravel was generally used for the base so that the monument stood out by itself with-

out plants or artificial protection walls. Exceptionally, Pierre Szekely’s sculpture

(France-Hungary), the style of which is very different from all the others, was placed

in an area planted with trees.

Goeritz found an adequate location for the majority of the sculptures. They may

have looked even better if they had been placed closer together. However, in order to

do that, it would have been necessary to carry out complicated and very costly eleva-

tion changes of the ground alongside the road. The characteristics of the road-sides,

the necessity of establishing a certain order in the placing of the sculptures, and Goer-itz’s desire to have them on the right side of a person driving towards the Olympic

Village, account for their final placements. Three of the sculptures are not alongside

the road: those of Jacques Moeschal (Belgium) and Todd Williams (U.S.A.) are

inside the Olympic Village. The third and last sculpture which was designed by Jorge

Dubon (Mexico), is located in the town of Xochimilco, very near the road.

The “Route of Friendship”was striking at night as one drove along it. The illumi-

nation was carried out with the advice of the outstanding Mexican stenographer Julio

Prieto. The sculptures were illuminated from the ground. Unfortunately, as the lamps

were placed within reach of people who passed by, they were gradually damaged orstolen. At present, they are illuminated at special occasions. The “Route” is still very

beautiful, even though today the entire surrounding area is densely populated.

To inform people traveling by car alongside the sculptures of the names of the

sculptors and their countries of origin, Goeritz designed a sign that was placed about a

hundred meters in advance of each monument’s location. These signs were made of

two disks, one horizontal and the other vertical. They were made of cement painted in

white with lettering in black.

Despite the limited time and means available, the “Route of Friendship” became

a reality. It exists and is still there. It proved that team work is feasible in Olympic art.The most helpful improvisational talent of the Mexican people was a blessing and the

fact that the President of the organizing committee of the Games of the XIX Olym-

piad was a talented architect, endowed with perception and sensibility, was a great

advantage. The project was carried out with the generous help of several official and

private institutions. Among them were the Department of the Federal District, the

Ministry of Public Works, the Chambers of Concrete, Iron and the Construction

Industry, as well as many private companies.

The “Route of Friendship” represents a humanistic, Olympic attempt to achieve

harmony between different peoples and races of the world. Its artistic concept wasunique at that time: a highway of sculpture, the purpose of which was to unite human-

istic and artistic endeavor. The spirit of innovation of this project, i.e. the artistic plan-

ning of suburbs and roads, was a contribution to town-planning as well as to the

cultural and artistic achievements of the modern Olympic Movement which paved the



118 Olympika

way for future generations of architects, artists, and engineers.

Volume VII - 1998

Invited Sculptors and their Sculptures

(in order of appearance along the route)

Angela Gurría - Mexico

Angela Gurría was born in Mexico City in 1929, studied sculpture under German

Cueto and worked in the studios of Abraham Gonzalez and Mario Zamora. She was

awarded first prize in the III Biennial of Sculpture in Mexico for her work in integrat-

ing sculpture and architecture. Angela Gurría taught sculptural techniques at the

Ibero-American University and the University of the Americas.




Willi Gutmann - Switzerland

Willi Gutmann was born in Diesdorf, Switzerland in 1927 and studied in several

European countries. He became interested in monumental sculpture and in the devel-

opment of mobile figures based on a disjointed body which can turn or move. He par-

ticipated in one-person as well as group exhibitions in Switzerland, Germany, the

United Kingdom, the U.S.A., Japan, and Mexico.




Milos Chlupác - Czechoslovakia

Milos Chlupác was born in Benesov, Czechoslovakia in 1920. After a period of

working in stone, he studied sculpture at the Prague School of Decorative Arts. Heparticipated in the exhibitions of the “MAYO” group as well as in group exhibitions

in Czechoslovakia, Italy and Poland, He took part in the International Symposium of

Sculpture in St. Margreten, Austria, and the French Symposium of Sculpture in

Grenoble.




Koshi Takahashi - Japan

Kloshi Takahashi was born in Japan in 1925 and studied at the Tokyo Academy

of Art. He came to Mexico and settled down in Jalapa where he studied the prehis-

panic culture and modern art of Mexico. He made a series of sculptures for the Uni-

versity of Veracruz. Takahashi participated in the II National Biennial organized by

the INBA (National Institute of Fine Arts), the IX International Biennial of Tokyoand the Tokyo National Museum of Art’s “Exhibition of Japanese Artists Residing

Abroad.”




Pierre Székely - France / Hungary

Pierre Székely was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1923. In 1968 he lived in

France . He studied design, modeling and wood sculpture. He specialized in the cre-ation of monumental sculptures and worked in close collaboration with architects on

problems of architectonic integration and sculptural games for children. One of his

noteworthy works of sculptural architecture is the “Chapelle du Carmel” in Valenci-

ennes, France.




Gonzalo Fonseca - Uruguay

Gonzalo Fonseca was born in Montevideo, Uruguay in 1922. In 1968 he was liv-

ing in the U.S.A. He studied architecture and collaborated with Joaquin Torres Gar-

cia, exponent of American constructive universalism. He traveled to the Near East

and lived in Paris where he painted and worked on murals and ceramics. At the time

of the preparation of the Games of the XIX Olympiad in Mexico-1968, he special-

ized in architectural sculptures and murals, made experiments with various materials

and worked on the integration of art and architecture in the U.S.A.




Constantino Nivola - Italy / United States

Constantino Nivola was born in Sardinia, Italy in 1911. In 1968 he was living in

the U.S.A. He had been a fine arts teacher at the Monza Institute in Milan, art directorof the Olivetti Corporation of Italy, as well as of architectural publications in New

York, director of the design studio at Harvard University, and art instructor at Colum-

bia University. He worked in applied sculpture and architectural integration and spe-

cialized in large murals in which he used a new system of sand-casting for bas-reliefs.




Jacques Moeschal - Belgium

Jacques Moeschal was born in Uccle, Belgium in 1913 and taught at the RoyalAcademy of Fine Arts and at the National School of Architecture and Visual Arts in

Brussels. He was a member of the Technical Committee for the Advancement of the

Arts in Royaumont, France and of the Symposia Committee of European Sculptors in

Austria. He sculpted several monumental and commemorative sculptures in Canada,

Egypt, Austria, Italy, the Netherlands, and Belgium.




Todd Williams - United States

Todd Williams was born in Savannah, Georgia in 1939 and attended City Col-lege and the School of Visual Arts in New York. He was art instructor at the Manhat-

tan Country School and at the Bernstein Institute. He was awarded several prizes and

fellowships and participated in exhibitions in the U.S.A. and Africa.

Grzegorz Kowalski - Poland

Grzegorz Kowalski was born in Warsaw, Poland in 1942 and graduated from the

Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts. His work was exhibited at several Polish symposia




and at international exhibitions, such as the II Biennial of Forms in Space in Elblag

and the III Biennial of Architecture in Brno.

* Note: The author apologizes for not having been able to obtain and include a pic-

ture of Jose Maria Subirach’s sculpture.

Clement Meadmore - Australia

Clement Meadmore was born in Melbourne, Australia in 1929. In 1968 he lived

in the U.S.A. He studied industrial design and engineering at the Royal Melbourne

Technical College. He participated with his works in exhibitions in Melbourne and

Sydney. His work was closely related to that of the structuralists. He took part in

group exhibitions of the so-called “primary structures” trend.




Herbert Bayer - United States / Austria

Herbert Bayer was born in Haag, Austria in 1900. In 1968 he lived in Aspen,Colorado, U.S.A. He studied under Kandinsky at the Bauhaus School of Weimar and

at Dessau, where he later taught. He worked in many areas : industrial, graphic and

environmental design, photography, painting, visual communication, architecture,

sculpture applied to architecture, monumental sculpture, murals, reconstruction of old

buildings, sculptural gardens, bridges, and museography.




Joop J. Beljon - The Netherlands

Joop J. Beljon was born in Haarlem, the Netherlands in 1922 and studied monu-

mental sculpture and memorial stone inscriptions. He was also active in typography.

Beljon taught industrial design at several universities in the Netherlands. He was

director of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts and Applied Arts in The Hague. He

experimented with concrete, copper, zinc, wood, plastics, textiles and pliable reeds.

Some of his work in sculpture and design had the aim of achieving a synthesis of both

in sculptural furniture.




Itzhak Danziger - Israel

Itzhak Danziger was born in Berlin, Germany in 1916. In 1968 he was living in

Israel. He studied sculpture in London. His monumental and commemorative sculp-

tures may be found in several cities in Israel. He had exhibitions in the United King-

dom, Paris and Israel. He participated in the “Ten Israeli Artists” exhibition at the

Museum of Modern Art in New York. He lectured on three-dimensional design at the

Technion College of Architecture in Haifa. Danziger has worked with stone, steel.

bronze, tin, and aluminum. He also devoted himself to garden sculpture and land-

scape architecture.




Olivier Séguin - France

Olivier Séguin was born in Montreuil sur Mer, France in 1927. In 1968 he lived

in Mexico. He studied at the Lille and Paris Schools of Fine arts and taught visual

education, plastic integration, and sculpture in several schools in Mexico. His works

have been exhibited in Morocco, Mexico, France, and the U.S.A. At the time of the

Games of the XIX Olympiad he was working in architectural integration (reliefs) andmonumental sculpture.




Mohamed Melehi - Morocco

Mohamed Melehi was born in Asilah, Morocco in 1936. He studied in Spain,

Italy, France, and the U.S.A. In both the U.S.A. and Morocco he produced murals,

paintings, and bas-reliefs. He was a professor at the Casablanca Ecole des Beaux

Arts. He was interested in graphic design, photography, and posters. He participated

in several exhibitions in France, Italy, the U.S.A., Morocco, and other African coun-

tries.




Helen Escobedo - Mexico

Helen Escobedo was born in Mexico City in 1934 and studied sculpture under

German Cueto, John Skeaping, Frank Dobson, Leon Underwood, and Andree Wille-

quet. She founded a textile design center and did scenic designs for the theater as well

as sculptural murals. She had an exhibition of functional sculptures made of plasticmaterials at the Gallery of Mexican Art.




Jorge Dubón - Mexico

Jorge Dubón was born in Chiapas, Mexico in 1936 and was living in France in

1968. He studied sculpture, architecture, and painting in Mexico, the U.S.A. and

France. He participated in several exhibitions in those countries. He was granted sev-

eral awards and scholarships. He studied the theory of sculpture (under Ossip Zadk-

ine), stone carving (under Francisco Zuniga and Renee Collamarini), aesthetics, thewelding and tinning of various materials and architectural composition. He had been

the assistant of several well known sculptors (among them Seymour Lipton and Fran-

coise Sthaly) and architects. He produced reliefs and architectonic as well as sculp-

tural works.

Ángela Gurría_1998:olympika

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