Klaus Biesenbach

Me xico City:
An Exhibition about the
Exchange Rates
of Bodies and Values
A themati c exhibit i on
of international artists
based in Mexico City
Mexico City:
An Exhibition about the Exchange Rates of Bodies and Va lues
Klaus Bi esenbach
Approaching Mexico City by plane, one flies over
vast expanses of urban buildup with a jagged
mountain face rising all around it, framing the
picture of one of the l arges t citi es in the
world, a pl ace fill ed with stati st i ca l super l a-
tives. As revealed in Melanie Smith' s photos for
Spiral City I - V (2002) - shot from a heli copt er -
one i s immed iat el y aware of the immensity of this
sprawling urban l andscape . Smith approximates a
sa t ellit e vi ew of the city - in this case , the
poorest di stri ct of Mex i co Ci ty - revea ling the
density of thi s mega lopoli s with it s crammed
street s and makeshift homes that crowd the area .
Howev er , the congestion i s captured as an
abstract pattern, creat ing order out of an
intrinsically chaoti c and frenzied metr opoli s . In
the smog, the individual buildings and units fade
into an indistinguishable urban mass .
In the l ast few years, music, film, and art from
Mexico have become an instrumental part of the
int erna ti ona l exper imenta l scene. Recognizing the
inherent diffi culti es of a national representa-
ti on - focusing on one particular country - one
approach might be to explore why such rich and
fertile artistic production has occurred in one
place at one particular moment in time . An exhi-
bition about the exchange rates of bodies and
values i s tightly wound around a point of view,
connecting the artists - who live and work in one
of the most densely populated cit i es in the world
- to the realities of daily life and how they
confront and ass imil at e these i ss ues into a body
of work . Henc e, the exh ibition rep resents a the -
mati c angle - vi sua lizing one perspective - in
order to descr ibe and comprehend the creative
climate in Mexico City .
Over the la st decade, New York, despite the
recent tr agedi es, ha s grown ri cher and safer . In
grave contrast, Mexico and Mex i co -{ity hav e
undergone dra st i c soc i al and economical cha ng es,
resulting in a dr amat i c decrease in wea lth and
secur ity. Everyday life in Mexico City has become
more and more dangerous, posing a great cha ll enge
t o the Mexican government and even more so to the
population . A view that ref l ect s on both coun-
tri es simult aneous l y from a European perspective
- and that takes into account the history of the
Americas from the conquista up to modern t imes
discerns a compl ex and revealing metaphor for
today's globalization and the reality of regiona l
and cultura l differences . The gap in economi c
power and the disproportionate differences in
soc i al condit i ons and expect ations can be condi-
tioned upon wh ere you were born, where you live
and what passport you hold. At one point in time,
Mexico could have been seen as a possible place
of exil e, wh ere one could escape the acti ons of
world politics and find sola ce and distance from
these centr al ized conflicts . However, not onl y is
Mexi co not peripheral, but i s also one of the
f oca l points for the ensuing problems that have
arisen fr om in creas ing global devel opment. If one
says that there is no wind in the eye of the
st orm, they might describe New York, but Mexico
City i s definitely shaken by the winds of ongoing
cha nge.
In essence, thi s exhibit ion has become a value, a
good, or an object to be traded, which then trav -
el s from Mexico to New York to Berlin. Therefore,
the exhibiti on i s not only tied to a concentrated
thematic approach , but the exh ibiti on i s in
it self al so wh at it is thematically about . It
embod i es the economi c reality of the location and
its imports and exports . The intrinsic difficul-
ties that we encountered during our preparations
for the exhibiti on in New York and then Europe have
become an essential part of the conceptual frame -
work , whi ch in turn, influenced the artists and
the cura t ors in the works sel ect ed for each venue.
During the 1990s , it l ooked as if the current
st ate of art production would emb ody the appea l -
ing surface quality of popular culture . And even
if there had been a subvers ive int ent , it was
comprised of it s commerc ial value, reaffirming
exist ing economi c and cultur al trade routes . Some
of the works that have surfaced from Mexico City
have been very difficult to digest - even when
cons idered fr om multiple viewpoint s - because
they do not represent a purely aesthetic ideal.
Instead, the works reflect a certa in soc i al
truth, functioning at a cer t ain level of reality.
Exhibiting the works in a city other than their
place of or igin isolates and focuses on their
dissimilarities, and this process affects the
ways in whi ch certain topics are discussed or
neglected, made visible or concea l ed . Mexico City
is a place that is experienc ing change on a glob-
al scale .
31
The exhibition explores the fixed price tags that
are attached to values and bodies and their spe-
cific exchange rates and currencies . Some of the
artists in the exhibition produce works that some
might find politically incorrect . The artists
assume these fragile positions i n order to reveal
a bigger picture. It is necessary to do so if
the relevance and effectiveness of the topic or
idea are to be properly discussed or realized.
Without cl aiming a position of innocence, the
artists incriminate themselves in order to iden-
tify a common guilt that we all share as being
part of today's world .
Jose Davila is interested in man's perceptions of
his urban environment and it s nomadic state .
Creating an architectura l urban setting , he uses
temporary structures - resulting in monumental
interventions - to examine notions of tr ansience
and impermanence . For Tempora 1 i ty is a Ouesti on
of Sur viva 1 ( 2001 ) , Davila covered the Camden
Arts Center in London in scaffolding and red and
yellow mesh netting. Temporality is a Question of
Survival 2 ( Diptych ) (2001 ) is part of a ser i es
of photographs taken from inside the building,
capturing images of the surrounding area seen
through the colored netting and scaffolding
structure . The obstructed view articulates an
artist's interpretation of a f oreign city through
a visual barrier - in this case , an a rchi t ec tura l
scaffolding he constructed - reminding us of the
alienated and narrow view we might impose while
taking a closer look at the "other . "
For S, M, L, XL ( 2001 ) Jose Davila cut Rem
Koolhaas and Bruce Mau's famous text col l age into
four pieces, sized small t o extra-large, refer-
encing the idea that globalization can be suffi -
ciently visualized and addressed by city planning
and an innovative layout. Jose Davila shows how
art is one of many multiple cultura l or economi c
systems that can reach an audience on a global
scale, addressing or deconstructing modernist or
postcolonial traditions and it s classif i ca tions .
Some classical or modern masterpieces show the
same example / sample quality level as a rarefied
object in a museum. Globally-marketed and di s-
tributed brands want to encourage their clients
to participate in this desirable quality by buy-
ing and using the product .
For Portable Broken Obelisk ( For Outdoor Markets )
(1991 - 93 ) , Abaroa conceives a contempor ary ver -
sion of Barnett Newman's Broken Obelisk (1967 ) ,
creating a towering structure out of the "Mexi can
pink" covered tents often used by str eet vendors .
Originally, the piece was displayed beside an
32
open-air market . Mimicking the monumentality of
minimalism while using utilitarian street sup-
plies instead of high art mat er ial s, Abaroa pro-
duces a cheap impr ovised "copy" of a First World
treasure .
The literal digestion of f ood and the metaphoric
digestion of art / culture and the poetic poten-
tiality found in objects of the mundane betome a
metaphor for the assimilation of contemporary
culture . For exampl e, Eduardo Abaroa's and Ruben
Ortiz Torres's mixed-media col laboration
Elotes / Maiz Transgenico (2002 ) comprises forty-
eight replicas of chewed "corn on st i cks, " a pop-
ular and inexpens i ve snack sold by street vendors
throughout th e city . Th e half-eaten corn implies
a consumer's digestion, capturing both the trans-
formation of the snack into energy and the dis-
posal of the remainder. In this case, the corn -
a rural product commonly eaten by workers -
becomes a valuable and rare art piece, cast with
hand-painted resin, creating a sharp contra st
with the traditional rural practice of using the
chewed corncobs for various hygiene purposes .
Corn was called "the source of life" in ol d
Mesoamerican cultures and in modern times it i s
expor ted worldwide from Mexico and returns as
globa l ly branded processed food . The rural tradi-
tion of corn has been tr ans formed int o the highly
refined and very popular Americanized artificial
breakfast cereal, Kellogg's Cornflakes. For
Diario (1997), Kuri digitally alters the visual
on the front of the "Kellogg's" ce real boxes,
reflecting on spec ifi c moment s using appropriated
images from the news, reenactments of the recent
past, and representations of the "lost" past -
visual markers of a historical moment in time .
The work also hints at the economi c implication s
of exporting goods produced in Mexico f or foreign
manufa cturers, which are then packaged by corpo-
rate brands and imported back int o Mexico . Arbol
con Chicles (Tree with Chewing Gum) (1999 ) i s a
close-up view of a tree trunk spot ted with wads
of brightly-colored chewing gum - another typi-
cally American re-imported product originally
st emming from Mexi co - stuck there over time by
people waiting at the nearby bus stop. Th e juxta-
position of the two objects - one organic, the
other synthetic - produces a stra ng e yet intimat e
relationship. The digested and then di scarded
blobs of gum sugges t th e human imprint, a trace
of a time past. For Untitled ( Day Fe/ By My Faith )
(1998 ) , Kuri places an embossed fiberglass
chicharron (fr ied pork rind ) in a glass vitrine -
mimicking a street stand - giving a local snack
favorite high-art status. The golden glow of the
fried pork rind enhances the miraculous appear-
ance of the words doy fe. To create Work in
Progress (1995 ) , Gabriel Kuri wrapped avocados in
newspaper, a traditional method in Mexican homes
of ripening the fru it.
It is to the "global economy machine" with its
imports and exports and exchange rates that the
art i st Minerva Cuevas has devoted much of her
time, energy, and vigilant skept i cism. Founded by
Cuevas in April 1998, the Mej or Vida Corp .
(Better Life Corp . ) is a non-profit organization
that fuses art with socia l ac tivi sm . Through MVC,
Cuevas dispenses products free of cha rge over the
Int ernet and in site-specif i c act i ons in var i ous
cities around the world . For her series Piensa
Global - Actua Local (Think Global - Act Local )
(1999 ) , Cuevas took photographs on the streets of
Mexico City of individuals wearing clothing
adorned with the logos of corporate giants. By
calling attention to the (fake? ) brand name
cl othes worn by Mexican consumers, Cuevas makes
evident the underlying tension between the local
ident i ty of the city and the mechanisms behind
the global economy. The brands establ i sh a con -
nection to a lifestyl e and an athletic culture ,
but these images also suggest that the individu-
als might also be part of the armies of cheap
laborers who produce these brand name products in
sweat shops for low wages. In the on-going
"Barcodes Replacement" series , Cuevas copies and
t hen alters the bar codes on grocery store items,
enabl i ng shoppers to purchase typica l ly over-
priced products at a s i gn ifi cant reduction . This
subversive act undermi nes the capitalis t system,
t argeting corporate grocery giants . Cuevas has
also produced fake student ID cards . which extend
youth , and therefore, life discounts to everyone .
In 1985, Mexico City was struck by a devastating
earthquake, a three-minute tremor registering 8.1
on the Richter scale . Entire bl ocks of bui l dings
were reduced to rubble . Although it has been
immensely difficult to determine the exact number
of victims in this ca t astrophe - since an inordi-
nate number of the urban dwellers were not regis-
tered by the city, due to illegal or vagrant sta-
tus - some surmise that the death t ol l could have
reached as high as 20,000. Many of the damaged
buildings have yet to be rebuilt, and the few
skelet ons that stil l stand in dangerous, t eet er -
ing ru i n swarm with multitudes of discontented
squatters. The earthquake - or, to be more pre-
cise , the buildings it wrecked and the struggling
inhabitant s - implies a disturbing real i ty in
Mexico City. It is not only the shaky uncertainty
of dai l y life and the risk that living here
involves, but the pervasive tension between
wealth and poverty, between progress, stagnation
and improvisation, and between violence and
civ ility that an imates this vibrant city. These
same tensions make the voices of its people - the
artists, the politicians, the everyday masses -
especially potent and enduringly adept at drawing
an accurate picture of their world, which sits
outs ide of the protected bubble of the First
World with it s abundance of wealth and security .
Life is obv i ous l y dangerous in Mexico City. The
body becomes a good to be protected, dealt with,
or exchanged for other values.
Within the context of this very city where thou-
sands of peopl e died as buildings collapsed in
the devastating earthquake, Pedro Reyes' cocoon-
like shel t ers provide a protective architecture
that i nv it es the spectator to enter , relax, and
enjoy a moment of rest . Reyes uses the colorful
plastic materia l commonly used in Mexico for bags
or containers typically found in the marketplace
to construct rainbow-colored structures by wind -
ing colorful cords of plastic along a metal
frame . Prisoners in Mexican jails commonly use
this technique to produce market bags . The
Capulas (a word between capsule, cupola, and cop-
ula t e) , (2002 ) based on the Russian matrioshkas,
are a beautiful synthesis of architecture and
fantasy . Inside the dome-1 ike structures, the
viewer is suspended above ground like a bird in a
nes t. This stunn ing blend of art and craft is
inspired by a book titled "Th e Inner Castle" by
Santa Teresa de Avila ( 1515 - 1582 ) , who introduced
a meditation method based on imagining buildings
as metaphors for the human soul .
From its birth in 1325 as the ancient Aztec city
of Tenochtitlan (transla t ed as "belly button of
the moon" ) up until t oday, t he city has grown
into one of the most densely populated places on
earth. A first-t i me visitor might believe the
city to be inhab it ed predominantly by two differ -
ent sorts of living creatures, that is, human
beings and dogs ; countless numbers of both can be
found sleeping in parks or sprawled out on side-
walk corners, threadbare and exhausted, looki ng
forlorn at best. In fact, it is often di ffi cult
t o determine whether you are stumbling upon a
sleepi ng creature , a wounded animal, or a lan-
guishing corpse . Humans and dogs seem to occupy
th e same bleak, ill-fated existence in the inter-
nationally acclaimed and Oscar -nominated film
Amores Perras ( 2001 ) . In this grungy depiction of
33
modern day Mex i co City, human bei ngs are no bet -
t er of f t han dogs . Di rec t ed by Al ej and ro Gonz al ez
Inar rit u, t he f ilm vi sua lizes an intr ica t e system
of rel ati onsh i ps and exchanges between the inhab-
it ant s of thi s swa rming Mexi can metropoli s . Th e
narr ative of Amores Perr as i s construct ed ar ound
a ser i es of vi ol ent ac t s : peopl e and dogs fight -
ing, killi ng , and dying. Executi ons , r evenge , and
kidnappings are on l y a few of the di st urbi ng
st ory li nes that cons tit ut e t hi s t oug h, un r edemp -
ti ve t ale of city life . As with any l arge muni ci -
pality, people and thi ngs come and go wi thout a
tr ace . In Se Busca Recompensa (Seeking Reward)
(1998-2001) , Jonathan Hern and ez has t ra nsl at ed
thi s geogr aphy of f ea r int o a se ri es of works
compri sing some of the col orful "l os t pet
pos t er s" posted up around the city by worri ed dog
own ers wh ose pets have been kidnapped. No matt er
how poo r t he owner s mi ght be , t he pos t ers oft en
an noun ce high rewards fo r the sa f e return of the
own er s loved ones . The differ ent l evel s of
domes ti city and t he va ri et y of br eeds bring t o
mind the p i nt ur as de cas t as- l at e col oni al art
of Mex i co, popul ar in the 18th century, pr esent -
ing fig ures of va ri ous races and cas t es wh o ca rry
differ ent economi c , politi ca l and soc i al values .
Th e castas paint ings i llustrat e t he cross- f er til -
i zati on that occurr ed among the Eu ropea n
i nva ders , t he i nd i ge nous i nhabit ant s of Mex i co ,
and the sl aves f rom ab r oa d. An insc ripti on above
or bel ow the work identifi es the r ac i al mi xtur e
depi ct ed in the image ry: cri o ll o, mes tizo, mu l at -
t o. Th ese wor ks of ar t provide a vi sual impr es-
si on of the per i od and off er an hi st ori ca l
accoun t of a cl ass i f i ca ti on and nomin ati on sys t em
and it s r ep resenta ti on in art. Yos hua Ok6n
in vokes another theme present in the cas t as
pain ti ngs i n hi s reco rding of two dogs mati ng as
a symb ol of the in he rentl y probl emati c but perv a-
sive mi xi ng of cultur es. For Chocorrol (1997) ,
Ok6n doc ument s two dogs mating as a symbol of th e
inher entl y pr oblemati c mi xing of cultur es . Ok6n
empl oys hi s pet, a Xo l oitzcuintli mal e dog - a
hairl ess br eed na ti ve t o Mex i co - t o mat e with a
whit e femal e French pood l e that he rent ed f r om a
br eeder . Ok6n i ntended to record the Fr ench poo-
dl e ' s rej ecti on of hi s dog ' s att empt s t o mat e.
Howeve r, unbeknowns t t o t he arti st, th e poodl e
happened t o be in hea t. Ok6n att empt ed t o halt
th e ac ti on, but he was t oo l at e . Th e br eeder wa s
enr aged wh en i nf ormed of the event, and in an
eff or t t o pl aca t e him, Ok6 n off er ed fin anci al
comp ensa ti on . Re f us i ng the money , t he br eeder was
more di stur bed by the vi ol ati on of a "pur e"
34
spec i es , cl aiming the out come would produce a
mi xed br eed monstros ity.
Pr os tit uti on circl es are j ust as fas tidi ous wh en
it comes t o mi xed and pur e br eeds . In f ac t,
bl ond e Eur opea ns still f et ch the highes t pri ce in
the trade. Appar ently, the light er the s kin pig -
ment ati on i s , the hi gher the cos t, whil e the
darker the ski n the l ower the cos t . Differ ent
bodi es ca r ry differ ent pri ce t ags , and i ndeed,
the val ue of bodi es i s not i ns i gni f i ca nt i n a
city that has one of the hi ghes t kidn apping r at es
in the world . Of c_our se , wit h ki dnapp ing, the
rat e of the r ansom depends on the wea lth and
pr ominence of th e vi ctim. Since th e economi c
cr i ses i n the mi d-1990s , th ousa nds of vi ctims
have s uff ered damaging fin anci al l osses and th ere
i s a palpabl e sense among them of i r repar abl e
di scont ent and un res t . Th e "Mex i ca n Saa t chi ...
Eugeni o Lopez, wh o ha s es t abli shed a pri va t e ,
int erna t ionall y ori ent ed cont emp or ary art mu seum
on hi s f amil y es t at e , has been sa id t o ride i n
armored vehi cl es and i s always esco rt ed by two
bodyguard s trained in Is r ae l .
Th e ri ch r epr esent a di stinct and nonethel ess
gari sh minority. Th e subj ect s of Dani el a
Ro ssell' s Un titl ed (1 998- 2002 ) f rom t he "Ri ch &
Famous" se ri es of 89 phot og r aph s are mos tl y young
upper -cl ass women, oft en the arti st' s pe r sona l
fri ends or memb er s of he r affl uent and powerf ul
f amil y. Coupling soc i et y portrait ur e and perf or-
mance , Rossell' s sitt ers un abas hedl y embr ace
their l avi sh domes tic surr oundings , signaling
their nouv ea u ri che st atus . Dani el a Rossell ca p-
tur es th e end ang er ed spec i es of the ri ch and
f amous in their orn at e and over prot ective envi-
ronment s , whi ch resembl e ch ild ren' s rooms and
f airy-t al e scenar i os . In these settings , t he
arti st dr aws a pi ctur e of the spect er of a
spoil ed bl ond ri ch girl, an obj ect of des i re that
dangerousl y verges on the un ca nny inca rn at i on of
a Barbi e st ereotype - her sex ual ity r educ ed t o
nothing but an expensive commodity , or worse , t o
a chea p deco rati on. Since Mex i co has one of the
highes t kidnapping r at es in the world, with an
aver age of thr ee a day , thi s const ant thr ea t
requir es these women t o sur round t hemsel ves with
bodyguard s whe n out s ide of t he pr ot ecti on of
their homes . Th ei r elit e st atus attrac t s kidn ap-
per s l oo king f or the hi ghes t ransom prices .
It i s these wea lthy pe opl e wh o wer e most l i ke l y
the vi ctims of performan ce arti st s Mi guel
Calderon and Yos hua Ok6n, wh o roamed Mexi co Cit y
and videot aped themsel ves as they br oke int o
parked ca r s and st ol e away with the r adi os . Thi s
act, they i mply, was a way of challengi ng the
dubious socia l and political state of the city. A
Propos ito . . . ( 1996 ) consists of a sculpture made
out of 120 of the pilfered systems along with a
one-hour video loop documenting their thefts . The
artists leave it ambiguous whether the vi deo
shows the documentat i on of a real theft or a
staged performance of a criminal action. This
juveni le and shocking - not to mention poss i bly
illegal - act typifies the subversive, bad -boy
behavior of this young duo and points to the ten-
sion between legal and illegal, which is much a
part of the city's corrupt fabric .
Speaking of the corrupt polit i cal and civil fig-
ures of authority and the price tag that every
person in Mexico City seems to have, Yoshua Ok6n
records in Poli V (2000) the local Mexican
police , in all the i r uniformed pomp and circum-
stance, dancing and twirling their batons to tra-
ditional music for a small bribe. Although these
police officers i nstill fear on the street, Ok6n
reduces the i r actions to humi liating and comical
tasks. Poli V comments on the official corruption
that infiltrates the city and is an intrinsic
aspect of the streets .
A mask may be the most effective way to hide, to
subvert or to transform one's identity, freeing
oneself of distinction . But as Carlos Amorales
implies in his work, the wearing of a mask could,
at times , have dubious - not to mention dangerous
-res ults . Witness i ng one of his performances, a
visitor encounters a dancer wearing a mask . His
face , eyes, nose and mouth are entirely con-
cealed . The mask drains the performer of an iden -
tity, transforming the individual into an object
associated with a spectacle. The dancer is the
artist Carlos Amorales . Born and raised i n Mexico
City, Amorales has lived in Amsterdam most
recently . From his experiences abroad and from a
learned assimilation of another culture, Amorales
examines the development of the self through the
interpretation of the foreign . Th i s extended
investigation has led him to the p ~ p u l r world of
wrestling, where the construction of a fictional
identity is a common occurrence, and more recent -
ly to the "rave" or underground haven of dance
and music, where popular entertainers assume per -
sonae . Amoral es lends the masks to others so that
they too can experience and acquire new i denti -
ties . The emptying of one's individuality through
this ritua l transforms the dancer i nto "other , " a
foreign object of desire. This exchange examines
the production of culture and the anonymous face
that i s commonly associated wi th gl obalization .
In spite of that, a vast majority of the popula -
tion cannot even afford a discounted product. It
is these people - home l ess and destitut e men and
women who live on the dark peripheries of society
- that interest Francis Al)is . In Sleepers II
( 2001 ) , an accumulated series of images, A l )is
captures the exposed bodies of sleeping beggars
and stray dogs lying in the Mexican streets. In
the another vi vid series of images titled
Ambulantes (Push ing and Pulling) (1998-2002),
Al)is presents the daily commute of Mexican sell -
ers dragging and tugging their wares through the
congested streets of downtown Mexico City. The
images show people putting their entire body
weight aga i nst the commercial value they are
physically dragging to sell or barter in the mar -
ketplace . The frenetic movement of the images
reveals the parallel economy of the vendors'
struggle to make a living in an unforgiving envi-
ronment. In his works and performances, Al)is also
reflects upon the presence of violence within the
city. In Reenactments (2000) , for example, Al.Ys
was filmed as he bought a gun in a store and
calmly walked the streets of downtown Mexico City
holding it in plain sight. The performance, which
was recorded with a hi dden video camera, lasted
for approximately twelve minutes, until Al)is was
overpowered and arrested by the police . The next
day , the artist reenacted the performance with
the assistance of several cameramen and in col-
laboration with the police . When vi ewed side by
side, the two projections convey a dry commentary
on the freedom one can negotiate through fiction
and a reflection on the limitations imposed by
reality . Some have even said that Francis Al)is
risked his life for this performance, since the
pol i ce could have easily shot him the first time
around.
Certa i nly, his actions draw a complex portrait of
Mexico City , an environment in which, at times,
even a human l i fe doesn ' t seem to account for
much . Still , death is an unden i able reality any-
where in the world . And i n Mexico City - with
the festering criminal element, the black mar -
kets, and the widespread social and economic
i nequities - death is uncomfortably close to
home . Working at forensic medical departments
across the city, Teresa Margolles and the artist-
association SEMEFO know the ci ty's story of
death . For more than a decade, SEMEFO has exam-
ined the life of the corpse and such rituals per-
formed on and for the dead body as ceremonial
washing and sacred burials . Through photographs,
videos, installations, and performances,
35
Margolles expl ores the physical manifestations of
memory, violence, mon ey, and soc ial inequality on
the body that remains after death. For one of her
exhibitions, Margolles displayed the pierced
tongue of a male teenager who had died a violent
street death. The art i st offered the young man' s
family payment for a proper burial, acqu iring the
tongue of the dead in exchange . This secul ar
relic was then exhibited in a room at Ace
Gallery, with a shor t text exp l aining it s orig in .
For another exhibit ion, Margolles glazed an
entire gallery wall with human fat, which she had
purchased from corrupt employees of the city
morgue. The installation was often perceived as a
commentary on the obsess i on of beauty - the fat
becoming a mi staken metaphor for the discarded
waste of wealthy liposuction patients.
Teresa Margolles' work also examines the life of
the corpse and the rituals performed on and for
the dead body, such as the ceremonious washing
and the sacred burial. Beyond this, she i s inter -
ested in the object that remains as a marker or
visual reminder of the dead, a relic of the past .
At the morgue, Margolles transforms these ritual s
into performances as she washes or buries the
unidentified remains. For Vaporization (2001),
Margoll es created a preternatural env i ronment
from the vaporized water of bathed corpses . Her
performance not on ly visualizes the physical mem-
ory of a last washing, but it also alludes to
the notion of fading away or dissolving - the
disappearance of the individual into the dense
f og of a city populated by far over 20 milli on
people. Despite the fact that Margolles has dis -
infected the vaporized water for the installa -
tion, the work still connotes a looming sense of
peril , a powerful reminder of the cycles of 1 i fe.
Margolles appropriates ancient rituals honoring
the dead, but for some, the work still appears
threatening, as death and the corpse have been
determined taboo in modern Fir st World soc i eti es .
Moreover, citizens of a tightly woven urban fab -
ric should realize that the water drained from
the city morgue will eventual l y enter our water
system and may even show up as tap water .
Seen in its ori gina 1 context, Me xi co City, the
work of Santiago Sierra appears in a different
light . All through his career, Si erra has been
working through i ssues of exploita ti on and col-
laboration, often paying people to perform
painful or humiliating tasks . In the past, for
example, Sierra has employed a group of young
people to have a singl e line tattooed on their
backs in exchange for a sma ll sa lary. Even
Sierra's most violent actions appear no mor e or
36
l ess harmless than a game when they are compared
to the harsh rea l ity of their urban surroundings.
Nevertheless, Si erra's performances manage to
expose the deep scars of a violent soc i ety as it
negotiates it s own place in the wealthy world of
production and advanced, industria lization. In one
performance. the guests of a gallery opening were
forced into buses heading for the slums of Mexico
City, dropped off, and l eft at their own mercy .
Sierra's kidnappings point to the privileges of
the art world and become a metaphor for a country
in which life can be dangerous and where bodies
can be used as currency.
In the early summer of 2002 , Si erra was invited
to a performance f est ival in Cali, Colombia . With
the money he received for the production of his
piece, he paid l ocal craftsmen to sew a monumen -
tal Amer i can flag hand-crafted to exactly cover
the en tire facade of th e museum. Hi s work seemed
to be a comment on the str ength and power of the
average performance budget translated into the
wages of local craftsmen ; a commentary on big
business's dependency on cheap labor, guarantee -
; ng the surviva l of their products . After five
days the flag had to be removed, due to arson,
which endangered the museum. The Amer i can flag
had become an object of violation on display in
all it s fragility.
The flag, the passport , and monetary currency are
signifi ers of different areas of an economi c and
legal cl imat e strictly regimented by a strict set
of rules and barriers . Indeed, the border and
life around and across these borders has become a
subject of interrogation for many artists as they
examine the line where two distinct and inherent-
ly different worlds meet . Ruben Ortiz Torres cre-
ated Alien Toy (1997) for InSITE97 in San Diego
and Tijuana. Along with the famed 1 ow-rider afi-
cionado Sa lvador Munoz, Ortiz Torres created a
hybrid truck covered with border patrol markings
that can fragment into severa 1 pi eces when it
"dances . " The video documents the vehicle per -
forming its elaborate movements through the
desert, spli ced with footage of al i en puppets and
mod els of low-r ider trucks . Ortiz Torres alludes
to how authorities treat Mexicans as aliens
invad ing the United States, and yet, these ille-
gal immigrant s play a signifi cant and necessary
role in the American economy . The cyborg- like car
also refers to the high-tech infr ared equ ipment
used by border patrols to l ocate illegal immi -
grants in the desert . The video integrates found
and s imulat ed UFO footag e in order to art icul ate
a story about an alien invasion.
Jonathan Hernandez , in col l abora ti on with the
l egendary Tijuana Nortec music group Fussible and
the Tijuana des ign group Torolab, exa min es the
other side of th e border, recording the throngs
of young American teens f rom San Diego who flock
to Tijuana to partake in a debauc hed night of
underage drinking. The video follows the groups
of underage kids as they indulge in the crowded
nightclubs and roam the Mexican street s before
returning the next morning to the comfort of
their Amer i can homes. Paradoxically, this border
traffic has fueled the music industry in Tijuana
just as th e illegal migrating workers who come
fr om Mexico over th e border are an instrument al
part of severa l indust ri es and for harvesting
close to the border.
For inSITE2000, Gustavo Arti gas presented The
Rules of the Game (2000 ) . The first component of
this two-part project entailed the constructi on
of a fronton (hand ball court) on the Tijuana bor-
der in Colonial Libertad . For the second part,
Artigas staged a sporting event : two Mexican soc-
cer t eams and two American basketball teams
played simult aneously on the same court .
Ant i cipa ting inj uries due to accidenta l colli -
sions , Art i gas brought in a sl ew of emergency
veh i cles and medical staff . Surprisingl y, howev-
er, both matches went without any maj or disrup-
tions or personal injury, which sugges t s in this
case the theoretica l viability of a healthy coex-
i stence of Mexicans and Americans along their
shared border.
On the map the border exists as a defining line
between nationalities and countr i es ; in Daniela
Rossell's photos it exists as a separat i on
between lifestyles and expectations ; in daily
life the borders ex i st between the served and the
subserv i en t, between the protected, thr ea t en ing
and expl oiting, whi ch ever way one might see it .
The art i st Yoshua Ok6n is no stranger t o this
patently tragic and unpredictable _status quo . In
fact, he was kidnapped in front of the art space
"La Panaderi a" by a group of people related to
his family . Ok6n was held hostage for thr ee weeks
before being released in excha ng e for a ransom. A
week l at er his dog was kidnapped . Yet, sometimes
the hunt ed turn int o the hunters : the privileged
at t ack the weak. For one of the opening exh ibi -
tions of the new experi mental art cent er ,
"Laboratorio Arte Al ameda ," artist Iv an Edeza has
documented a manhunt in an underdevel oped area of
the rainforest. In . .. de negociosyplacer
( 2000 ) , Edeza alt ers found footage depicting
upper-class sportsmen hunting indigenous peopl e
in a Brazilian jungle . The artist discovered the
footage - a "violence compila ti on tape" dated
from the 1970s - in the Tepito neighborhood of
Mexico City, a dangerous and indi gent sect i on of
t own famous for its black market . The video shows
the men as they shoot at the fleeing tribesmen
below fr om the safety of a helicopter.
Edeza ' s work documents the vi olence that exists
among humans and revea l s the basic social differ-
ences , expectations, guarantees , and exchange
rates (access to l egal protection, medical care ,
educa ti on and nutrition) between members of
"Fir st World" and "Third World" societies . The
artist makes us aware of atrocities committed in
cont emp orary times - ev ident in the found footage
- asking us to reconsider and realize the reality
behind the constant overflow of viol ent images we
encount er in the news on a daily basis. Although
Edeza feigns an attempt to ali enate the graphic
subject matt er by on ly par ti all y distorting the
images , his efforts on l y enhance and dramatize
the sordid content , exposing the vulnerability of
truth and the media's abi lity to manipulate fact .
Edeza di st orts the pixels in the image, creating
an abstract pattern, recal ling the computer games
often played by adolescents , which depict the
same st ereotypi cal violence of men killing men.
Lat er, the sportsmen / killers collect the corpses
of th e natives and cut off their ears for tro-
phies. By exh ibiting this cruel and hurtful docu-
ment, Edeza creates a very cl ear, up -front
metaphor for the viol ence which pervades Mexico
City, a cramp ed space where Beverly Hil ls and
Calcutta meet every day . But Edeza, as well as
many of the most interesting ar ti sts i n Mexico
City, may be al so sugges ting a broader interpre-
tat i on of our cont empora ry culture , which - as
seen upside down, looking from the South up to
the North and the border - appears as a field of
end l ess confrontat i on and systematic expl oit a-
ti on . However controversia l it might be, his work
paints a drastic but multilayered image of
today' s culture , reminding us of the conquista :
an hi st orical story about how the white Europeans
stole the aborig i nes ' l and and possibly their
l ives . It can al so be seen , however, as a
met aphor for the patroll ing helicopters that sur-
vey and captur e "Third World" citizens as they
cross the borders into the "Fir st Worlds" of
America , Europe or As i a .
37
Mutual Abu se
Cuauhtemoc Medina
1. ESCAPE AND CAPTURE
Ever si nee I can remember, the art 1 andscape -
and especially national vistas - has nauseated
me. This is not only a reaction to how preten-
tious it is to become the hypothetical adminis-
trator of a cultural field. It is rather about
being fed up politically . Broaching the topic of
specific artworks, seeking to communicate the
effect they have on you as well as the series of
fleeting implications they hold in reference to
certain debates, and the attitude they express in
reference to a context: a 11 this supposes keeping
your distance from an intellectual / advertising
function - satisfying the taste of tourists / cura-
tors / institutions in representing art from a spe-
cific place.
Throughout the 1990s, many of us fell prey to the
notion of contemporary art as a means of escaping
the ideologies of "national culture" as well as
the oppressive seduction of "the international."
Peripheral artists (and by extension their fellow
travelers ) have to perform a trick. which con-
sists in de-identifying themselves and abusing,
distorting, parodying or sometimes even decon-
structing their assigned role as their nation-
states virtual ci vi 1 servants, whi 1 e at the same
time renegotiating the "center's" symbolic con-
trol as an art - historical point of reference.
This game's inherent pleasure cannot be over-
looked . For a while, writing about and making
contemporary art in places like Mexico meant one
had to carry out a particular de-nationalization
and re - localization, which depended on an unequal
network of exchanges (in both the North and the
South ) based on the risk and use of misunder-
standing.
The artist could abuse the centers' interests in
certain peripheral art practices to shock the
local cultural orthodoxy's tastes, patrimonialism
and emotional habits. That is why if one inter-
vened and transformed art practices in territo-
ries that aspired to enter the global circuit of
exhibition and debate, one did not merely express
one's entry into the mainstream. This admission
promised an escape from those "socially accepted
forms of subjectivity" that cultural critics,
like Roger Bartra. had identified as part of the
"i magi nary power networks, "
1
which supported a
pseudo-nationalist regime that had recently become
merely an agent of the neo-1 i beral modernization
of capital . The extent of this break is obvious in
a text critic Osvaldo Sanchez wrote in 2000:
"I do not know if anyone here claims to defend
the national as a moral value, or as any other
38
sort of value. versus the global . But we know
that the national displays a false condition of
unity in time and space . It astounds me that we
still pretend today not to see the national as a
construct of the State, internalized as a refer -
ential system which represents no other context
than that of imposition . "
2
Nevertheless. once more we have no choice but to
take into account a monstrous paradox : the circu-
lation of works- in the global art system is still
tied to the model of national representation .
When suddenly, in 2002, a series of global art
institutions compete to assemble work and artists
solely based on the fact that they operate in or
in relation to a place such as Mexico City, they
can very well produce an inversion in terms - de-
localizing this work has the possible consequence
of re-nationalizing it.
A twofold risk exists : an amorphous collection of
diverse forms of refusal - the product of overac-
tive skepticism - could be posited as "the art of
any nation," especially when that nation (Mexico )
fulfilled the function of representing the idea
(and phantasm) of "national art" on the interna -
tional circuit during the modernist / Muralist
period . On the one hand. the peri phera 1 cultural
civil servant could see the opportunity of recon-
verting what was once artistic autonomy and
improvisation into a diplomatic operation. For
its part , the center's aud i ence can assume that
it now "understands" what the art of a touristy
place they have not visited is like or, even
worse, it may disregard the works' particularity
because it feels uneasy about the geographic and
national frame of reference in which they are
presented. An institution of the center (let us
say, for convenience's sake, P. S. 1) would revi-
talize what had been killed and buried by the
economy's inexorable brutality and many cultural
actors stances: the idea that the s i gni fi er
"Mexico" mi ght have some critical / artistic rele-
vance .
A text cannot stop this regression from happen-
; ng . At most , it can aspire to revea 1 a series
of - unequal, fragmentary and de-centered -
episodes illustrating some of the tensions and
possibilit i es that this (failed? ) escape attempt
implies .
3. ARTIFICIAL, LIKE ANY GENEALOGY
One morning in 1994, a small group of artists and
friends went to the Copilco neighborhood in
Mexico City's south end, accompanying Eduardo
Abaroa as he installed his Broken Obelisk for
Street Mar ke t s (1991 - 1993) . Bes ide a huge ti an-
gui s or traveling street mar ke t set up every
Saturday on an avenue running al ong a row of
high -volt age pyl ons , Ab ar oa pr oposed t o tran s-
plant the rhetori ca l pr esence of a crucial work
of postwar Amer i can sc ulptur e , Barnett Newman' s
famou s Broken Obeli sk (1963- 1966) .
Ab arca ' s pi ece was not a pr ovincial exampl e of
appropriati on art. In retr os pect, it mu st be seen
as a theorizati on: settling the score with t he
metropolitan hi st ory of art, i . e . , wit h t he hi s-
t ory of art, by mea ns of a di al ogue with a
southern urban economi c const ell ati on. Ab aroa ' s
Obeli sk was a very shr ewd desc ripti on of the
fragility of an art pr ac t i ce th at wa s then t aking
pl ace in the periphery of publi cs , institutions ,
communiti es , cur at or s and rn a rket s . Indeed, thi s
"emer ging art" was . in the end, marginal ent er -
t ainment f or a small community that by then had
es t abli shed par all el art spaces (Sa l on des
Azt ecas , La Oui fio ner a , Mel' s Ca f e , Temi st oc l es
44, La Panader ia , Cu ra re ) , whi ch fun cti oned in
varying degr ees as pl aces f or self -edu cati on,
cr eating l obby gr oup s , debating, and partying.
Abaroa had r ebuilt Newman' s obeli s k using mat eri -
al s and t ec hniques th at had become standard in
Mexi co City street mar ke t s since th e 1970s : gar -
i sh "Mex i ca n pin k" pl as ti c sheeting and a tubul ar
met al struct ure that can be di smantl ed, all owing
vendors t o set up a f r uit and veget abl e st and
with a fun cti onal i st el egance and lightness , and
then move it to another str eet so an other given
neighborhood' s inhabitant s ca n buy th eir wee kl y
supply of groce ri es .
Pseud o- imitat i on: the sublime mod ern ges tur e was
ref ormul at ed t o stage the insuper abl e contr adi c-
ti on between t emp or ary popul ar ar chit ectur e and
moderni sm' s scul ptur al voca bulary. In additi on,
t o adapti ng Newman' s sc ul ptur e t o make it move-
abl e , qui ck t o build and pot enti all y sell abl e -
or even worse . equ aling it mat eri all y t o a Third
World market' s admini strative norms - the wor k
expl ored th e unbr i dg ea bl e di stan ce between the
metropolit an sour ces of wh at still pa sses as pub -
li c sculptur e t oday in pl aces such as Mexi co and
the li ving f orm of soc i al f ormati-ons as hor izon-
t al, penet ra bl e soc i al structur es whi ch ca n be
di smantl ed. In thi s cont ext , the i n s it u model
f or sc ul pt ur e should al so be di sca rded; scul ptur e
should become portabl e in order t o expr ess it s
ability t o ent er and exit the megalopoli s ' f orm-
l ess space at wil l .
Obel i sk des cribed the imposs ibility of a genea l o-
gy. Th ere was no way of r e-es t abl i shing f ounding
pr incipl es f or sc ulptur e based on a "l oca l" exam-
pl e, not even by l ook ing t o Mathi as Go eritz or
the arti sti c/ populi st / conceptual Grupos movement
of t he 1970s . And unli ke wh at Newman's l egacy
could mean t o Minimali sm and t he
ar chit ec t ur al / anti -sculptura l wo r k of U. S. con-
ce ptuali st s , the f act th at it i nt ervened i n a
differ ent str eet space al so made thi s hi story of
art a deni ed herit age ; th e street of a Third
World megal opoli s was t oo busy stubbornl y r enego -
ti ating tr aditi on and cha ng e , surviv al and prof -
it, t o acce pt thi s or any other obj ect as a f orm
of publi c art . If the pi ece t ropicali zed Ameri can
moderni sm in one of it s embl emati c works , the
market fr om whi ch it borr owed it s mater i al i ty
deni ed fr om the out set the f ormal ep i c coded i n
the negoti ati on between contin uity and di sconti -
nuity, whi ch makes Newman' s Obel i sk a moderni st
paradigm.
To qualify Ab ar oa ' s obj ect as a produc t of a col -
orful "hybrid culture" would have thus been
incompl et e . Ra ther, it arti cul at ed t he limi ts of
ass imil ati on , as did the works of such art is t s as
Sil vi a Gruner and Abr aham Cr uz vill egas , or Da ni el
Guzman' s and Luis Feli pe Or t ega ' s remakes of
cl ass i c perf ormances . Wat chin g Abaroa erect hi s
column bes ide the r ea l mar ke t, one coul d not help
but think that the arti st' s rea l contributi on wa s
not t o hold the obeli sk it self up t o noti ce , but
r ather t o ca ll att enti on t o th e unequa l. i ncom-
mens ur abl e di st ance between thi s obj ect and it s
cont ext .
Th at morni ng in 1994, a group of chi l dren spent a
l ong time observ i ng Abaroa ' s ope rat i ons . I wa nt
t o beli eve that they wer e busy comp ar i ng t he
building of thi s usel ess obj ect t o it s backg round
of market st all s . Finall y, one of them had the
nerv e to ask the arti st "what is that?" Abaroa
answer ed "It' s a sculpt ur e." The ki d, of cour se ,
sa id " oh " and, vi sibl y di sa ppoi nt ed, he and his
fri ends went off t o pl ay socce r.
Almos t a decade l at er, t hi s wor k' s "nomadi sm" i s
still the fr ame of ref er ence of ar t out i n the
open: l ac kin g a pl ace , audi ence , st able hi st ori -
cal r ecord, and r el ati onships - a t ra nsiti on
between a non -tr aditi on and an impr obabl e futur e .
5. TO DE-NATIONALIZ E WAS THUS TO RE LOCATE
Living in Mex i co between 1970 and 2000 meant
exi sting i n a st at e of cri s i s rathe r than in a
country. Th ere were timel y cyc l es of economi c
cr as h/ ca pit ali st reinves tment / economi c crash / cap-
it ali st r einves tment (1 97 6, 1982, 1994) . The r ea l
value of sa l ari es plummet ed, whil e ge ner al li ving
conditi ons and publi c se rv i ces worsened. Th er e
were ma ss tr agedi es , sometimes with dea th t oll s
in the thousa nds, du e t o "acc ident s" or "na tur al"
di sast er s exace rbat ed by the infr ast r uc tur e ' s
incompet ence and fr aud s ( e . g . , the Sa n J uani co
gas st or age f ac ility fire in 1984, t he Mex i co
39
City ear t hqua ke in 1985, th e expl os i on ca used by
gasoli ne l eaki ng i nt o the Gu adal aj ar a sewage sys-
t em i n 1992) . All thi s se rv ed as the background
f or t he gr adua l pr og r ess of soc i al and politi ca l
str ugg l es , wh ose onl y point in common might have
been the urgent need t o repl ace the Partido
Revol uc ionar i o In stituci onal CPRI ) , ruling fr om
1929 t o 2000 . Th e pr ocess reac hed it s height with
the 1994 politi ca l and economi c br ea kd own: the
outbr eak of t he Zapa ti st a r ebelli on on New Yea r' s
Day ; t he murder of the PRI' s offi ci al pres iden-
t i al ca ndidate in Marc h, one of many politi ca l
crimes t ha t t he l ega l sys t em was never abl e Cor
did not want ) t o resolve ; and the spec t ac ul ar
fin anc i al coll apse i n Decemb er, whi ch suddenl y
r evea l ed the illuso ry char ac t er of the pr omi ses
of devel opment th at had been the main selling
poi nt f or Mex i co ' s inco rpor ati on int o NAFTA. Thi s
was a t er rit ory marked by the sca r s of un derde-
ve l opment and by the wounds of the end of the
century ' s br ut al neo-1 iberal re-conv er si on.
Wha t rol e could cont emp or ary art have vi s -a-vi s
thi s pr ocess , ref ut i ng at once the model - pr oven
use l ess - of subordin ati ng a wor k t o ideol og i ca l
model s in ruins? In f act, there were f ew pr oj ec t s
th at expli citl y and r el evantly tri ed t o inse rt
con t empo rary practi ce within the mos t immedi at e
politi ca l agenda : Vi cen t e Ra zo' s populi st / concep-
tual exper iment. the Salinas Museum,
3
Mari ana
Botey's subvers i ve / pr opheti c videos and certa i n
perfo rmances , whi ch doc ument ed t he imaginary of
the "aPRi ca l ypse ," as arti st Cesa r Mart i nez Silva
ca ll ed it in t he l at e 1990s . In spit e of all
ki nd s of r everberati ons , the main eff ec t the
Zapati st a rebelli on and it s ques tioning of hege-
mon i c whit e/ mes ti zo cultur e had in the rea lm of
art was t o crea t e the conditi ons that all owed
Mar uch Santiz Gomez , a Chamul a woma n bor n i n
1975, to r each beyond the ca nons of indi geni st
phot ography by pr esenti ng he r community' s beli ef s
and t aboos i n the conceptual ph ot o/ t ext f ormat.
4
It was , rather, the expl ora ti on/ expl oit ati on of
the tr agi comi c eff ect s of mod ernization th at
defi ned the Mex i co Ci ty art community' s bas i c
aes t heti c attit udes . In st ea d of revi siting con-
cept ua l art t o f ormul at e a ser i es of t aut ol ogi ca l
st ra t eg i es about t he conditi on of art, or t o sub -
j ect t he (shaky ) cul tur al instituti on t o immanent
cri t ique , arti st s based i n Mex i co City f ormul at ed
st ra t eg i es f ou nd ed on a new wa y of consuming
their environment : an aes theti ciz ati on th at
evin ced their refin ed sensibility by demonstrat -
ing their ability t o pr ocess what th e economi c
and politi ca l elit e , with their modernizing pr e-
t ens i ons , cons ider ed repul sive .
When Dan i el a Rosse ll exa mi nes upper -c l ass
lifes t yl es in overwh elmingl y kit sc h phot ogr aphs .
40
wh en Cl audi a Fernandez makes coll ages based on
the decor ative pr et ensi on of Mex i co City home
f aca des , wh en Yos hua Okon makes a poli ceman da nce
and Jonat ha n Hern andez document s i n ph ot ogr aph s
the r esult s of urban ineffi ci ency , th ese arti st s
si des t ep th e modern / postmodern dil emma and mani -
f es t a new sens ibil i ty inst ea d: th eir r efin ement
as moderni zed individual s . Th e aes theti c Qf the
modernized cons i st ed in es t abli shing refl ex ive
clues ref er ri ng t o un equal economi c and cultur al
r el ati ons in di al ogue with gl obal cont emp orary
art l anguages .
Thi s di spl ay of sublimat ed bad t as t e i s pr obabl y
th e onl y point in common between in credibl y dif -
f erenti at ed proj ect s and pr acti ces . Mel ani e Smith
cr eat ed a compl ex dialogue between abstraction
and th e spect ac l e of street commer ce , and her
appr oac h t o the appear anc e and codes of the con-
t emp or ary- impoveri shed was almos t ant hropol ogi -
ca l; Mig ue l Calderon depi ct ed the t ensi on between
gl amour and vulgarity , with all t he energy
deriv ed fr om boo ri sh cyni ci sm; Thomas Gl ass f ord
examined in sc ulptur es and assemblages the way
t ec hn ol ogy, th e body and traditi onal obj ect s wer e
arti cul at ed within a ma soc hi sti c , neo-primitive ,
post -industri al eroti ci sm; Gabri el Kuri crea t ed
obj ect s that desc ribed the symb oli c cos t s of
moment s of l ei sur e . cel ebr ati on, work and mea n-
i ng; Gust avo Artigas rehea r sed t he criti ca l pos-
sibiliti es of tr ansf orming ent ert ainment and
sport s int o soc ial all egori es .
Th e way these arti st s dec ided to appr oac h subcul -
tur e , soc i al inequal ity, t el evi sed deri s i on or
vi ol ence did not imply that they wer e denoun cing
or oppos ing these things . To the ext ent that th e
l andsca pe and times they were living in were
pr oven t o be inclement , incomprehensible , and
inhumane , they wagered t o extrac t fr om them some
ki nd of res idual charm. whi ch, as Maga li Arri ol a
st at es , i s deri ved in equa l par t s fr om the dys -
fun cti onality of citi es l i ke Mex i co and t he
"fun cti onality impr ovi sed" by their div er se
act or s .
5
Th ese and other works tr ansf ormed,
through a hos t of operati ons , wh at was brutal or
gr oundl ess int o a soc ial sub 1 ime : a window ont o a
ment all y unf athomabl e vi sual and cultur al chaos ,
the res pectful and di st ant appr oach t o spont a-
neous soc i al structur es or power s , wh ose scope
l ay f ar beyond any mec hani sm of appr ehens i on,
modernizati on tr ansfigur ed int o aes theti c sophi s-
ticati on.
Th i s bitt er sweet enjoyment of Latin -American
underdevel opment as an endl ess sour ce of the bru -
t al -marvelous can probabl y be underst ood as part
of a symb oli c divi s i on of l abour. By pos iting an
appr opri at e aes theti c (ab)use of underdevel op-
ment, the arti st knew he or she was pr oviding t he
global art circuit with a certain degree of soci-
ological intensity, entropi c impurity, and sense
of cultural urgency, which are not f easibl e in
countries benefiting from the concentrati on of
capita l occurr ing under globalization. If the
neo-libera l agen t s of globalization de scr ibe a
country's lack of economi c, t ax . or labor reg ul a-
ti ons as investment incentives, why should we be
surpr i sed th at artists broach topics such as the
conditions of inequality, cultura l clashes , mer-
ci l ess modern izati on , and soc i al paradox in their
environment as sources of refinement, which al l ow
them to participate in the games of contemp orary
art?
Thi s relation paralleling (but not mimi ck ing )
expa nding hyper -capit al i sm' s neo-Darwinian rules
result ed in the insert i on of these artists' pr ac-
ti ces int o the global cultural debate . Rather
than sheepi shly join the end l ess multitude of
globalization's victims, the contemp orary art
practitioner preferred to become an except i on ,
making use of globalization instead of merely
being its instrument . This strategy made him or
her a marginal beneficiary of the hi stori ca l
momen t, as he or she transformed the effective
de-capitalization of his or her env ironment int o
symbolic capit al . Compared to the paralyzing des -
peration of high-cultural models of resistance,
thi s relative complic ity act ivated a parallel
space where the socia l, cultura l and political
condit i ons imposed by the new economy could be
discussed. Social baroque (the extenuat ing
labyrinth of violations t o the modern idea l' s
norms ) ope ned up a range of cr itical / cynical pos-
sibi liti es for artists if they chose to occupy an
ambivalent position, vi s-a- vis the violent
process of integration .
Once we reach the end of this road, we must
urgent l y ask ourselves up to what point thi s aes-
thetic can maintain its distinction in the l ong
t erm. It could well be that this modernized
taste's success on a global l evel indicat es what
Olivier Debroise has described as the reactiva -
tion of the "aesthetics of excess " that has
served as a source for Mexican art through out the
twentieth century in the shape of ~ a new f orm of
exoticism, with a fascination with moment s of
ideological transformation and an unbounded
attract i on for ethica l transgressors . "
6
When a
book like ABC DF (2001)
7
compil es Mexico City
artworks of the 1990s int o a "visual di ctionary,"
depicting reasons why one might become "att ac hed"
to living there , turning signs of underdevelop -
ment into a new visual nationalism, it probably
indi cates the new beginning of an old process:
the metamorphosis of what once were fragmentary
sounds into a new pastoral symphony.
7. MIGRATION ROUTES
Between the fall of 1991 and the spr i ng of 1992,
Francis Alys made a piece that defined his prac-
ti ce : proposing walks as a narrative way of
int erven ing in socia l space. Collaborating with
an ordinary machine shop , Alys manuf actured a
sma ll animal made of magnet ized metal cubes fit-
ted with roll er -skate wheels. Entitled Collector
(1991-1992 )
8
, it was not conceived as a sculpture
by the architect who had come to Mexico a few
years previous, but ra ther as a device or toy. As
if it were a dog, Al ys walked the Collector
everyday through downtown Mexico City, until it
got a second skin made up of nails, bottlecaps
and other meta lli c residue it ca me across on the
pavement . Conceived partly as an homage to stray
dogs as well as to pepenadores- peopl e who pi ck
up and sort through gar bage for recycling - Alys'
Collector was a parasit i cal object. It s action of
walking and col l ect ing debris had the purpose of
al l owing its creator to infiltrate the body of a
city' s stor i es- a city in which he wa s (s till )
merely a guest.
Previously, in 1990, Alys had st arted complement-
ing his walks thr ough down town Mexico City with
in sta llati on routines: for instance, putting pil-
l ows in broken window frames . Al ys had by then
rea lized that he could use this kind of
action / fiction as a way of intervening, record-
ing, and i nvolving himself in the urban as a ter-
ritory of conflicts , frictions, and ta l es . This
was, in his own words, a means of political
involvement .
Context:
Political in the Greek sense of polis, the city
as a sit e of feelings and conflicts from which
materials are extracted to create fictions, art
and urban myths . 9
In October 1992, Gabriel Orozco molded a grey
plasticine ball whose size was defined by a self -
referential el ement : the ball weighed the same as
th e artist, a replica of him mad e in the modeling
material of sculpture . For several days Orozco
pushed The Yielding Stone through the streets of
Monterrey, northern Mexico's corporate-industria l
cen t er. for it to record the texture of the ter-
rain. As it rolled the ball picked up rocks , dust
and filth: residue incorporating into the sculp -
ture ev idence of its journey through town. The
marks on the obj ect's round surface were then
erased by other marks, as if they were ancient
si mulacra, extremely fin e l ayers of perception .
Finally, after making sure that the relief of a
man hol e cover was imprinted on the ball, Orozco
had it carefull y moved to the exh ibiti on space .
10
This Yielding Stone sums up two aspects of
Orozco ' s early work: his heterodox exper iments
41
with molding and shaping objects and installa -
tions ( My Hands Are My Heart, 1991 ) and his
interest in the object's sculptural presence in
urban terrain ( Maluco Tourist, 1991) . The
Yielding Stone predisposed Orozco to develop an
interest in found situations and instant sculp-
tural interventions that his photographs from the
mid-1990s document: evanescent mirages where an
ordinary object served to restore a moment of
aesthetic grace as a countermeasure to capitalist
societies' excess of signs . ll
A comparative analysis of these two approaches'
differentiated effects and tensions has yet to be
done. The first. that of a Belgian architect who
migrates south and sets up shop in the core of a
Third World megalopolis, becoming the inventor of
a sculptural / pictorial / conceptual field of social
and aesthetic interactions. The second. a native
Mexican artist who migrates north and becomes the
commercial / curator i al / cr iti cal phenomenon which,
more than any other, points out the re-positing
of the geopolitics of art in the 1990s' first
global circuit, al ong with all its inherent con -
tradictions.
While over the years Alys radicalized his project
of exploring an art derived from the aesthetic
friction, which the megalopolis effects upon the
sculptural object and idea. allowing himself to
occasionally be directly ironic about his locali -
ty's political system and history ( Housing for
Everybody, 1994, Patriotic Stories, 1997.
Narcosalinas, 1995 ) , Orozco became the example of
the de - localized global artist's insertion into
the 1990s context, situated in a more or less
expli cit dialogue with the roots of contemporary
art ( Duchamp. Cage. Fl uxus ) . Orozco s games of
seduction / provocation are generally characterized
by their almost complete lack of presence in the
white cube as he tests the limits of viewers'
complicity by hanging yogurt conta iner lids on
the wall. replicating the exhibition space in an
empty shoebox or turning the gallery into a park -
ing lot for visitors. Alys' work, in turn, brings
into the gallery documents and products of
actions that. practically by definition. suggest
an attempt at reconstructing the social-cultural
fabric - whether this is because they posit
alternative circuits for the circulation of art
object s and works, because they involve compl ex
dialogical structures of co-authorsh ip, or
because, through rumor. they intervene in a realm
that lies somewhere between anecdotal conceptual
script and popular mythology. Orozco's work oper-
ates in phenomenal ogi cal terms and in terms of
its friction / complicity with institutions . Alys'
works - above all his walks - resort to the
imaginary and mimic the unexpected performances
42
caused by the circulation of goods. class distinc-
tions, and the citizenry's forms of expression.
11. THE OROZCO CASE
However, any possible comparison between aesthet -
ics and strategies must wait until we clarify the
particular predicament of the Orozco case. i.e ..
describe how the l aunch of his international
career allowed the center to settle the score in
a peculiar way with the notion of "Mexican art . "
When Lynn Zelevansky curated Orozco's show in
1993, she presented him as the art i st who had
finally freed f1imself from "the legacy of the
three most famous Muralists," who, according to
her. were sti ll "a weighty burden for as pi ring
artists" in Mexico.
12
This perspective obliterated
in one fell swoop forty years of attempts. howev -
er failed they were, to establi sh high-modernist
models - or s impl y models of conceptual activism
- in the Mexican context . Months later. curator
Laura Hoptman expressed the same thesis as an
epistemologi cal revolution . Thus, like the work
of Piero Manzoni. which had ceased to imitate
life to then be life, Orozco's best work was no
longer "about being from Mexico, IT IS FROM MEXI -
C0."13 A Benjamin Buchloh text was the crown ing
jewel in this exchange regarding Gabriel Orozco's
essentia l relationship with Mexico. Buchloh chose
to present Orozco in the Kanaal Foundation s ~ w
in Kortrijk, Belgium, to launch a kind of general
reading of twentieth-century Mexican art history,
its political / commercial domestication and , in
passim, point out this supposed tradition's need
to "sublimate" Muralism's political temptations
so that ar t from the periphery could finally fall
in with the cutt ing edge. Little did it matter
that Latin-American art history was not his field
of expert i se . In his text, among other things, he
claimed that the work of Jose Guadalupe Posada
referred to Victoriano Hu erta's fascist regime
( 1913- 1915) . though Posada died weeks before
Hu erta took power . Hi s urgent need to relate
Orozco to his diagnosis of Mexican history,
though it might have been an instantly-construct -
ed history, led him to associate the art i st's
plasticine and rubber balls to "the games of the
Maya courts" and "the haunting sculptures of
st one skulls we know mostly from dark black-and-
white photographs."
14
A projection that. though
it seemed exoticizing and groundless, Orozco sub-
sequent l y took it upon himself to justify when he
installed large-format photos of Aztec monoliths
next to similar reproductions of his fundamental
works in the Philadelphia Museum of Art in his
1999 show Photogravity.
This series of slip -ups in reasoning about "the
national" - seemingl y so out of place in the cen -
ter's discussion of art - could be partly
explained by the fact that the mainstream, rede-
fined by the advent of Abstract Expressionism in
the 1940s, had decided to cr itique and then dis-
card the Mexican Muralist model; thus, the ques-
tion of "Mexican art" had remained inscr ibed as a
kind of buried trauma in the history of contempo -
rary art. Therefore, when another art i st whose
last name also happened to be Orozco landed in
New York City , he brought back to the fore a
ser ies of debates repressed f or forty years.
However, there was another extenuating circum-
stance : 1993 was the year a first wave of neo-
conceptuali sm swept the global scene , and it was
also when, at events like the Whitney Biennial,
the art of Latino artists took the American art
scene by storm with a display of identity poli-
tics . The two phenomena must be cons idered in
relation to each other. When it seemed possible
that artists like Guillermo Gomez Pena and Daniel
J. Martinez could become references for what was
understood as "political art" in the 1990s , cer-
tain cr iti cs and metropolitan institutions l egit-
imized recently-immigrated artists like Gabriel
Orozco when - and on l y when - their work
expressed a tension with the mainstream that was
both more hermetic and aesthetic than Chicano,
neo-Rican or post -colon i al agit-pop . Benjamin
Buchloh exa lt ed Orozco precisely because "nothing
coul d be l ess accepta bl e to him than the variety
of neo-Mexicanisms or Latinisms" that were then
popping up in Western markets and exhibition
spaces .
15
With this rejection, critics like
Buehl oh wrongly assumed that al l these
"Latinisms" or "neo-Mexican i sms " had an affirma-
tive, exoticizing and expressionistic function
when they had al so played a part in questioning
integrationist formulations, which in the U. S.
and Latin America, ci r cumscribed the consumption
of iconography and art .
If Orozco ' s nationality became so cruc i al , it was
because it had a determined use value : if even a
Mexican artist could participate in the mel an-
choly disposition of post-minimal or post-concep-
tual art, it was possible to prove that the lat-
ter strategi es were the on l y l eg itimat e responses
to late capita li sm ' s progressive In
other word s , Orozco ' s neo-conceptualism made him
the perfect Latin American so that al l other
American Latinos could be put out to pasture .
There then appeared a precondition to admission
into the mainstream: it had to be the result of
a periphera l reading of cent er-der ived "high cul -
ture ." That is how Buchloh formulated it in a
second, less hastily written essay about Orozco
in 1996:
Orozco conf ronts us with a sur pri si ng i nsight :
namely that the impact of high -cul tur al practices
emerging from different centers can be particu-
l ar ly pr oductive when they are (mis )read from a
considerabl e distance and hybridized in a geopo-
liti cal margin, outside the strictures of local
discursive orthodoxies and conventions.
16
For severa l years , Gabriel Orozco had a monopoly
in terms of visibility - his was the only art
from Mexico on the global circuit - and he was
extremel y reluctant to become involved in debates
about the relationship between center and periph-
ery , or in any other debate for that matter.
While his expl oit s were being consumed in centers
as forms of political / poet i c intervention, to the
degree that his operations with the waste prod-
ucts of consumpti on and with sig ns of poverty
were framed by a reading of the life cyc l e of
goods on a global scale, on a local level (as
Olivier Debroise recently wrote ) , "his own resis-
tance - although ambiguous - to the idea of 'rep-
resenting the nation' was eager l y awaited by
critics ."
17
17 . MISCHIEVOUS EXPORTATION
In the early 1990s , Sa lvador Munoz moved from
Jalisco to California . An expert mechanic, he was
fascinated by the l ow-riders that Chicano commu-
nities had used to make their presence felt on
the streets of southern U. S. border towns .
However, Munoz misunderstood this tradition .
Rather than cus tomize a Chevy Impala or any other
American sports car , he turned a pick-up (the
redneck's vehicle of choi ce ) int o an impossible
object . Munoz t ook off the hood and fitted it
with hydraulic jacks so it could do aerial somer-
sault s . He folded up the cabin so it could rise
up on a fork lift and spin like a propeller .
Entitled Wicked Bed, Munoz's low- rider pick - up
truck broke the mold of a post - industrial / popular
genre and took it int o uncharted territory, some-
thing that all owed him t o win southern U. S. "rad-
i cal bed -dancing" contests four years in a row,
from 1994 to 1997.
Ruben Ortiz Torres - a sophist i cated expert in
cultural mirages and the dynamics of hybri di za-
tion by means of mi sunderstanding - perceived
Munoz's pick-up as describing a radical paradig-
matic sh ift in art . Within the popular genre of
the low rider , Munoz ' s practice was destabiliz-
ing, provocative and modifying l anguages. i . e.,
taking on the same roles that the avant-garde had
once played in ar t. Ort iz saw the object as one
of Duchamp's, Picabia's and Tinguely's motley
offspr ing and turn ed it into Alien Toy in 1997.
Painted like a border -patrol car , he introduced
this robotic vehicle to the art world accompanied
by a video that depicts the drama of immigration
on a cosmic level . In this vi deo, Ortiz narrates
th e carnavalesque game with which aliens outwit
43
their hunters all along the Mexico-U.S. border,
transposing post -national cultur e's endless
process of mutation to a futuristic, al l egorical
level . Ortiz's and Munoz' s low-rider, excessive
and futuristic, commercial and symbolic of a
meta -identity, was el evated Co r should we say
beamed up ) to a more radical plane th an that of
art ready-mades: it became a cultural
Frankenstein and a political Golem.
1
B
Alien Toy exemplifies a dynamic truly character-
istic of contemporary transcultural crea tion,
defined by transferring the south ' s subord inate
aesthetics to the realm of material excess and
ma ss- media delirium of places like California. In
the face of thi s symbolic disturbance, the
artist's role is redefined to posit a new kind of
aesthetic populi sm, no longer based on the quest
for supposed vernacular authentic ity, but instead
focu sing on cultural cases where "the dominated"
manage to get the edge on hegemonic culture tech -
nically and conceptually on their own terms .
This post-national and dialogical vernacular
intellectualism see ks to take the greatest poss i-
ble artistic advantage of cultural contraband:
characteristic traits, practices and object s that
would have been used to re i nforce group identity
are redirected to short -circuit the network of
cultural traditions, art circuits, and political
contexts .
In mid -1996, Carlos Amorales went to Ray Rosas'
workshop Che i s a former lucha libre or Mexican
wr es tling star ) to commission him to make a ma sk
ba sed on his own facial features . The mask was a
conceptual subversion of 1 ucha 1 ibre' s codes as
sport and theatrical game. The new virtual
wr est ler whom Carlos christened "Amoral es" (a
play on words based on his two l ast names ) wa s
in fact an "amoral" agent. Instead of adopting
th e supe rhero' s or super-villa in' s identity -
identi ties whi ch lend wr es tling matches their
structure- it wa s an empty, free-floating signi-
fier who se identity would not emerge from an
allegorical costume , but rather from the future
history of it s encounter s with artists, politi -
cians, audiences, museums and wrestling arenas
around the world . Not only did the Amorales char-
acter, as the artist wrote in 1997, "function
like an empty container that i s to be filled by
whoeve r imper sonates it," it also all owed the
artist to stage a wide range of dialogical s itua-
tions and performances that explored the conver -
gence of the hi story of performance art, the epic
of spor ts and the erotic and political function
of identity . The result of this i s not an exoti -
cism derived from the globa lization of subordi-
nate entertainment, but rather a str ategy of
seduction / provocation where the flow of cultural
44
capital is inverted, positing a fleeting utopia
where "low cultural practices emerging from dif -
ferent peripheries can be particular l y productive
when they are Cmi s) read from a considerable di s-
tance and hybridized in a geopolit i cal center . "
19. AN ETHICS DERIVED FROM ITS DISCONTINUATI ON
During the winter of 2001 - 2002 , it wa s impossibl e
for one to cross the ACE Gall ery threshold in
Mexico City without feeling cold shivers . Behind
a plexi -glass door, one entered a thick mist,
limiting visibility to two feet. As if we were
penetrating a horror movi e or a Stephen King sus -
pense novel, we fell prey to anxiety . After all,
we all knew this was a Teresa Margoll es show.
For over a decade, Teresa Margolles' art practice
has been based on the manipulation, recycling,
appropr i at i on and presentation of what i s at once
th e most abject and the most sacred of sub-
stances: human remains . Forming part of the SEME-
FO group during the early 1990s, and more recent -
ly as a sol oi st, Margoll es ha s transformed the
morgue i nto her l ab, making work that ha s always
challenged the limit s of deco rum and of the
institution of art by forcing us to contemplate,
aesthetically, politically and ethically, the
fate of the bodies of people we do not know,
especially those that end up in the morgue after
accidents or murders and are never claimed . While
superannuated official national culture cont inues
to profit from the myth that Mexicans laugh at
death, Margolles ' work rubs our noses in the
stark , shady rea lity of what it mean s to die in
Mexico - a count ry where widespread mi se ry and
violence go hand in hand with the inefficiency of
the overburdened forensic, medical and legal sys-
tems .
It i s because of these antecedents that, upon
entering ACE, we were afraid Margolles would
throw some t erribl e evidence in our face- like
the blood-soaked clothes of children run over by
a car, the embalmed tongue of a punk kid whose
family could not afford even the simpl est of
burial s , or the intolerable image of a sofa
uphol stered in human viscera. But the ga ll ery wa s
bar e, or rather it was simply filled with thi s
mist that had a slightly industrial, bitter fla -
vor . Enveloped in the vapor, you were al one with
your thoughts, fears and breathing, only hearing
the asthmatic wheeze of a smoke machine that,
every once in awhile, blew out a thick white puff
under th e carefully designed overhead illumina -
tion.
The mi st was made of water used to wa sh corpses
in the morgue, disinfect ed ( hence the acrid
smell ) to avoid any risk of infection. Walking
through this cl oud impli ed accept ing that the
death of others would ent er your lungs, intr oduc-
ing int o the bloodstream a substance from a world
with which we usually prefer not t o deal. The
feeling was at once delicate and dreadful .
Margoll es transmutes obscene bodily contact int o
pure spi rituality . She had never gone so far in
imposing on her audience a physical contact with
the materiality of death . Nor had her work ever
been thi s subt l e and respectful .
The acute tension between sublimation and exces-
sive contact in this recent installation by
Margolles, her delicate use of the t error i sm of
deceit, is sympt omati c of a more generalized
practice. In the last few years . paralleling the
process by which the local milieu has come to be
accept ed as a participant in the global circuit,
a process of radi ca lizati on has also been taking
place . Several artists (including those who
formed part of the fir st wave of the 1990s ) are
given to practices that approach in a more
ref l exive , but also more agg ress ive manner the
intersection between commodif i cation , violence ,
accel erated ideologizing and increased oppression
at the beginning of the twenty -first century .
On the one hand, various local arti sts have cre -
ated fictional corporate identiti es that imitat e
the structure of transnational business as well
as the pseudo - religious, therapeutic,
cu ltural / commerc i al, or humanitarian formations,
which have recently replaced cla ssica l political
groups - the party, un i on , or ideological fac-
tion.19 They then set up a parallel system that,
to quote Minerva Cuevas, " ( ... ) is not unaware of
politi ca l parties as soc i al actors but considers
them obsolete and useless as far as it s objec-
tives are concerned." There are many diverse
exampl es of th ese org an izat ional simul acra :
- Miguel Ventura's New Interterritoria 1
Language Council, a hypothetical post -political
movement manifesting it self as a fusion of born -
again , self-help group and neo - right-wing party
that projects in a paranoid manner the possibili-
ty of applying the postmodern "linguistic twist"
to the invention of new languages which, hypo-
thetically, should spel l the end of exist ing ten -
sions between people in terms of g ~ n d e r cu lture ,
and desire .
- Th e HCRH or "Honorabl e Council for Human
Vindication," a phantom organizat i on supposedly
founded in 1947, that, through conferences and
relentlessly tacky humanistic act i ons , tricks the
public with all eged philanthropic ac ti ons , magi -
cal cures , fake cultur al comp anies , pseudo-utopi-
an ca lendars, and demonstrations of sol idarity.
- Virtual ar t -bus iness projects like Mario
Garcia Torres' Arte Check and its subs idi ary ,
Abastecedora de Galerfas or "Gall ery Suppli er ."
Arte Check ( http: // www . arte-check.com/ faq.htm)
sel l s bonds for purchasing art as part of a com-
pany's emp l oyee benefits . Besides claiming to
f ac ilitat e the injection of funds int o the art
market, it parodies the fictional charact er of an
economi c system based on mere speculation . As
part of Arte Check, Abastecedora de Galer fas for-
mu l at es an absurd reduction of the art system' s
commod ificat i on and admini strative tendencies as
it cla ims to sell "art i cles which institutions
such as galleries and exhibit i on spaces need,
li ke l abel s in standard sizes , specia l lighting,
different tones of white paint bearing the signa-
ture of artis t s , signs with special lettering and
room-deodorizers with scents such as ' oil paint,'
among other things ."
- Heterodox economi c en t elech i es . Under the
mon iker "Mejor Vida Corp." (Better Life Corp. )
(http : I / irati onal . org / mv c) , Minerva Cueva s has
created a hybrid - part welfare state, part cor-
porate potlatch, part anti-capit alist NGO and
wish-fulfilling company - based on supplying free
goods and services . By offering goods, which
apparently improve the life of their user s free
of charge , from tear gas to illegal supermarket
discounts. Cuevas has been sketching out a plan
for radical political intervention. Usi ng the art
world as a channel for ant i -capitalist, environ -
mental and libertarian act ivi st campaigns, and
providing support and technology to groups or
individuals who wish to set up pirate radio sta -
ti ons , MVC has become a multilevel platform,
where an immediate, practical sort of utopiani sm
coincides with the quest for coalitions that
should take the initiative in establi shing resis-
tance to the global capital i st system.
What all these projects have in common , in spite
of their diversity and greatly differing l evel s
of compl ex ity, i s not solely their practice of
simulat ing an organizati on : simultaneous l y , they
put cultural practice's eth i ca l and institutional
limits to the test . On the one hand, they try to
transform the commod ifi ed condition of current
aesthetic relations with the creat ion of critical
commodities or counter-systems of commerce / propa-
ganda . In other words, cultural interventions
that no l onger manifest themselves by mean s of an
object-work or an action-concept, but through a
mechanism made up of functions, agent s , and mes-
sages in a commodified space of circul ation and
information . On the other hand - and this is
someth ing that often seems to throw cr iti cs off
tr ack - they envisage in various ways a non-exis-
tent public sphere . They sidestep the usual
political actors and agendas to posit an arena of
strategi es and debates that appears provisionally
more signifi cant or relevant than the smal l
45
administrative dilemmas that obstruct current
everyday politics.
It i s perhaps for this reason th at it does not
seem the least bit contradi ctory that these com-
panies would pop up during the demise of Mexico's
ancien regime . Th e so-ca ll ed democratic transi-
tion, resulting from the rise t o power of a con-
fused center-right government with Vicente Fox's
victory in 2000, had the following consequence
among others : illusions of change that twenty
years of socia l struggl es had invested in the
notion of "political normalization" gradually
disappeared . The latter concept came t o signify,
especially in Mexico, a useless sort of access to
the political sphere in creat ing a cer t ain mea -
sure of political control with regard to the new
economy ' s character , the blind spot of world pow-
ers' "new consensus ." In this sense , these pseu -
do-organizations, whether iron i c or humanitarian,
are symbolic attempts to reestablish agencies of
social intervention . It is indeed an economy' s
omni-modal character, in which no political
int ervention whatsoever seems possible, that
point s to the obsol escence of high-cultural val-
ues. This establ i shes the need, among other
things, to go beyond the ethical provisions that
forbade art to emulate the very structur es of
oppression.
No one has challenged art practice's ethical con-
ventions more than Santi ago Si erra in his quest
for political relevance. Since his arrival in
Mexico in 1996, Sierra has transformed his post -
minimal sculptura l practice based on the materi-
alistic results of industria l work into a ser i es
of actions that establ i sh a dialogue devoid of
illusions with the dialectics of oppression and
dissidence under capital i sm.
2
0
On the one hand, Sant i ago Sierra has been turning
acts of vandalism and industria l sabotage , the
obstruct ion of traffi c, or the dysf uncti ona lity
of objects into artistic gestures . Generally,
these transgressions are also extrapol ati ons of
given forms of socia l deviance , but they subl i -
mate our desire t o reformulate them as dispersed
rebellious uprisings. When Sierra rented a car ,
for instance, to scratch off it s ena mel with a
key (200 -cm Line Scratched into Car Paint, Olbia,
Cerdena, July 2001 ) , he sugges t s that we perceive
a multitude of apparently unrelated, irrational
actions as a massive protest against the estab-
1 i shment . For one , he ascr ibes to everyday acts
of anger and petty cr ime a political status that
might be the contemporary equ ival ent of the
Luddit e rebellion aga inst capita li st mechaniza-
tion. But he al so puts int o perspective a pletho -
ra of cont emporary art practices' apparently
transgressive value by revealing the art system' s
46
ability to confer an aura of legitimacy to purely
cr iminal gestures .
Along with this aes thet i cizing of subcultur al
disobedience, Si erra has staged a great many
act i ons that transform the cold relationship of
paid labor int o a material deep-freeze . In
excha ng e for mon ey , the amount of which is usual-
l y ca l cul ated based on the l ocal minimum wage,
Si erra mak es people raise primary structures ,
exhi bit themselves before an audience ; - he hires
workers to be sealed into boxes , isolation cham-
bers, or the hold of a sh ip; he asks to mark
their bodies with tattoos or cut their hair, or
even ma sturbate in front of a came ra. By and
large, the people doing these act ions are subor-
dinate subject s : prostitutes, drug addicts, pan-
handlers, homeless people, and ill egal immi -
grants, not to mention the Third World's hordes
of underemployed individual s . Money is not
featured in these actions s impl y as a general
equiva l ent between goods, but as the basic means
of acquiring (and canceling out ) subject ive
autonomy.
The purpose of these act i ons , regardles s of what
Sierra's shocked cr iti cs might say , i s not to
foster a voyeurism of humiliation . The obscenity
of Si erra ' s acts lies in making visible what
ar ti sti c modesty tri es to concea l. In other
words , the universality of economi c coerc i on that
the artist unearths and displays, even in that
place where modernity had hoped to find refuge
from it : aes thetic culture . Th ese acts are char-
ac t er ized by the fact that they do not allow art
institutions , participants, audiences, or th e
ar ti st himself to ent er a plea of "not-guilty."
Sierra unmasks the cultural institution (a nd him-
self) as forming an int egra l and subord inat e part
of the general socia l order .
Th e cr iti cal result of these actions is to
destroy cultur e's appearance of autonomy. On the
one hand, museums , galleries or curatorial orga-
nizations, who present Santiago Sierra's work,
accept the rol e of "emp l oyers ," purchasing
i nstances of work with the awkward purpose of
presenting allegedly innovative conceptua l art
methodol og i es . Audiences are forced to view them-
selves as consumers of luxury goods, who ta ke
advant age of the compl ex networks that transform
si mple in stances of work into contemplative expe-
riences . Finally, the art i st demonstrates his
condi ti on of white-collar proletarian: an intel -
l ectual mediat or who in exc hange for ce rtain
privileges - mainly, being allowed to take part
in the profits generated by the ar t sales system
- introduces ideas and pr oject s that l ead to the
generation of profits . Th e f act that the works
Si er ra conce ives are often deliberately useless
or absurd ha s a function analogous to the meaning
of abstraction in modern and contemporary art. It
links artistic "creation" - lacking decoration or
ethical alibi - to the exploration of the poss i -
bl e conditions of remunerated subordination as an
aesthetic methodology, devoid of functional ele-
ment s , ideological justifications, or marginal
pl eas ur es .
Sierra's work is a violent illustration of the
conditions of art in the contemporary world: a
mer cil ess form of immanent critique that con-
fronts the artwork and it s supposed "humanism"
with it s economic and soc ial antithesis, an
exploration that, in the end, also reveals con-
temporary art's sca nt value as a medium of inter -
cultural negotiation.
In March 2001, Sant i ago Sierra visit ed the
Cultural Center ( Ca sa de la Cultura ) in
Zinacantan, one of the mor e characteristically
indigenous villages in the Altos region of
Chi a pas, located in the a r ea of conflict between
the Zapati sta National Liberation Front and the
Mexican army. Sierra did not go there to seek out
- as hav e many Mexican, European and American
int ell ec tual s - indications of the indigenous
rebellion's revolutionary potential . On the con-
trary , he staged an action that translates in
monetary t erms the colonial operation par excel-
lence: the r eplacement of a native American lan -
guage by a European tongue . Sierra paid eleven
Tzotzil women from Zinacantan th e equivalent of
two dollar s to r epea t a sent enc e in Spanish: "I
am being paid to say something I do not under -
stand."
Few works so candidly desc ribe th e network of
unbalanced exchanges in which today's economy and
culture operate. For a little over twenty dol-
lars, an artist of Spanish origin produces a
video that will potentially allow him to earn a
thousand times that. For a little over twenty
dollars, an image acquires the dubious privilege
of sa tisfying the longing for a Povera aesthetic
originating in Mexico . Twenty dollars, which do
not represent the f ee of an i solated economic
action in remote Chiapas, but rather the value
involved in a global economic/symbolic operation.
More or less the same amount of money that you,
dear rea der, paid to own the collection of Third
World amusements contained in thi s catalogue .
1
Roger Bartra. La jaula de Ia melancolfa , Mexico City, Grijalbo .
1987, p. 16
2
Osvaldo Sanchez, " El cuerpo de la naci 6n. El neomexicanismo : la
pulsion homosexual y la desnacionalizaci6n," Curare . Espacio Crftico
para las Artes . no . 17 , Mexico City, January - June 2001, p. 138
3
See Vicente Razo , The Official Museo Salinas Guide, with texts by
Carlos Monsivais, Cuauht emoc Medina and Federico Navarrete, Smart
Art Press. Los Angeles . 2002
4
See Marux Santiz Gomez. Creencias de nuestros antepasados . with
essays by Hermann Bellinghausen, Carlota Duarte and Gabri ela Varga s
Cetina, Centro de la Imagen, CONACULTA, CIESAS and Casa de las
Imagenes. Mexico City. 1998
5
Magali Arriola, "Ciudad de Mexico : Activisme incidentel et
detournements spontanes d un urbani sme manque." Parachut e no . 104.
Montreal, Canada, October - December, 2001. p. 65
6
Olivier Debroise. "This Should not Be Read Here: Notes on a
Reconfiguration of the Arts as Viewed from Mexico," ess ay read at
the 8 th International Contemporary Art Theory Forum, Monterrey, Nuevo
Leon . Apri 1 5, 2002 ( unpublished )
7
Cristina Faesler Bremer ( eta/ . ) , ABC OF. Diccionario grJfico de
Ia ciudad de Mexico. Editorial Diamantina. Mexico City, 2001
8
For a detailed analysis of Collector as paradigmatic of Aly s '
practice , see C. Medina, "Action / Fiction," in Francis Aljs, es s ays
by C. Medina and Carlos Basualdo . Musee Picasso. Antibes. France ,
2001, pp . 5- 25
9
Francis Alys, text from April 1992 in Francis Aljs, text s by F.
Alys, C. Medina and Kurt Hollander, Galeria Arte Contemporaneo,
Mexico City, 1992
10
The exhibition Si Col on supi era ... ( " If Columbus only Knew ... " ) curat -
ed by Olivier Debroise for the Museo de Monterrey, Octobe r 1992
11
It was this window upon "lived experience" that Jean Fisher. in
an otherwise relevant text, posited as Orozco's connection to Latin
America's peripheral cultures . Jean Fisher, "The Sleep of
Wakefulness" in Gabriel Orozco. Catherine de Zegher (ed . ) , The
Kanaal Art Foundation, Kortrijk, Belgium. 1993 . pp . 14-23
11
Lynn Zel evansky . "Gabriel Orozco" in Projects 41, The Museum of
Modern Art. New York. 1993
13
Laura Hoptman. "A Letter to the Arti st" (addressed to Gabriel
Orozco . July 27 , 1993 ) . Documents. p. 65
14
Benjamin Buchloh. " Refuse and Refuge" in Gabriel Orozco,
Kunsthalle Zurich. ICA London. Daad Berlin, Zurich / London / Berlin,
1996. pp . 46 - 47
15
Ibid .. p. 46
16
Benjamin Buchloh. "The Sculpture of Everyday Life" in Gabriel
Orozco, Catherine de Zegher (ed . ) , The Kanaal Art Foundation,
Kortrijk , Belgium. 1993, pp . 49-50
17
Olivier Debroise, op . cit . Regarding Orozco ' s critical reception
in the Mexican milieu, see 0 . Debroise . "Gabriel Orozco en el Museo
de Arte Moderno de Nueva York, " La Jornada, September 21, 1993; 0.
Debroise. "Orozco es inocente," Reforma. October 2. 2000; C. Medina,
" El caso Orozco ," Reforma. October 25 , 2000 . I presented certain
points of my argument as "Delays and Arrivals" in the conference The
American Dream/ EI Sueno Americana. Los Angeles County Mu seum of Art.
January 10 , 1998, upon the generous invitation of Lynn Zelevansky .
1
8 See Sally Yard (ed . ) , Private Time in Public Space! Tiempo privado
en espacio pablico, JnSite 97, San Diego-Tijuana Installation
Gallery / CONACULTA , 1998, p. 114. and C. Medina. "As Quetzalc6atl
Said : I Shall Return in a One-Reed Year . All in Green. and in My
Flying Saucer," flyer for Ruben Ortiz Torres' show Alien Toyz .
Unidentified Causing Object . Objeto rodante no identificado. Track
16 Gallery, Los Angeles . January - February, 1998
19
Two outlooks are worth consulting regarding these pseudo - corporate
forms : Magali Arriola. "Raz6n social ... essay pres ented at the Fir s t
International Symposium on Contemporary Art Theory (SITAC ) , Mexico
City, January 24 - 26, 2002 (press dept . ) and Mario Garcia Torres .
"Active Market , Fluctuations in the Competition for the Aes thetic
User," Parachute no . 104, Montreal, Canada, October - December .
2001' pp . 53- 61
1
For an online catalogue of Sierra ' s work, see http: // www . art e- mex -
ico . com/ eguerrero / sierra / . For a previous analysis of mine of
Sierra's work. see C. Medina . " Recent Political Forms : Radical
Pursuits in Mexico / Santiago Sierra . Francis Alys, Minerva Cuevas,"
in TRANS . arts . cultures . media no . 8 . New York-Sao Paulo, 2000
47
0-2*
Patricia Martin
Every national display is doomed to failure,
because there i s an implicit expectation for
artists to respond to the place where they work
in the same way. This sense can lead to general-
izations about what are in fact distinct, indi-
vidual practices that have little in common and
have been developed in complete isolation from
one another . These exhibiti ons are doomed to
failure unless one acknowledges the fictional
character of the enterpr i se and the idiosyncrat -
ic, fragile, and provisional character of the
choices and connections it deploys. The present
exhibition focuses on the idea of Exchange as one
of several possible ways to understand the art
currently being produced by Mexican artists and
by foreigners living in Mexico. It is a result of
the negotiation between an out sider - represent-
ing a site of validation, New York City and
P.S . 1/ MoMA - and the local (Mexican ) art scene .
While many of the artists sel ected for thi s exhi -
bition are accustomed to showing abroad in dif-
ferent contexts and under different premises,
this particular show has created some uneasiness
over conforming to the expectat i ons of what the
term "Mexican art " is supposed to mean.
Mexico's complex cultura l roots, its colorful
folklore, its overwhelming urban realities, and
the contradictions in its social fabric have been
and stil l are unavoidable themes in any analysis
of its cultural and artistic production . To say
so ri s ks sounding romantic or cl i ched, but Mexico
is indeed the l ocus for a "concentrated reality."
At the same time, the shifts and constraints in
post - NAFTA Mexico have made it the blueprint for
understanding the contradictions of globaliza-
tion . Mexico, in its paradoxical position as a
"peripheral center ,"
1
embod i es the realities of
contemporary societ i es in an age of globa lizat i on
- and many of today' s curatoria l tropes: dis-
placement, flow, transnational tr ansact ions ,
nomadism, translation, borders . Art production in
Mexico and its reception abroad is closely linked
to the country's politics, especial l y with
regards to its age-ol d loved / hated neighbor and
current strategic ally , the United States .
Mexico's current vi sibility cannot be separated
Jeonj u, South Ko rea , June 17t h 2002
48
from this hi stori cal circumstance, and some of
the artists have investigated the complexity of
this borderline situation.
Reality, act i on, and intervention are terms quin-
tessentially associated with the idea of "r adi-
cal" practices by artists , who since the 1960s
have tried to free themselves from the
or the circuits dictated by the art
market. In the absence of a proper market infra-
structure , Mexican artists in the 1990s, while
invested in performance and immateriality, were
not trying to escape the market constraints (as
there were none ) , and consequently did not feel
the need to produce artistic objects as such .
Ephemerality lies at the core of this hesitancy,
both in regards to time (action ) and material
(object ) . Th e absent market and nonexistent gal-
leries moved the site of the work from the studio
to the str eet and changed an object-based prac-
tice into an event -driven one , with all of the
unavoidable frictions (political, social ) implied
in this displacement into the public realm.
One of the biggest cities on the planet, Mexico
City has developed its own rules, giving it an
equilibr ium that remains constantly precarious.
This fragility is echoed in artists' performances
or "actions, " which derive their strength from
passing virtually unnoticed . Other artists choose
to distance themselves from reality - as specta-
tors - in order to identify decaying systems or
systems in the process of being constructed .
Accordingly, some of the most incisive cr iti cs
and most acute observations come from Mexicans
living abroad, or from foreigners who emphatical -
ly invest their critical insights in Mexico.
BORDER
2
The theme of the border has emerged in recent
years in numerous international art events, such
as the Hav ana and Johannesburg Biennials and in
the context of the U.S. / Mexico axis - among the
most politically charged borders in the world . It
has become a primary concern or the unwritten
alibi for event s, exhibiti ons , or institutions
such as i nSITE in San Diego, the Border Arts
Workshop / Taller de Arte Fronterizo (BAW/ TAF ) in
Tijuana , the Centro Cultural de La Raza in San
Francisco, and t he La Joll a Muse um of Con t em-
porary Ar t.
The border i s a necessa ry space f or exchan ge . A
transact i on t akes pl ace wh en two t hings t ouch : a
pr ocess of negoti ati on f orms t he bas i s of a bor -
der rel ati onshi p. In thi s sense , a work of art i s
no l ange r "produ ced" but rather th e res ult of an
int eract i on or i nt erfe rence with t he l oa ded con-
t ext of t he border and t he arti st. Thi s int erac-
ti on determi nes t he sha pe , fo rm, wei ght, and pr e-
sentat i on of t he result i ng ar twork or it s doc u-
ment ati on .
Du r i ng the 1980s , Ruben Ortiz Torr es moved t o Los
Ange l es - Aztl an in hi s own nomenclature - and
spen t time i n seve r al of the t errit ori es nea r the
U. S/ Mex i co border to cont inue wh at he li kes t o
ca ll hi s "soc i o-cult ura l" resea r ch. Fr onti er com-
mun iti es (of second -genera ti on immigr ant s ) are
hybrid cult ures : neither here nor t he r e , neit he r
compl et el y us nor them, nor both at the same
time. Li ving abr oa d al l owed Ort i z Torr es t o eval -
ua t e "Mex i ca n" idi osyncrasy . Hi s r eading of the
si gns of "Mex i ca nn ess " bl endin g and coexi st i ng i n
hybri d communiti es has l ed t o a body of work in
whi ch t hese image ri es are deconst ruct ed, coll ect-
ed , i nt erpret ed, and fur t he r con t ami na t ed.
Cars are sta t us symb ol s , althoug h us ual ly di s -
creet because it i s t he ir pr i ce r ather th an their
vi sua l appea r ance th at const i tutes the s ignifi er
of wea lth . Th e aut omobil e i s by def i niti on mass-
pr oduced ; it s exi st ence t i ed t o the f ormati on of,
and parallel t o, a whol e economi ca l sys t em.
Wi th i n Hi span i c communit i es , however , ca rs have
oft en been rewor ked by their own ers t o bea r the
signs of t heir persona l i t y. These cars ar e the
pr i de of t he ir own er -builders and are the epit ome
of publ i c self- expr ess i on as they circul at e and
are shown -off in trade shows and commun i t y gath -
er ings . Mi ddl e-cl ass obse rver s of t en scoff at
t hese bizarre vehi cl es , cons i der i ng them the
emb odi ment of bad t as t e , and in doi ng so pos it
t heir own aes thet ic pa ramet er s of innoc uous
anonymity as signs of cul tur al supe ri ority vi s-a -
vi s an (i nfe ri or ) soc i al gr oup that so adamantl y
exh ibi ts the signifi ers of indiv i dua lity.
A 7 fen Toy (1997) i s an overblown ga dget that evi -
dences Or tiz Torr es ' s almos t perv er se fa sc inati on
with t he phenomenon of Chi cano "l ow rider" ca r s .
He poi nt s t o a cer t ain aut omotive industry that
caters to t he (male ) Chi cano community by pr ovi d-
ing superfl uous car pa rt s and gadgets . As crit i c
Cuahut emoc Med i na has not ed, "Con t emporary obses-
s i on wi th UFOs i s a proj ecti on of t he t error of
the domin ant whit e Angl o-Saxon cul ture to the
invas i on of the Third World Lati no immi grant, and
to be more exact, Mexica n. "
3
In thi s sense , Ortiz
Torr es ' s Al i en Toy i s ce rt ai nl y t hrea t eni ng , as
he has construct ed a car t ha t t akes aesthet ic
mut ability t o it s extremes : a dr ag car (a car i n
dr ag) that moves , jumps , and dances t o mus i c and
t hat changes , like th e Ja panese Tra nsformer toys ,
int o unexpect ed sha pes and con fi gurat i ons .
Sport s are a si gnifi ca nt aspec t of mass cul ture
in almos t every cont empor ary soc i et y and as s uch
might be expec t ed t o be an idea l s i te for int er-
na ti onal un ders t anding . Th ese act i viti es are a
met apho r f or war i n many respect s : they f requent -
l y invol ve two s ides , at l eas t, i n confront ation,
a t errit ory mean t t o be conquered or prot ected .
strat egi es of att ack and def ence , phys i ca l vio-
l ence , neutr al arbit er s , fi xed r ul es to abi de by,
and poss i bili t i es t o maneuv er within them. At the
same time , sport s ca n be the exact oppos it e of
war : a t err ai n wh ere race , reli gi on , and economi -
ca l and politi ca l differences are l evel ed i n a
privi l eged space of confr on t at i on without fa t al
consequences . The Ru 7 es of the Game ( 2000 ) by
Gust avo Artigas was commi ss i oned for i nS ITE i n
Sa n Di ego. Artigas st aged a socce r matc h between
two Me xican t ea ms and a bas ketball mat ch bet ween
two Ameri ca n t eams . Both games were hel d on t he
same court , at the same t i me , t es t ing the poss i -
biliti es of coexi st ence and t ol erance i n a gi ven
t errit ory . Of course , spect at ors i n Mex i co have
the same di s int eres t i n and mi sunderstandi ng of
baske tbal l as Amer i cans have i n and of soccer .
Al though both sport s have a pr ec i se set of r ul es ,
pl ay i ng t hem si mult aneously in th e same space
i nv ol ved several pe r ce ptual shifts : the awareness
of t he (coll ecti ve ) self in re l at ion t o others
and the awar eness of ot he r set s of rul es and va l -
ues fun cti oning within the same t err itory . The
pl aye r s had t o f ind a way t o bypass the mul t i pl e
us / them r el ati onships det ermin ed by the reconfi g-
ur ed game: our t ea m aga inst the other soccer (o r
bas ke tball ) t eam; socce r player s agai nst the bas-
ketba ll pl aye r s ; Mex i ca n t eams compet i ng f or the
same t err i t ory as the Ameri can t ea ms ; and, ul t i -
mat el y, everyone pl ayed against the const ra int s
imposed by sharing the same cour t.
49
Al so commi ss i oned by inSITE , the video No One
Over 21 (2000) by Jonathan Hern and ez f oc uses on
the borde r as a s it e f or un even transacti ons . No
One Over 21 is the r es ult of the coll abor ati on
between Hernandez, the des ign coll ective Tor ol ab,
and Fuss ibl e (a memb er of the Nort ec Coll ecti ve ,
a mu s i ca l out fit that combines el ectr oni c rhythms
with t he traditi onal Nortefia of northern Mex i co ) .
Whil e the promi se of a "better life" in the
Unit ed St at es lures thousa nds of Mex i ca ns t o ri sk
cr oss ing Tij ua na ' s infamous f ence , Tijuana repr e-
sent s a t ant ali zing sit e f or debauched exc ur si ons
f or Amer i ca n kids still under the l egal drin king
age . As Jonat han Her nand ez st at es , "Ev ery weekend
ni ght , Ca liforni an t eenager s go t o Tijuana t o
li ve the i llusi on of the Revoluci 6n Avenu e spec-
t ac l e . Night life i s born at the cross roa ds of the
limit of what i s f orbidden and wh at i s permi ss i -
bl e. The fa ntasy of a ' self liber ati on' i s condi -
ti oned t o an occ ur rence happening on a ce rt ain
geogra phi ca l point wh ere the noti ons of l egality
and ill egali ty compl ement eac h other and ce rt ain -
l y enr i ch t he ent er t ainment."
4
Th e shor t. f as t -
paced video set t o Fu ss ibl e ' s hybrid musi ca l
score reso rt s t o the codes of rea lity t el evi s i on
mi xed wit h MTV aes theti cs t o crea t e a short st ory
at the bor der (once again ) between f asc inati on
and cr i t ique . No One Over 21 ambiguousl y and
voye ur i sti ca l y makes use of well -known cli ches :
sex-a nd -drugs-crav ing spoil ed Ameri ca n kids ,
Mex i ca n hustl er s and hooke rs , drug peddl er s , the
vi sua ll y comp elling urban chaos of Tijuana, and
t he aftermath of the weekend, wh ere the l ocal
workers have t o cl ea n up the mess . Dri ven by an
obsess i on with the so rdid side of dail y life , the
vi deo marks the beg inning of Her nand ez' s inves ti -
ga ti on into t ouri sm as a met aphor and refl ecti on
on contemp or ary life , gl obalizati on, tr avel,
l ei sure, and t he constructi on of power. Th e
arti st 's gaze osc ill at es between r epul si on and
fasc i na ti on , a charact er i sti c of the arti st' s
ot her work . Th e video as ks impor t ant ques ti ons
about t he probl emati c na tur e of the tr ansacti ons
at the U. S.- Mex i co bo rder. impl ying that the
mora ll y quest i onabl e in the U.S . i s poss ibl e in
Mex i co, given the l axity of the l aw sys t em and
the admini st ra ti ve cor rupti on. Showing the pi ece
in the Unit ed St at es eff ecti vel y cl oses the l oop
and compl et es the tr ansacti on between Mexi ca n
cri t i ca li ty and Ameri ca n consumpti on.
50
For more than a decade , Pedr o Reyes has been cr e-
ating fi elds of researc h between di ve r se di sc i -
plines . Or iginall y tr ained as an ar chit ect, Reyes
was instrument al in the devel opment of alt ern a-
tive exhibiti on spaces during the 1990s , es pe-
ci all y by transf orming the innard s of a publi c
monument int o a space f or arti sti c .
He appr opri at ed one of the sculptur es commi s-
si oned for the 1968 Ol ympi cs in Mex i co City, the
Torre de los Vient os ( Tower of the Winds) by
Uruguaya n sc ulpt or Gonz al o Fonseca , a f ormer
pupil of Joa qu i n Tor res- Gar ci a . One of hi s l at es t
pr oj ect s has been a combin ati on of chemi stry and
ar chit ectur e. whi ch he ca ll s Arqufmi ca
CA r chimes try) . Acco rding t o hi s own definiti on,
Ar chimes try studi es "how a ment al image i nfl u-
ences the shape of a constructi on." Acco rding t o
Reyes. "the reason why mos t of our bui 1 dings 1 ook
alike i s because all of us have acce pt ed the same
idea of how a building must be. Th e end eav our of
Ar chimes try i s t o open an un expect ed fi eld of
morphol ogy wh ere a constr uc ti on i s under stood as
a di rect tr ansl ati on of human psyc hol og i ca l dri-
ves , no matt er how ca pri ci ous or impr obabl e they
may seem. "
5
One of the fi rs t pr ot ot ypes i s the
Capula , a word cl ose t o other concept s such as
cupula , copula , capelo or al so capsule or capullo
(cocoon) . Capula i s a nes t made of col orful vinyl
string that i s suspend ed th ree f eet over the
fl oo r and ca n be ent ered f rom bel ow. Th e pl as ti c
f abri c of the Capula i s well known in Mexi co ,
since t ypi ca l mar ke t bags and beac h chairs are
made of it; it i s an exampl e of how an ar tifi -
cial mat eri al, a pr oduct of modern chemi stry. has
been adopt ed by cr aft smen t o cr ea t e a unique
st yl e of "syntheti c f olkl ore. " Th e co rpor al
involvement encour aged by the Capul as i s root ed
in a Latin Ameri ca n sensibility. Whil e ther e i s
an Ameri ca n and Eur opea n influence in cont emp o-
ra ry art in Mexi co , Reyes dr aws fr om the Latin
Ameri ca n experiment s fr om the 1960s - the opti cal
art of Jes us Raf ae l Sot o and Carl os Cruz -Di ez -
es pec i all y the thea t er pl ays , comi cs , and films
of Al exandr a Jodorowsky .
PARALLEL WORLDS
Like mos t of Latin Ameri ca , Mex i co i s a country
wh ere absolut e poverty coexi st s with absol ut e
wea lth. Th ese "conditi ons of ext reme wea lth" have
been doc ument ed by arti st Dani el a Rossell, wh o
explores the status of women (a nd status in gen-
eral ) , using images of upper-c la ss women in their
luxurious surroundings . At the start of her
career, Ro ssell phot ographed the facades of hous-
es, labeling each image with a woman' s name.
Later, she penetrat ed deeper into notions of fem-
ininity by photographing nude bodi es of women
profusely decorat ed with snack food . In r ecent
years, she ha s dissected the spaces wh ere the
"upper cr ust" lives : wea lthy women in the oft en-
dr eamlike settings of their own homes . Ri cas y
famosa ( Rich and Famous - a work in progress;
1998-2002) i s a ser i es of portraits of well-off
women, taken in their homes and portraying them
as the st ereotypes and car i ca tur es of their own
conception of class . At the same time, the women
appear as fr ag il e subj ect s with an identity con-
structed thr ough their relationship with a ca mera
and therefor e thr ough the op inion of an "other."
Most of the Rich and Famous photographs expose a
glossy , glittery , golden, shiny, sexy , exotic
world: char acte ri sti cs that could al so desc ribe
the l oca l political infras tructur es of power . For
these women, taste does not come from an "aristo-
cra ti c ," hi st orical lineage , but fr om a literal
translation of wealth into lifestyle. With much
of Mex ican photography int eres ted in the indige-
nous, in the supposedl y un spoil ed rural and van-
i shing Mexico, Rossell manages t o show us the
oppos it e s ide of the coin. Rich and Famous shows
a Mexico distant to all of us, as exoti c as the
indigenous Mexico, but f ar more vi sua lly com-
pe lling and , given the country ' s curr ent soc io -
economic disparities, politically pertinent .
Like Rossell, Yoshua Ok6n ha s sought to r evi se
the ideologies of the socia l class he comes from :
the idiosyncrasies of memb ers of the Mexican
upper cla sses , their as pi ration s , and their
cl ai ms f or l egi timacy . Abuse of power comes as no
surpr i se in Mexico, wh ere wea lth, political
power , and soc i al standing are still tightl y
int ertwined, and wh ere near-tot al impunity ca n be
bought by th ose with the mea ns to pay for it .
Ok6n i s also interested in the upper class's fa s-
cina ti on/repul s i on t oward s what i s cons idered
"na co" (cheesy ) and how peopl e un consc iously
identify with obj ects from whi ch they are trying
to distance themselves . Ok6n's work takes a mock -
soc i ol og ical approach of cl ass ifying soc ial pat-
terns of behav i or , in particular the relation-
ships between the "ma st er" and the "se rv an t," two
t erms that even in mod er n-day Mexico could stil l
be used without the quotation marks .
Chocorrol (1997) - a "ca nine porno project" in
Ok6n's own definiti on - i s a video wh ere a
Xoloitzcuintli dog (a Mex i ca n hairl ess breed)
copulat es with a well -g roomed poodle. Th e two
different breeds ca n obviously signify the
"loca l" and "for eigner," the r aw and groomed, the
poor and rich, the cream and the br ea d. Ac tuall y ,
though, thi s int erpret ation can be turned around :
poodles are in fa ct rather common, and the
"Xo los" (s ome of whi ch wer e famously own ed by
Di ego Rivera ) are very expensive and have become
symb ol s of exclusivity based more on cul tur al
knowledge than on ( recent ly acquired ) wea lth.
Ok6n has stated that the video mea nt to document
wh at he foresaw as the futile sexua l ad vances of
the Xol oi tzcui ntl i towards the "fan cy" poodle
onl y to be refu sed again and aga in, a comment on
difference, cla ss , and soc ial signifi ers . The
bit ch he r ented t o make the movi e happened to be
in heat, so he was not abl e to prevent the dog
from mounting her . Wh en told wh at had happened,
the owner wa s outraged and r ef used monet ary com-
pensation, telling the ar ti st that it was "a mon-
strosity, an unnatural act." "Then I understood
that it wa s mor e of a rac ial and mor al issue
than anything el se , "
6
says Ok6n, perceiving age-
old prejudi ces towards cross breeding across races
and soc ial boundaries. While Fr ench poodles are
relatively new, the product of many different
breeds, and anything but "pure ," the
Xo l oit zcuintli breed harks ba ck t o the Aztec
times . Paradoxically, es t abli shing di stan ce fr om
assoc iati ons to the indigenous Mexican culture is
sancti oned, and so it is cl ear that questions of
purity, race , and skin col or are still quite
pot ent. Chocorrol shows that instinct overrul es
any prejudi ce in the an imal kingdom. In the con-
t ext of Ok 6n's other work, the piece recalls one
of the t ypi ca l pa ttern s of behavio r in wea lthy
adolescents: the upper -c l ass kid gets the house
servant pr egna nt, a downright rape that invari-
ably goes unpuni shed. It has al so become a common
occurrence in Mexican soa p operas .
It i s s i gn ifi cant that several arti st s in Me xico
(Yos hua Ok6n , Fr anc i s Al)i s , Jon athan Hern andez ,
among others) have mad e works with dog s as their
main subjects , as does one of the most successful
51
Mexican films in the recent years. Alejandro
Gonzalez Inarritu's Amores Perras (2000; a raw
urban tale that cuts through the layers of Mexico
City's society linking people, precisely, through
th eir relation to their dogs ) . Hernandez' s work
Se Busca Recompensa C Seeking, Reward) C 1998-2001)
is made of one hundred "lost dog" announcements
that the artist col l ect ed in the streets of
Mex i co City at various times. Dogs become the
subjects of the work through the publi c markers
of their absence . Readymade obj ect s of whi ch the
artist became aware while wandering the str eet s,
the flyers expose a myriad of emoti ona l relation-
ships between children, adult s, singl e women,
families, and their lost dogs, who often refer to
th eir lost pet as a member of the family or a
dear friend: "I was robbed by gun-wielding thugs ...
my parent s are very sad ;" "she was wearing a blue
sweater;" "she has a hiccup-like ti c," and so on .
This work directly alludes to th e kidnapping of
pets in Mexico, a perversely clever practice that
targets subjects dear to their own er s. while
bypassing the harsh penalties for kidnapping
humans, a crime that has sharply risen in the
past decade .
Luis Bunuel coined the term "vida de perros" Ca
dog's life ) to refer to the harsh conditi ons of
th e homeless and the outcast , but in many cases ,
the life of a pet in Mexican homes can seem more
desirable that that which most of the population
- a high percentage of which live under the
threshold of poverty - has to endure . As one
reviewer of Amores Perras acut el y pointed out ,
"[the] film is raw in places, and it s atmosphere
of unrelenting physical and emotiona l brutality
will certainl y drive some viewers away . As the
film's U. S. di stributor has taken great pains t o
expl ain , the gruesome back-alley dogfights cen-
tral to one plotline are si mul ated . Vi olence
against human beings apparently requires no such
explanation ." 7
KIDNAPPING
"Life i s worth nothing," goes a popular Mexican
saying . In Mexico , this l oss of value refers to
the price of a life Cas in kidnapping, child
l abor, the micropolitics of ado pti on, prostitu-
tion, and even "normal" work condit ions ) , and to
th e corrupted systems of punishment - or lack
thereof - for taking a life. The entry of Mexico
52
in th e system of transna ti onal flow of capital
has signal ed a new, ruthless logic of subord ina-
tion: bodies have been put to use because th ey
are cheapl y priced.
As a cura t orial "cat egory, " kidnapping is cer-
tainly a strong term. Many art i sts have noted
that huge amounts of capit al have been mobilized
to build and st aff "Maqu il adoras " - l ow-wage
assembly plant s - that take advantage of "l ess
rigid" control s of work cond itions for lower
legal minimum wages meant to increase profits.
Artworks in the form of guerrilla-type act i ons
undermining the hegemony of capita l and the hir -
ing of workers at (r idi culously low) legal wages
t o perform absurd tasks, highlight ways that the
body assumes the burden of sus t ai ning "n ormal"
daily urban life . Critiquing t he exploitation is
problematic, however, because thousands of work-
ers and ent ire commun iti es benefit from the new
situati on as a whole, regardless of their hesita-
tions.
The price ascr ibed t o a body i s situated at the
cent er of the "hired performances" conce ived and
overseen by Santi ago Sierra . Sierra , a Spa ni sh
artist who has made Mexico his home, has an
uncanny ability to go directly to the heart of
th e confli cts and contradictions of our contempo-
rary global soc i ety . For his act i on at P. S.1
8
,
Sierra photographs the bare upper-back of each
mu seum sta ff memb er and then arranges th e images
on a panel accor ding to skin color and hierarchy.
Th e work t akes on th e form of an inverted grada-
tion . Si erra's pieces are over tl y confrontation-
al, leav ing littl e space for mediation. Although
Si erra refuses to repeat a work, his mechanisms
remain si mil ar : he reveals the socia l, racial, or
political inequalities and struct ures of
exploit ation thr ough a clever detournement of
those structures in performances, where t he very
groups subjected to exploi t ation carry out its
deconstruction.
Sierra uses the body to disclose t he mechanisms
of power and exploitati on of various social con-
figurations, including that of the art world.
Sierra highlights P.S . 1' s Guard Program, where
the institut i on hires young people from disadvan-
taged communiti es as its securi ty staff. This new
work add resses the meth ods of conceptual art
(a r chiving, comparing, and so on. ) . A question
always remains open-ended in Sierra's work:
whether he denounces the means of exploit ation or
repl i cates them. Or is he doing the former
through the latter?
While Sierra expl ores an economi c conditi on by
playing int o the roles he denounces , the Mexican
comp any Mejor Vida Corp . (Bett er Lif e Corp ) tr i es
to find workable al t ern at ives to the l og ic s of
capita l by providing free product s and serv i ces
to those who demand them. Minerva Cuevas, the
only employee of MVC, works in many different
ways, from We b projects to on -sit e actions, from
simpl e chores (such as writing letters for the
illiterate ) to guerrilla-like act i ons that subt l y
int erfere with capi t ali sm. Bar Codes Replacement
series (2000-ongoing )
9
is a good exa mpl e : at a
supermarket , she sel ects products already pack-
aged and weighed (li ke cheese, nuts. or carrots )
and buys the l i ghtest package . At MVC's headquar -
ters, she scans the bar code, reproduces it, and
returns to the supermarket to replace the exis t -
ing bar code of heavier and bigger packages with
the ones she has copi ed . Bar Code functions as a
service, or as a product , as she makes th em
availabl e for download from MVC's Web sit e
(www . irational.org / mvc /) . Bar Code (a "trompe l e
scanner ," as Cuevas refers to it ) has a 1 so
appeared i n severa l museums and galler i es .
Cuevas' altrui sm i s a symboli c gesture that
inserts it self in real circuit s and takes adva n-
tage of existing commerc i al systems . MVC i s a
one-person company that reverses the goals of a
funct i onal one . Critiquing corporate bureaucracy,
Cuevas has imposed a strict limit to the growth
of MVC, so its success will mean its failure, as
she will eventua l ly be i ncapabl e of fulfilling
the demand for the services and product s that she
is offering . The services provided by MVC include
issuing fake student cards, sweeping and mop ping
subway sta ti ons , giving metro ti cket s f or fr ee
during rush hours to avoid the long queues, and
providing prestamped enve l opes . l t h o ~ ~ h Cuevas
has stated in interviews that MVC i s not (or not
on l y) an artistic project, the corporation ' s
products have often been shown in museums and
gal l er i es .
In a recent int erv i ew with cura t or Hans- Ulri ch
Obr i st, Cuevas cl ear l y states that she does not
consider the op position art / life to be valid:
"I don't be li eve the gallery space is outside the
real' world. The gal l ery and the museum are cul-
tural institutions with their own politics as
well, and you can always try to use and interfere
with their structures . I work with museums
because it means you will target a spec i f i c audi-
ence . I f eel Mejor Vida Corp . i s a parasite pro -
j ect that uses the mu seum beca use of it s produc-
tion faciliti es and publi c presence. It' s one way
the co rporati on can grow larger, and in that
sense , the int ernet has been a very powerful com-
munication tool."
It is thr ough it s symboli sm that the project con-
nects to reality, and it s fragility and na ivet e
gives it str ength . In a sense, MVC can only func-
tion in the realm of the symb oli c. One critic
asked Cuevas if "mejor vida" wa s synonymous t o
"welfare," and she repl i ed: "there i s no rela-
tion . MVC has precise fields of work, and what we
gi ve away , in economi ca l terms, is not what gives
our ac tiviti es their value."
10
If a body can be bought f or nothing, it does not
escape commodifi ca ti on even aft er death. There is
an unspoken traffi c of corpses and organs, and
th ose who do not have the economi ca l means to pay
for even a humbl e buri al are routinely subjected
t o the "ultimate exclus i on " (in Medina's words ) :
ending up in the common pit . In the mid-1980s, an
underground group ca ll ed SEMEFO (meaning Medical
Forensic Serv i ces ) start ed out doing gory perfor-
mances as a trash metal rock band. Teresa
Margoll es , the unofficial leader of the group ,
al so creates in st all ati ons with an imal corpses,
casts of dead human bodies, and bodily fluids .
Over the years , she has become more involved in
contemp orary art and has developed a career of
her own . Her work has become 1 ess theatri ca 1 , but
the content remains macabre and unsettling.
Vaporizaci6n ( Vaporization ) (2002 ) appeals to
senses other than si ght, as a strong smell of
anti septic and th e cons i st ent drone of the fog
mach ine pervade the room. Th e water that i s fed
int o th e mach ine comes from the morgue, a refuse
from the cl eaning of corpses . The otherwise empty
gallery cont ains only a fog that eventual l y fore-
cl oses vi sibil ity. In what appears to be a mini-
mal display, one soon recognizes the antiseptic
smell as the sme ll of death . The faint odor is a
reminder of th e brevity of human exi stence and of
van i ty' s fr ag ility and a powerful reminder that
"van i sh ing" comes from "vanitaes . " The spectator
i s unsettled, as she realizes that these effluv i a
of death have ac tuall y entered her body, becoming
one with it. Mex i can folklore deals with death
53
with a strange mixture of terror and humor, but
Margolles drains away the picturesque and works
within the severe and austere language of concep-
tual aesthetics .
As seen in the front pages in the tabloids and
the much-invoked Day of the Dead, Mexicans are
supposed to possess a very playful relation with
death. Margolles' work is undeniably provocative
and raises the issue of the legal and ethical
spaces in which the work is allowed to be pro-
duced and exhibited. As she searches for the gaps
left open at the intersection of the law and its
enforcement, Margolles mimicks the process of
"finding a way out , " a common survival strategy
among those living under harsh conditions.
Presenting her work at P.S . l is a challenge : in a
country with pervasive regulation for every
aspect of life - even the once-autonomous contem-
porary art culture (and P. S. l was the paradigmat-
ic "raw" space ) - will the work end up being more
about obtaining permits and respecting regula-
tions than about inscribing the dead body in the
public sphere? Will the experience of the work be
reduced to its neutralized representation?
As Medina has signaled, the real strength of
Margolles' practice resides beyond its transgres-
sive side and in its capacity to highlight the
extreme permissivity and laid-back systems of
contemporary Mexican law enforcement . Her work
operates within a "zone of tolerance" where the
exceptions usually granted to artistic practice
(what in literary theory could be called a "poet-
ic license" ) comply with the situations and
institutions it implicitly undermines .
11
The same
dynamic appears in the action / insta l lation A
Prop6sito (1996 ) by Miguel Calderon, who chooses
to go against the grain in an "!-don't-give-a-
damn" attitude. Many of his works have bordered
legality, decency, and what can be rightly con-
sidered "art." With Okon as his partner in crime,
Calderon stole car stereo systems, mimicking, not
without danger, the rising pattern of urban crime
in Mexico. A Prop6sito (which can be translated
as both "regarding ... " or "on purpose" ) transpos-
es what is happening on the streets into the art
sphere, without, paradoxically, ever leaving the
urban setting.
Negotiating a situation of "doubl e-excl usi on," or
the feeling of not fully belonging to any social
system after many years of living abroad, Carlos
Amorales conflates his real self and his al ter
54
ego and demands an active participation of the
audience . The performance Funny 13 (2000-2002 )
marks Amorales' next step after his longtime
involvement with his "Amorales" character and the
world of wrestling . For someone living in Mexico,
using wrestlers as subject matter wou l d have been
obscene, the cliche of cliches . But for someone
who has been living abroad for so long (he has
lived in Amsterdam since 1992 ) , the wrestler
became an irresistible figure to portray both his
embrace of the local from abroad as well as mak-
ing his construction of identity literal (both as
a Mexican and as an artistic persona,
"Amorales") .
Funny 13 takes its cue from the rave scene, and,
as before, Amorales assumes a masked identity . In
this case, a devil-shaman coaxes the auditorium
into joining him in the performance . Amorales's
work has always had a way of "trendizing the
folkloric : " his pieces are perfectly and highly
crafted, with a cold, super-slick look . Amorales
has created a very peculiar syncretism that comes
out in the aesthetics of the work . A five-point
star is drawn on the floor of the performance
arena invoking the presence of Satan, a figure
embodied by Amorales himself through his new
masked persona . On the walls of the enclosed
space hangs a wall drawing referencing the envi-
ronment found in sports clubs , with outlines of
pin-up gir l s, creating an ambiguous setting where
arcane imagery blends with kitsch references . In
the midst of a rhythmic and cathartic dance to
music by Silverio, Amorales / Devil starts to mess
with people, tempting them to join the dance,
breaking the "don't touch" taboo .
Amorales's performance works give the public the
opportunity to experience firsthand the ambience
of Mexican wrestling : carnivalesque, theatrical
events where a fight is a stand-in for the spec -
tators own passions and desires . In theater.
actors pretend to be something else, and the pub-
lic suspends its disbelief in order to get
invol ved . In sports. an actual confrontation
takes place in which spectators take sides and
let go of their pass i ons. What sets wrestling
apart is that the wrestlers are pretending to
fight. They know it, and the public knows i t, and
each knows the other knows it; and yet, the spec -
tacle works . How come? Because what is at stake
is not the outcome of the confrontation, but the
cathartic involvement of the public in the farce .
POINTS OF CONTACT
For Francis Alys, the discovery of the particular
urban landscape of Mexico City signified a radi-
cal shift in his practice
12
and has since
remained the underlying theme for most of his
work . In a ser ies of walks that conceptually
relate to Situationist derives, Alys has scoured
the streets of Mexico City, documenting his find-
ings or making actions that more of t en than not
remain unnoticed as they become integrated in the
urban life of the city . He has pulled, dragged,
pushed, or worn diverse objects in his daily
expeditions through the streets. Most of these
performances have been documented on video or
photography by an assistant and have become the
sole testimony to the existence of the work.
Alys is acutely aware of the alt ernative economy
of the so -called Third World and of it s tactics
of subemployment, sma ll -scale retailing, consump -
tion without brands, pirating, appropriation of
public space, mobility, and the recycling of
urban detritus for recirculation in the consump-
tion cycle. He i s also aware of the complex web
of social relations that grows out of these
actions . The photographs from the series
"Ambul antes (Pushing and Pulling )" (1998- 2002 )
concentrate on the weight of things (both the
actual load and the social implications of the
action ) . Here , the Christian express ion that has
made its way into common l anguage, "In the sweat
of thy face sha lt thou eat bread," becomes liter-
al . Alys' pieces are modern-day Sisyphean under -
t akings, in which the "common man" has to undergo
often-gruesome tasks every day. But, as often
happens in his work, the search for narrative
between document, fiction, and poetics reveals
how simple day-to-day living takes on an almost
epi ca l stance: what can be a humiliating burden -
pushing the "diablito" (a makeshift cart l oaded
with merchandise ) and crossing s t r ~ t s calling
out for customers - becomes a dignified endeavor .
Alys' gaze has the ability to turn everyday hap-
penings into surrea l tales, where the viewer is
often unsure whether to rece ive them as actual
facts or as fictions concocted by the artist .
Al ys i s aware of the dangers impli cit in his dou-
ble status as foreigner (a Belgian in Mexico and
an artist in the urban realm) : "When working in a
zone of poverty, the sense of being an exploiter
is never far away, "
13
he says .
This inequality of power is also present in
Eduardo Abaroa's work. Abaroa's Portable Broken
Obelisk/ Para t1ercados Ambulantes (1991-1993 ) is a
direct reference to Barnett Newman's famous
sculptur e where the two paradigmatic monumental
forms, the pyramid and the obelisk, meet at a
point of permanent tension . Abaroa adapted the
size (it is 25% smaller ) , form, and proportions
of Newman's sculpture and constructed a "Mexican"
version of it . But whereas Newman's modernist
icon seaml ess l y resolves its structural tour de
force through the use of Cor- Ten steel, Abaroa 's
broken obelisk has an internal - though at times
visible - mak es hift tubular metal structure cov-
ered with a cheap plastic (in a bright fuchsia
shade known as "Mexican pink" ) commonly used in
street markets. The work not only appropriates
aesthetic codes and transforms them with "local"
materials, but also imports a canonical abstract
monument and str ips it from all of its connota-
tions. In the displacement from fixity to mobili-
ty, st eel to pink plastic, corporation to street
market, f orma l economies to informal ones, Abaroa
remarks that any adoption of foreign models -
whether cultura l or economic - is doomed to
remain subaltern unless a radical operation is
performed that brings unreasonable and naive
aspirations face to face with present-day
Mexico's reality, contradicti ons, and actual con-
ditions of possibility.
Whereas Newman's sculpture was commissioned by
Seagram's for its headquarters entrance, Abaroa's
movable sculpture mocks the dignity that is
expected from works of art as signifiers of cor-
porate ident ity and the connotations of stabili-
ty, cosmopolitani sm, and good taste they are sup-
posed to embody. In his work, Abaroa has consis-
tently undermined assumptions regarding the sym-
bols of "high" culture by submitting them to
reinterpretations that signal that their value
often relies on a certain "cultural arbitrari-
ness" and not on "an existential need for person-
al sat i sfaction . "
14
Abaroa, who has said that he
lives in "a world where utopian ideals have dis-
appeared and have been replaced by their con-
traries," constr uct s a bizarre world - with
irony, sarcasm and a particularly dark sense of
humor - where everyday objects turn into adult
toys . Childhood toys are stripped of their "nice-
ness" and turned int o vicious critiques of what
they stand for.
55
"Politicians and avocados have something in com-
mon : they are made to mature through the use of
newspaper s ," goes a popular saying. Gabri el
Kuri ' s Work in Progress (1995 ) invokes a tension
between the t emporality of the media (in thi s
case the print ed news with which he wrapped the
avocados) and the natural processes of ripening,
aging, and decay. Th e wor k also refer s to the
artist's chi l dhood, as wrapped avocados, mangos ,
and other tropical fruit s evoke a famili arity
once found in most Mexican homes . While complet-
ing his studi es in London within a self -imposed
sec lus ion (he was himself in a "concentr ated"
maturing process), Kuri began to reflect on what
wa s t o become the core of hi s wor k, the elusive
concept of time . He be came interes ted in how
something like a newspaper, capable of conveying
informati on of great importance, i s in a very
short period of time render ed practica l ly use -
less . Paradoxically, once the newspaper i s old,
it s phys i ca l support - paper - becomes ecological
wa ste, while the news (a term that becomes a one-
wor d oxymoron once it s function ha s been per -
f ormed ) remains only in memory . Thi s cyc l ical
pa ssage fr om signifi can ce to obsolescence be come s
a unit of time meas ur ement .
Kuri 's work ha s always succeeded in el icit i ng
mean ingful associations from the mo st humble of
everyday mat eri al s and element s : newspapers, fly -
ers , information charts, cereal boxes , flower s ,
or wheel barrows . Th e mea ning of Work in Progress
does not li e in the newspaper it self or in the
tr opi cal fruit inside , but r ather in the point of
conta ct between them. By re -semant i zing often
di sparate obj ect s i n an unexpected coexi stence,
his conceptua l propositions shy away from easy
national identifications , yet respond t o the con-
tingen cies of that context, it s ma t erials, and
it s rea liti es .
Dougla s Crimp ha s shown how "the set of objects
the Museum di splays i s sus tained only by the fic-
ti on that they somehow constitute a coherent rep-
r esent ational univ erse . "
15
Th e current hype around
Mexico has l ed to the organization of many inter -
national exhibitions , and th e pr es ent exhibition
- given New York's l egitimizing power - runs the
risk of set ting a canon and positing as norm what
i s only one aspect of art produced in Mexico
City . Klaus Biesenbach ha s drawn our attention to
the Exc hange as a curatorial f iction or uni fying
trait. Th e acritical belief in this fiction i s
56
what gives every group of otherwi se di sparat e and
heterogeneous objects a unifying thread . That
fiction ca n be ca lled Hi story, Hi st ory of Art,
History of Contemporary Art, Cont emp orary Art in
Mexico, and so on . In thi s sense , countries are
al so fiction s that have been enfor ced upon us .
The Magical Mexico, the Surrealist Mexico, the
Larger Than Life Mex i co , the Indigenous Mexico.
the Black & Wh i t e Mexi co , the Viol ent Mex ico have
all been curated for us in the past, and the
operation taki ng_pl ace her e i s no different. Thi s
process involves trading, f or exampl e , a narrow
reading of the work for wide visibility, and in
so doing, the transnat i onal exchange produces ,
under pr ec i se dir ecti ons and spec ifications , cul-
tural wea lth to be consumed abroad whil e retain -
ing a belief in the mutual advantages of the
ope ration. Th e values of these bodi es of work and
their exchange rat es are put to the t es t in thi s
compl ex negotiati on.
The author wishes to thank Jose Roca for his invaluable
insights and assistance in conceiving this text .
1
Cuauhtemoc Medina, "The struggle against determinism: a con -
versation with Carlos Monsivais , " Parachute , no . 104, Montreal,
Canada . October 2001. p. 17
2
Th i s text i s the result of conversations with the curator, and
I have written the essay by following the categories and themes
that Klaus Biesenbach had chosen to group the works.
3
Cuauhtemoc Medina. "Negociac ion y apertura, " CURARE 17, Mexico
City, January -June, 2001
4
Jonathan Hernandez. notes in the liner of the CD-ROM, "No One
Over 21"
5
Pedro Reyes in conversation with the author, 2002
6
Yoshua Ok6n. ci ted in Luna Cornea, "Zoografia," no . 20 ,
December 2000, p. 165
7
I am referring to Andrew O'Hehir ' s review of "Amores Perros "
at http : ll www . salon.coml ent l movies l reviewl 2001103130amo r es_per-
ros l
8
This piece was finally not performed I exhibited for the P. S. 1
exhibition .
9
This work was not exhibited in the exhibition at P. S.1. The
text was written before the final installation of the exhibi-
tion was completed .
1
Conversation between Hans Ulrich Obrist and Minerva Cuevas at
the first event of the projet "Information I Misinformation"
part of the 24th Graphic Biennial in Ljubljana. Slovenia . At
http : I l www . irati on a l . org l mvc I english . html .
11
Cuauhtemoc Medina. " Zones of Tolerance . Teresa Margolles .
SEMEFO and Beyond," Parachute, n. 104 , Montreal , October . 2001,
p. 32-52
12
Alys was trained as an architect, and it is in Mexico that he
decided to become an artist.
13
Francis Alys , cited by Michele Faguet in "The fear of return -
ing and being misunderstood," Parachute, no . 104, Montreal,
Canada . October 2001 , p. 125
14
Patrick Charpenel . referring to Abarca s work in the ex hi bi-
tion "Engendros del ocio y la hipocrecia," Museo de Arte
Carrillo Gil, Mexico City , 1999
15
Thi s is a quote from Donato Eugenio ' s "The Museum's Furnace .
Notes toward a Contextual Reading of Bouvard and Pecuchet, "
cited i n Douglas Crimp, On the Museum's Ruins , MIT Press .
Boston, 1995, p. 53
An Im-Media-te, Dispersed Combative Spirit
Guill ermo Santamarina
I would venture to say that never before in human
hi story ha s the codification of adversity been
more productive. Everyday, every unit of time
sees it s reminiscence labeled with a certain
parameter - first closed . . . then barely open .. .
now open (such a timely circumstance! ) -a para -
meter of acceptability , belonging, and access to
some form of misfortune . Thi s energy Co r pre -
cept?), a customhouse on the well -traveled road
between the continents of ignominy, assimilated
as a de facto circumstance, today fosters con-
tention, speculation, and lucrative hopes rather
than events that would certainly modify the way
adversity operates on soc ial bodies and individ -
ual anatomies (men' s and women ' s of all races and
all ages ) . It i s easy to sus tain that per sona l
experience and the experience of different kinds
of public consensus, which accompanies these con-
ditions of misfortune, is governed - obviously in
very imaginative ways - by the best deployed
sources of soc ial sec urity and of the admini stra -
tion of capital, work and lei sure , and circum-
sc ribed by the spectacular labyrinth that i s
bureaucracy and ma ss- media . Indeed, the media i s
the arbiter of our (boundless ) ta stes and of
those (vulnerable ) sins that are committed both
inside and outside our (otherwise unstable ) mor-
phologies . And after replac i ng an already deval -
ued God, the media offers the virtuous brea st of
benediction / damnation that feed s the business of
being alive . Business indeed, beca use today
everything is confined to the sordid pul se of
those few ma sters of the world . And evidently, as
far as influences are concerned, below those
"guides" of the human condition , we behold, in
those aforesaid - oftentimes bl oated - powers,
the promi se of progres s , the ta s ks of fragile
faith (with every religion downtrodden by politi -
cal prioriti es and, of course, economic position-
ing mechani sms ) and affiliations to other mytho-
1 og i cal manifestations or utopias Cwhi ch, it
seems , are unrealizabl e) and also, limping some-
where out there, we see art's original function,
or that which represent s th e heroic progress of
individual human will .
Representing decisively adversity's twist s and
turns at the beginning of the twenty-first centu-
ry, there are experts in Mexico who devot e their
energy to its aesthetic codification .
Po stulating, germinating, di ssemi nati ng, harvest-
ing (whether fruit s are plentiful or scarce ) the
character i stics that articulate the r elationsh ip
between visual art and the world t oday, with it s
impositions and coercive ritual s as a distinctive
topping, is a process that forms the basis of the
iconographic analysis of thousa nds of art i sts
working throughout the country . The relationship,
coinciding with the aforesaid, i s not si mple and
has many facet s which could be seen as "probably
sound," or even wor se , as "probably useful,"
aside from Co r indifferent to ) it s relevant or
transcendental acceptance in our sha r ed history
of univer sa l victimization and in each artist ' s
particular hi st ory .
I think that excess ive classifications and judg-
ments conventionally applied to the many forms of
discourse on art and adversity are insuffi cient
in the face of the laws of extreme relativity
that bureaucracy and the media have formulat ed.
In spite of definitions - recently es t abli shed
with too much zea l - of what i s designated as
terrorism Co r the int emper ance of the retort to
ideologies and economies induced by post-09 / 11 / 01
capitalism, as some of us have noticed ) , it i s
clear that today in Mexico, the countl ess sys tems
legitimizing what i s acceptably me ssed- up - and
most citizens ' res ignation - have grown extr emely
weak .
Paradoxes: though I doubt it ha s any real i nfl u-
ence, the rep resentation in art of life in the
face of adversities can now circulate practically
anywhere. It exists above chimneys , as it has for
years, and in the Church, for even l anger . It
decorates hallways , like an immovable potted
plant, and prowl s mu se um halls, often as unyield-
ing to visitor s as the potted plant . It visits
places wher e th e fl ow of urine i s perpetual, but
also, and for some time now, it ca n be seen on
walls in fancy hotels, wher e it woul d, of course ,
be in the way if it were not signed by a modern
ma ster whom no one dar es question. It lives here
and there in the va st national landsca pe: in cen-
ters for spiritual peace as well as in gossipy
watering holes ; in ultra-chic galleries ; in si te-
specific installations (wh er e the representation-
complaint concomitance usually moderat es argu-
ments regarding art's usefulness ) ; in diplomats'
57
offices, experiencing the index of perception and
other incursions of subjectivity; in "cutting-
edge" "alternative venues ; " in international
biennials (br idges of cunning communi cat ion where
outstanding ideas can be exc hanged and , of
course, where power struggl es t ake place ) ; in ar t
fair cubic l es (where l aundered money, short-term
investments, rumors, dizzy spell s, and fa sh i on
serve as conduit s for its movement ) ; in community
centers (where one ma y beli eve that the idea of
art as a transmitt er of spiritual interests is
still operative, hypothetically ) ; in wildlife
preserves (promising a certain harmony with the
misfortune of other living spec i es ) ; al so , print-
ed on political party pins, baseball caps , inner
tubes Cor Edvard Munch's bl ow-up Scream) ,
waterbeds . . .
And in spite of the fact that complaint s are the
da il y bread of Mexican households, it seems that
when they are expressed from the perspective of
stigmatization - like any show of misfortune is -
they no l onger spark the kind of sympatheti c
response they once did. We are used to hearing
sobs and they no l onger bother us mu ch .. . oh, but
if we were in front of a TV camera we might feel
more pain .. . I wonder what Bertolt Br echt would
have thought of such a peculiar phenomenon of
assimilation. He would certainl y have noticed
that bourgeois taste's frivolous unity spreads
with astounding swiftness to every soc i al stratum
of a country where differences do, of course ,
exist and are extremely harsh . Hence a - media ti c
- order that seems to foster self-degradation and
apparent decadence to strengthen the notion of
social appurtenance imposed by the effectiveness
of consumpt i on and the repetition of "ignorant"
behavior . An order that offers individual s a
location within an - ironically - extr eme l y
stratified social pyramid made by a culture whose
high degree of uniformity is the result of a flow
of information measured and admi ni stered by pre-
cious few polit ica l sources, the media's diversi-
fied technol ogica l injections or ideological
channels, whose powers of pers uasion are
grandiose (in speeches aimed at the reduction of
values) . Thus, you get a panorama of swiftl y-made
decisions that have littl e to do with any kind of
resignation, sacrif i ce or balance of freedom (as
proven by the success of television's reality
shows ) .
58
If Brecht were living in Mexico today and con-
ducting his assimilations of reality, he would
see how str ong , indifferent and commonpl ace self-
humiliation i s when it i s the result of a f ew
moments of friction with the concept of notoriety
in the publi c sphere or that of mass- media . He
might stage scenes of his Seven Deadly Sins where
more than two Annas, dyed blonde, fac e one anoth-
er in a game of effrontery , cunning, extreme
insult s , r el entl ess mutual accusa ti ons until they
passed the degradation test and went on t o do ads
(fo r Rev l on).
It seems that many peopl e are unaware of the
acrobatics that cont emp orary urban cultur e impos -
es on living in a st ate of disgrace despite their
cer tain ex i st ence and effect iveness. Misfortune's
exercise i s cha meleon-l i ke . Its taxonomy i s
adaptabl e and highl y negotiable. It i s al so
transferable, like anything el se in the system of
liber al globalization, as a way of assimilating
progress and- paradoxically- we ll -being . . . bru-
t all y hypocritical. In spit e of it all, as I sa id
before, certain Mexican artists manage to keep a
s i n e r ~ dribble of cr iti cal expressions l eaking
around the conceited invulnerability of a culture
that accommodates the notion of adversity soc i al -
ly. Fortunately, we can point to many instances
of honest, solid work that has been born in the
recent chapters of a l ong crisis, in precise
moments during the expans i on of a dark capital-
i sm , made of ant imat t er that suppor t ed white cap -
italism, within a network copied on the l egal one
that supports the movement and traffic of ill ega l
firearms, psychoactive drugs, exact copies of the
most expens ive computers, peopl e , running
shoes ... Th e show that Klaus Biesenbach has orga-
nized off ers an adequate means of contact with
crea ti ve processes which examine - and establi sh
various modes of separation from - the day-to-day
advers ity of the rea liti es of a nat i on that faces
har dshi ps i n trying t o shed the burden of domina-
tion, dependence and corruption ...
However , what t his show pos it s cannot be class i-
fied as mere cr iti cal - or even ethical - ambi-
tions that might lurk behind the cooking process
of the works that are on display. In fact, I can
assure you that the participating art i sts woul d
disclaim any all egiance to militant reformist
orga nizations and would be unwilling t o ac t as
representatives of any group aspi ring to thematic
unity whose members announce their operations as
"a product of our choos ing," in the existential
spirit of Albert Camus. "I don't know if art i s
the be st place to literally express or dissemi-
nate the importance of respecting the human
rights of all individual s ," says Eduardo Abaroa,
whose participation in this show could emblemati-
cally sum up the relationship between Con the one
hand ) the culture of progress and civilization
and Con the other ) the urgency, improvisation and
radiant Mexican aesthetic lying within the mate -
rials with which his sculpture i s mad e.
"Though I've always felt marginalized, sometimes
deliberately, I don't belong to any identifiabl e
minority with l eg itimat e claims . I would be con-
cerned about making oppressed groups' ser i ous
efforts seem banal if, with my lack of prior
involvement, I were to defend their causes . I
would like to think that by simply racking your
brains 24 hours a day looking for something that
hasn't been sa id or done, you also contribute
something valuable in that sense. I try to deal
with the way every one of us, and not just
groups such as marginal ones, is subj ected t o
present-day systems of control . And above all
hope that by seeking out or inventing my (our )
own freedom, I might also contribute to the free-
dom of others. "
In the exhibition Contra el muro (Aga inst the
Wall ) in Puerto Rico (2000 ) , it was impossible
not to note, in the context of present-day
national art history, a correspondence (though
many would disagree ) between the works' appear-
ance, materials and express ive economy and
Minimalism. Thi s "association," exemplif i ed by
the most successful works of Mexican art over the
past ten years, can be seen as a consequence of
degrees of fascination for an international order
that promises, if not a direct link with the
image of progress, then at least a certain abili-
ty for the work to locate it self in that great
offi ce of common cultures , with
institutionalized cr iti cism and - fortunately -
the extended practice of perversion Ca residue of
what past centuries' avant-garde art movements
have given to the universe ) . A hermetic form of
disgrace, the usual violence, subjected to condi-
tions of (nearly absolute ) silence , the (near )
invisibility of crimes that go unpunished in an
urban order are some of the recurrent elements
that circulate through Teresa Margolles' work
which, I believe, has fruitfully digested the
possibilities of a perverse Minimalism.
Santiago Sierra ha s for some time now been stag-
ing coercions and cases of associated condition-
ing full of convulsive and yet minimalized social
meaning. Hi s compositions , imposed upon - and
made with the cooperation of - human groups,
"demand" that viewers become aware , without any a
priori qualifications, of agreements, convention-
alities and / or common resignation strategies in
the face of adversity, bereft of any aesthetic
flirtations or perogatives beyond those an
ascetic monument eff ect ively requires.
To conclude , I will quote Eduardo Abaroa ' s
answers to two questions that I posed to the
ar ti sts Biesenbach invited to participate in the
curatorial project and that - though I am too not
sure if this significantly supports the aforesaid
- only he CAbaroa ) and Jose Davila had the cour-
tesy of answering:
Is the assimilation of everyday forms of adversi-
ty important to your creative process?
"It's one of my work's recurrent topics. My
pieces are a product of a constant clash with and
assimilation of otherness, of the range of states
in which they (everyday forms of adversity ) can
be acquired when there are no definite answers . "
Do you think that the connections that Mexican
visual arts establish with foreign audiences have
any repercussions on the ways we look at our liv-
ing environment (and react humanely )?
"I don't know if I perceive direct repercussions
of what we artists do . Until now political,
socia l and economic reality has always operated
in a sphere way beyond our reach and has brought
on a state of stupefaction that we are all trying
to get out of . We must admit that the period of
crisis and change from 1968 to the present has
been incredibly violent. Since the 1980s there
have been l eaps, or even school s of ways of doing
things. But I don't know anyone who can really
explain what' s going on or knows what really hap-
pens with those audiences you mentioned . I
believe, within my deeply pessimistic outlook,
that there are better opportunities for political
involvement right now, though I see concrete
actions as more viable than moralization."
Finally, in a very personal way, I would like to
thank those artists participating in this exhibi-
tion, with whi ch all those involved ratify our
incorruptible freedom, in spite of all monumental
crises.
59
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Carlos Amorales, born 1970, Mexico City
( 71 ) We in Flames, 2000- 2002
Installation and performance at Berlin Biennale
2001
Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Micheline
Szwajcer, Antwerp
Copyright Jens Liebchen
( 72 & 73 ) Pure Demons I Sympathy, 2000- 2002
Installation and performance at Galerie Micheline
Szwajcer
Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Micheline
Szwajcer , Antwerp
(74-75) Amorales vs . Amorales, 1999
Performance at Migros Museum, Zurich
Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Micheline
Szwajcer, Antwerp
( 76-77 ) Sympathy, 2002
DVD Sti ll s
Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Micheline
Szwajcer , Antwerp
Education : Gerrit Rietveld Academy and the
Rijksacademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam.
Sol o exh ibiti ons include: Fighting Evil with
Style , USF Contemporary Art Museum, Tampa,
Florida ( 2002 ) ; Solitario, Le Studio, Gallery
Yvon Lambert, Paris, France ( 2002 ) ; Cuerpo Sin
Alma, Fotografia y Video, Galeria Nina Menocal,
Mexico City (2001) ; Cabaret Amorales - Work for
Fun!, Migros Mu seum, Zurich, Switzerland (2001);
Kick in the Head, Migros Museum, Zuri ch,
Switzerland ( 2001 ) ; Ball Game, Art Forum Berlin,
Performance Lounge, Berlin, Germany ( 2001 ) ; House
of Games, Festival a/ d Werf , Utrecht, The
Netherlands ( 2001); Funny 13, Galerie Micheline
Szwajcer, Antwerp, Belgium ( 2000 ) ; Los Hutantes,
Project Room, Mus eo de Arte Carrillo Gil , Mexico
City (1999 ) .
Group exhibit i ons include: Coartadas / Alibis,
Witte de Wit, Rotterdam, The Netherlands ( 2002 ) ;
20 Hill ion Mexicans Can't Be Wrong, South London
Gallery, London, UK (2002 ) ; Outside of the Box,
Contemporary Art Museum, Tampa, Florida ( 2002 ) ;
FLAMES Image Research Office, BB2. Berlin,
Germany ( 2001 ) ; The Overexcited Body, Sesci
Pompeia, Sao Paulo, Brazil (2001 ) ; Kunst mach
Spass, Wolfsburg Museum, Wolfsburg, Germany
( 2001 ) ; Let's Entertain: Life's Guilty Pleasures,
Wolfsburg Museum, Wolfsburg, Germany (2001 ) ;
InSITE 2000, San Diego, California and Tijuana,
Mexico ( 2000 ) ; Au del a du Spectacle, Centre
Georges Pompi dou, Paris, France ( 2000 ) ; Let' s
Entertain , Walker Art Center, Minneapolis,
Minnesota ( 2000 ) .
70
-
Eduardo Abaroa, born 1968, Mexico City
( 63- 67) Portable Broken Obelisk ( For Outdoor
Markets ) , 1991 - 1993
Drawing, photographic prints, metal and plastic
canvas
Courtesy of the artist and kurimanzutto, Mexico
City
Collection of Gilberta Charpenel
Education : M.F.A. California Institute of the
Arts (1999 -2001) ; B.F.A. Escuela Nacional de
Artes Plasticas, Universidad Nacional Aut6noma de
Mexico , Mexico City (1988- 1992 ) .
Solo exhibitions include: Eduardo Abaroa:
Engendros del Ocio y la Hipocresia (1991-1999) ,
Track 16 Gallery, Los Angeles, California (2000) ;
Eduardo Abaroa, Jack Tilton Gallery, New York
(1999 ) ; Eduardo Abaroa: Engendros del Ocio y la
Hipocresia (1991-1999) , Museo de Arte Carrillo
Gil, Mexico City (1999 ) ; Paseos del Eter, Control
Remota, Crudo ... , Galeria OMR, Mexico City (1997);
Articulos Epilepticos, Art Deposit, Mexico City
(1996 ) ; Bitacora Artistica, Curare, Espacio
Critico para las Artes, Mexico City (1996 ) ; Don't
Give Me No Ideas, Iturralde Gallery, Los Angeles,
California (1995 ) ; Reproduccion Parcial, Arena
Mexico, Guadalajara. Mexico ( 1994 ) ; Wart Mart,
Corpus Callosum, Guadalajara, Mexico (1994 ) .
Group exhibit ion s in clude: Have a Cool Summer .
Track 16 Gallery, Lo s Angeles, California ( 2001 ) ;
Escultura Mexicana, La Academia a la In sta l ac i 6n ,
Museo del Pala cio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City
( 2001 ) ; Economia de Mercado, kurimanzutto,
Mercado de Medellin, Mexico City (1999 ) ; LaSala
del Artista, kurimanzutto, Mexico City (1999 ) ;
InSITE97, Tijuana, Mexico and San Diego,
California (1997 ) ; Acne, Museo de Arte Moderno,
Mexico City (1995 ) ; The Return of the Cadavre
Exquis, The Drawing Center, New York ( 1993) ;
Calma, Temistocles 44, Mexico City (1993 ) ;
Temfstocles II, Temi stocles 44, Mexico City
(1993 ) ; Temfstocles I ( Decoraci6n para el Hagar),
Temi s tocl es 44, Me xico City (1993 ) .
62
Francis Alys , born 1959 , Antwerp , Belgium
( 81 -89 ) Ambulantes (Push ing and Pulling) , 1998- 2002
77 sl ides
Courtesy of the art i st and Lisson Gallery, London
Education: Istituto di Architettura di Venezia,
Veni ce ( 1983- 1986) ; Inst itut d'Architecture de
Tournai, Belgium (1978- 1983) .
Solo exh i bi ti ons include: 76: Francis
Alys, Th e Museum of Modern Art, New York ( 2002 ) ;
Francis Alys, Wadswor th Atheneum, Hartford,
Connecticut ( 2001 ) ; Peter Kil chma nn , Zurich ,
Switzer l and ( 2001 ) ; The Last Clown, L i sson
Gall ery , London, UK ( 2001 ) ; Plug In, Winnipeg ,
Can ada ( 2000 ) ; ACME, Los Angeles, California
( 2000 ) ; Stand-by , Li sson Gallery, Lon don , UK
( 1999 ) ; Le Temps du Sommei 1, Contemporary Ar t
Gall ery, Vancouv er , Canada ( 1998 ) ; Mu seo
Regional, Guadalajara, Mexico (1 998 ) ; The Thief,
Di a Center f or the Ar t s, New York ( 1998 ) ; Jack
Tilt on Gallery, New York (1997) ; The Liar, The
Copy of the Liar , Mus eo de Arte Moderno, Mexico
City ( 1997 ) ; Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de
Oaxaca, Oaxaca, Mexi co (1996 ) .
Group ex hibitions incl ude: Lima Biennale, Lima ,
Peru (2002) ; A Walk to the End of the World , The
Foksal Gallery Foundation, Poland ( 2001 - 2002 ) ;
Loop, Kunsthal l e der Hypo-Kulturst iftung , Munich
and P. S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, New York
(2001) ; Opera City Art Gallery, Japan ( 2001 ) ;
Being - Together, Marres, Maa stricht, The
Netherlands (2001) ; God is in the Details , Centr e
for Contemporary Art, Geneva, Switzer l and ( 2001);
EGOFUGAL : 7th International I stanbul Bienna l e ,
Istanbul, Turkey ( 2001); Animations , P. S.1
Contemporary Art Center , New York (2001) ; 49th
Biennale di Venezia, Venice, Italy (2001) ;
Mutations : La Video Mexicaine Actuelle , Palais
des Arts , Toulouse and Iconoscope, Montpelier,
France ( 2001) ; A Shot in the Head, L i sson
Gallery, London, UK (2000) ; Mixing Memory and
Desire , New Museum of Art. Lucerne , Switzerland
( 2000 ) ; Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico City
( 1999 ) ; Cinco Continentes y una Ciudad, Museo de
la Ciudad, Mexico City (1998 ) .
80
Gabriel Kuri , born 1970, Mexico City
(185 ) Tree with Chewing Gum, 1999 (detail )
Laminated c-print
Courtesy of the artist and kurimanzutto , Mexico
City
(186- 193 ) Bob Schalkwijk
Unidad Juarez , 1985
Mexico City after the 1985 earthquake
Courtesy of Bob Schalkwijk
Education : M. F. A. Go l dsmiths' College Un i versity
of London (1993- 1995) ; Escuela Nac i onal de Artes
Plast i cas , Un i versidad Nacional Aut6noma de
Mexico, Mex i co City (1988- 1992 ) .
Solo exhibi t i ons inc l ude : Sara Me l t zer Gallery,
New York ( 2002 ) ; Momenta de Importancia, Museo
Rufino Tamayo , Mexico City, Aula Magna, Instituto
Angl o-Mexica no, Mexico , and Project Room , Madrid,
Spain (2000-2001 ) ; Plan de San Lunes, Museo de
l as Artes de Guada l ajara. Guadalajara , Mex i co
(1999 ) ; Extra , Sinaloa 252, Mex i co City (1997);
Everyday Holiday (with Liam Gi llick ) , Le Magasin
Centre National d'Art Contemporain de Grenoble,
Grenoble , France (1996 ) ; Te amo pero donde estas,
Galeria Arte Actual, Monterrey, Mexico ( 1992 ) ,
Iconografia del Capricho, Galeria Etnia, Mexico
City (1991 ) .
Group exhibit i ons include: 2002 Gwangju Biennale,
( in collaboration with CASPER ) Gwangju, Korea
( 2002 ) ; Exile on Main Street, NICC, Antwerp,
Belgium ( 2002 ) ; Tirana Biennial, Tirana, Albania
( 2001 ) ; Dedallic Convention. MAK, Vienna, Austria
( 2001 ) ; New Sittings Contemporary Projects 4, Los
Ange l es County Museum of Art, Los Ange l es,
California (2000 ) ; Age of Influence : Reflections
in the Mirror of American Culture. Museum of
Contemporary Art, Chicago, Illinois ( 2000 ) ;
Summer Show, Casey Kaplan Gallery, New York
( 2000 ) ; Galerfa Kurimanzutto a la Gal erie Chantel
Crousel , Galerie Chantel Crousel, Paris, France
( 2000 ) ; Yo y mi circunstancia, Montreal Museum of
Fine Arts , Montrea l , Canada ( 1999 ) ; Economi a de
Mercado, kurimanzutto, Mercado de Medellin,
Mexico (1999 ) ; Lines of Loss, Artists Space, New
York (1997); Moment Ginza. Le Magasin Centre
National d'Art Contemporain de Grenoble,
Grenoble, France (1996 ) .
184
Gustavo Artiga s , born 1970, Mexico City
(93-94 ) The Rules of the Game ( Part 1 ) I Las
Reglas del Juego ( Parte 1) , 2000
Video still
Courtesy of the artist and La Col ecc i 6n Jumex ,
Mexico City
(95-99 ) The Rules of the Game ( Part 2 ) I Las
Reglas del Juego ( Parte 2) , 2000
Video still
Courtesy of the artist and La Col ecc i 6n Jumex ,
Mexico City
Education: B. F. A. Esc uela Na cional de Artes
Plasticas , Univers idad Nacional Aut 6noma de
Mexico, Me xico City (1991 - 1995) .
Solo exhibit i ons include: Emergency Ex it, Mu seo
de Ar t e Carrillo Gil , Mexico City ( 2002 ) ; Locals
Hate Us, Iturralde Ga ll ery , Los Ange l es,
California and Fordsburg Ar ti s t s Studi os ,
Johannes burg, South Africa ( 2001 ) ; Te 11 her that
she i s making a mistake, Iturralde Gall ery , Los
Angeles, California (2000 ) ; Why Haven 't You
Called Me? , La Torr e de l os Vi entos , Mexico City
( 2000 ) ; Room 6001 , Labora tori o Mexico- Cuba,
Havana , Cuba ( 2000 ) ; A Clock: The Shape of Time,
Basel, Switzer l and (1998 ) ; Ritual and Rhythm, Th e
Other Gallery, Banff Centre for the Arts ,
Alberta, Can ada ( 1997 ) ; Unhoused/ Wall of Sound
( Installation/ Radio Pirate Broadcast ) , Jes Os
Maria 42, Centro Hi st 6rico , Me xico (1996 ) .
Group exh ibiti ons in clude : Catastroph i co, La
Panaderia, Mex i co City (2002 ) ; 49th Biennale di
Venez i a, Ven i ce , Italy (2001); Blind Spot,
Vrededorp, Johannesburg , South Africa ( 2001) ;
Sport Cult, Apex Ar t, New York ( 2001); Art in
General : 20 Years ( Canal Street Projects ) , Art in
General, New York (2001 ) ; The End of the Eclipse,
Fundaci 6n Telef6ni ca , Madr id, Spa in ( 2001); 7th
Havana Biennial, Havana , Cuba ( 2000 ) ; InSITE
2000 , Tijuana, Me xico and San Diego, California
(2000 ) ; Noise: First Sound Art Festival, Ex-
Teresa Arte Actual, Mexico City ( 1999 ) ; In the
90's : Mexican Contemporary Art, In stituto
Mexi cano de Cu l tura, Wa s hington D. C. and New York
(1998 ) 0
92
Jonathan Her nandez, born 1972 , Mexico City
( 135-137 ) No One Over 21, 2000
(Collaboration wit h FUSSIBLE & Tor oLab)
Video still
Courtesy of the artist and kurimanzutto, Mexico
City
(138 & 139 ) 50 sculptoric situations (Mexico )
Courtesy of the artist and kurimanzutt o, Mexico
City
Educa ti on : Escuela Nac i ona l 9e Artes Pl as ti cas ,
Universidad Nacion al Aut6noma de Mex i co , Mex i co
City ( 1993- 1997 ) ; Studies in Arch it ecture ,
Univers it e de Montr ea l, Canada ( 1991 - 1992 ) .
Solo exhibiti ons i nclude : Travelling wit hout
Moving, kurimanzutto at Mexico City's Gall ery
Airport , Mex i co City (2002 ) ; Everything is O. K.,
Project Room, ARCO, Madrid , Spain (2002 ) ; The
World is Yours , Gal eri e im Parkhaus , Berlin,
Germany ( 200 1 ) ; R. S. V. P., kuri manzutto, Me xi co
City (2000) ; Antes Oue Nada , Za ca t ecas #89,
Mexico City ( 1998 ) ; A Perfect Vacuum, La
Panaderia, Mexico City (1996 ) ; A el Alumna,
Galerias 1 y 2 de l a Escuela Nac i onal de Artes
Plasticas, UNAM, Mexico City (1995 ) .
Group exh ibitions include: Muta ti ons : La Video
Mexicaine Actuelle, Palais des Arts, Toul ouse and
I conoscope , Montpelli er, France (2001) ; 4x, Museo
de las Artes, Guadal aja ra, Mexico ( 2001);
Superficial , Centro de l a Imagen , Mexico City
( 2001 ) ; Metropolis Mexica , Musee de Picardie,
Ami ens, Fr ance ( 2001); Versiones del Sur : Cinco
Propuestas en Torno a 7 Arte en America,
F( r ) icci 6nes , Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina
Sofia, Madrid , Spa in (2000 ) ; lnSITE 2000,
Tijuana, Mexico and San Diego, California ( 2000 ) ;
A Shot in the Head, L i sson Gallery, London , UK
( 2000 ) ; Kurimanzutto J la Galer i e Chantal
Crouse/, Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris, France
( 2000 ) ; c/ o La Ciudad , SAW Gallery, Ottawa,
Canada ( 2000 ) ; Economia de Mercado , kuri manzutto ,
Mercado de Medellin , Mexico Ci t y ( 1999 ) ; 7 th
Muestra Internacional de Performance , Ex-Teresa
Arte Actual , Mex i co City (1998 ) ; Nuevas
Adquisiciones, Museo de Geologia, Mexico City
(1997) ; La Liga de la Injusticia, La Panaderia,
Mexico City ( 1995 ) ; Artefactos del Futuro,
Universidad de las Americas , Mexico City (1994 ) ;
La Panaderfa , La Panaderia , Mexico City (1994 ) .
134
Jose Davila, born 1974, Guadalajara
(123 ) Pent House, 1999
C-pr int
Courtesy of the arti st and Galeria Enrique
Guerrero, Mexico City
(124-125 ) Temporality i s a question of survival 3,
2001
C-print (diptych )
Courtesy of the ar ti st and Galeria Enrique
Gu errero, Me xico City
(126-127) Temporality i s a question of survival 2,
2001
C-print (diptych )
Courtesy of the arti st and Galeria Enrique
Guerrero, Mexico City
Education : Ba chelor of Arch itecture , ITESO
University, Gu adalajar a, Mexico .
Sol o exh ibitions include: Jose Davila, Galeria
Enrique Guerrero, Mex i co City (2002 ) ; Temporality
i s a Ques tion of Survival, Camden Art s Center,
London, UK (2001 ) ; Monocromo, Pr oject Room,
Mexico City ( 2001) ; 45 Minute Project,
Tel ev i centro, Guadalajara, Mexico (2001) ; Watch
your Step, Galer ia 3. 90 x 2. 40 NAP, Guadalajara,
Mex i co (1998 ) .
Group exhibiti ons include: Teoria de l Ocio, La
Colecci6n Jumex , Mexico (2002 ) ; Sa uvage, La
Panaderia , Mexico City (2002 ) ; Asamblaire, Centre
Culturel du Mexi que , Paris, Fr ance ( 2001) ;
Recreo : Cuatro Arti stas de Guada 1 ajara, Gal eri a
Enrique Guerrero, Mexico City (2001) ; Video
Screenings , 291 Gallery, London, UK (2000 ) ;
Cuarto de Demostraciones/ La casa ideal , Museo
Alejandro Otero , Caracas , Venezuela (2000 ) ; Apex
Ar t, New York (2000 ) ; NICC , Antwerp, Belgium
(2000 ) ; Yo y mis circunstanc ias I movilidad en el
arte contemporaneo de Mexico , Musee des Beaux-
Ar t s de Montreal, Montreal , Canada (1999 ) .
122
r
Melanie Smith, born 1965, Poole, England
( 257) Photo for Spiral City, 2002
Silver gelat i n print
Courtesy of the artist and Galeria OMR , Mexico City
( 258-261 ) Spiral City, 2002
Video st ill
Courtesy of the art i st and Galeria OMR . Mex i co City
( 262 & 263 ) Pink Tanguis, 2002
Digital image
Courtesy of the artist and Galeria OMR, Mexi co City
Education: B. F.A. Reading Uni vers ity, London
(1984- 88 ) .
Sol o exh ibiti ons include: 100% Acrflico, Galeria
OMR. Mex i co City ( 2001); Galerie Pet er Kilchmann.
Zurich, Swit zerland (2001 ) ; Orange Lush,
Instituto Ang l o Mexicano de Cultura. Mexico City
(1997) ; Obra Reciente: 1916-1996, Galeria OMR,
Mexico City (1996 ) ; Installation, Randolph Street
Gallery, Chicago, Illinoi s (1996 ) ; Dream Spots:
Taxqueffa Bus Station, Sa la Diaz, San Antonio,
Texas (1996) ; Gal eria OMR. Mexico City (1994);
Gall er i e L'Escaut, Brussel s, Belgium (1992 ) ;
Salon des Aztecas , Mexico City (1989 ) .
Group exh ibiti ons include: Twenty Million
Mexicans Can't be Wrong , South London Gallery,
London . UK ( 2002 ) ; Sala de Recuperaci6n , Museo de
Ar t e Carrillo Gil, Mexico City ( 2002 ) ; Here is
There. Weiner Secession, Vi enna . Austria ( 2002 ) ;
La Persistencia de la Imagen, Museo de Arte
Carrillo Gil, Mexico City ( 2001 ) ; Sonje Ar t
Center Museum . Seoul South Korea ( 2001 ) ;
Escultura Mexicana ( Tercera Parte ) , La Academia a
l a Instalaci6n, Museo del Palacio de Bellas
Artes , Mexico City ( 2001) ; Caleidoscopio :
Lenguajes Contemporaneos, Banco Nacional de
Comercio Exterior . Mexico City ( 2000 ) ;
Territorios Abstractos. Museo del Chopo, Mexico
City (2000 ) ; America, Foto Latina , Museo de las
Artes . Guadalajara. Mexico ( 2000 ) ; Chromaform,
Color in Contemporary Sculpture. Un i versity of
Texas at San Antonio, Texas (1998 ) ; Mexico Now.
Point of Departure (Mexico Ahara. Punta de
Partida ) , The Ohio Arts Council ' s Riffe Gallery,
Columbus . Ohio , El Arsenal de la Buntilla, San
Juan . Puerto Rico, The Mint Museum of Art.
Charlotte , North Carolina, Woodstreet Gallery,
Pitt sburg . Pennsylvania. The Mexican Fine Arts
Cen t er Museum, Chicago, Illinois, Delaware Art
Museum . Wilmi ngton, De l aware. The Contemporary
Arts Museum, Houston , Texas. and The Mexican
Cultural Institute, Wa s hington D.C . (1997) ; The
Conceptua 1 Trend: Si x Artists from Mexico, El
Mu seo del Barr i o, New York (1997) .
256
'
li
Miguel Calderon, born 1971, Mexico City , and
Yoshua Okon, born 1970, Mexico City
(103-107) A Prop6sito ... , 1996
120 stolen car stereos and color video
Courtesy of the artists and Andrea Rosen Gallery,
New York
See page 203 for Yoshua Okon
Education: B. F. A. San F,rancisco Art Institute,
California (1994 ) .
Miguel Calderon's solo exhibitions include: Gran-
Dote , La Panaderia, Mexico City ( 2001 ) ; CostCo
Serf es , La Panaderi a, Me xi co City ( 2000); !NOVA,
Milwaukee, Wi scons in (1999 ) ; Joven Entusiasta,
Museo Rufino Tamayo , Mex i co City (1999 ) ;
Aggressively !1ediocre/ !1enta 1 ly Cha 11 enged/ Fantasy
Island, Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York (1998 ) ;
Ridiculum Vitae, La Panaderia, Mexico City
(1998 ) ; A Prop6sito ... , La Panaderia, Mexico City
( 1997 ) ; Andrea Rosen Gallery , New York (1997 ) ;
Andrea Rosen Ga 11 ery , New York ( 1996 ) ; His tori a
Artificial, Museum of Natural Hi story , Mex i co
City (1995) ; From Socia 1 Activist to Drug Lord
Transformation ( A Touristic !1anifestour ) , Diego
Rivera Gallery, San Francisco Art Institute, San
Francisco, Ca 1 i f orni a ( 1994 ) .
Hi s group exhibit i ons include: Ultra Baroque:
Aspects of Post Latin American Art, Museum of
Contemporary Art, San Diego, California (2000 ) ;
Creacion en !1ovimento, Centro Cultural Tijuana,
Tijuana, Me xi co ( 2000 ) ; I Saw Stars, Momenta Art,
New York ( 2000 ) ; Er6gena, Museo de Arte Carrillo
Gil , Me xi co City ( 2000 ) ; Go Away : Artists and
Travel, Royal College of Art, London, UK (1999 ) ;
Pos itioning, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard
College, Annendale-on-Hudson, New York (1999 ) ; En
Crudo, Museo Nacional de las Artes , Mexico City
(1998 ) ; Jotoseptiembre, La Panaderi a , Mexico City
(1998 ) ; InSITE97, Tijuana, Mexico and San Diego,
California (1997) .
102
Minerva Cuevas, born 1975 , Mex i co City
(1 11 ) Piensa Global - Actua Local I Think Global-
Act Local, 1999 (details )
C-print
Courtesy of the arti st and ku rimanzut to, Me xico
City
( 112 - 119 ) Dodgem, 2002
Int erventi on in Mexico City amusement park
Courtesy of the ar ti st and kur imanzutto , Mexico
City
Education: B. F. A. Escuela Nacional de Artes
Plasticas, Univ ers idad Na cional Aut6noma de
Mexico, Mexico City ( 1993-1997 ) .
Sol o exh ibiti ons include : Dodgem 2002, kuri-
manzutto, Mex i co City ( 2002 ) ; HVC
Biotechnologies, Vi enna Secession, Vi en na,
Austria (2001 ) ; Hejor Vida Corp . , Mu seo Tamayo,
Mexico City (2000 ) ; Hejor Vida Corp . , Centro de
1 a Imagen, Me xi co City ( 2000); Hejor Vida Corp.,
El Despacho-Torre Lat inoamer i cana (1999 ) ;
Snowball , Th e Banff Centr e for the Arts, Alberta,
Canada ( 1998 ) ; Selfdoor, Th e Banf f Centre for the
Arts, Alberta, Canada ( 1998 ) ; Heterfa las Hanas
al Fuego par Ti, Museo Nacional de Arte , Mexico
City (1997); Fly, Video and Object Art Galleries
2 & 3, Escuel a Naci onal de Artes Plasti cas ,
Mex i co City ( 1997 ) .
Group exhibiti ons in clude : Casino 2000, St edelij k
Museum voor Actuel e Kunst, Ghent , Belgium ( 2001 ) ;
Graphic Biennale, Ljubljana , Sl oveni a (2001) ;
Locus Focus, Sonsbeek 2001 , Arnhe im, The
Netherlands (2001) ; Mutations : La Vi deo Hexicaine
Acutelle, Palais des Arts, Toulouse and
Iconoscope, Montpellier, France (2001 ) ; c/ o La
Ciudad, SAW Gallery, Ottawa, Canada ( 2000 ) ;
Kur i manzutto Gallery a la Galerie Chantal
Crousel, Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris, France
( 2000 ) ; Dream Machines , Hayward Gallery, London ,
UK ( 2000 ) ; Shot in the Head, Lisson Gallery,
London, UK ( 2000 ) ; Economia de Mercado, kuri-
manzutto , Mercado de Medellin , Mexico City
(1999 ) ; VI Bienal Internacional de Poesfa
Experimental , Sa l a Altami ra Project, Lake City ,
Mexico (1998 ) ; Creaci6n en Hovimiento, Museo de
Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico City (1998 ) .
110
Pedro Reyes, born 1972, Mexico City
( 213-2 18 ) Capula , 2002
Mixed media
Cour t esy of the ar ti st
( 220 & 221 ) Capula , 2002
Insta ll at i on view. P. S. l, New York
Photo credit : Jason Mandell a
Educa ti on : Arch it ec t ural Stud i es at Uni versidad
Iberoamericana, Mex i co ( 1990- 1995 ) .
Sol o exhibitions i nclude : Nomenclatura Arqufmica ,
Sala de Ar t e Publico Sique iros . Mex i co City
(2002) ; Parque Vertical , La Pana der ia, Mex i co
City (2002) ; Ps i co-horticultura , La Tor r e de los
Vientos . Mex i co City ( 2000 ) .
Group exh i bi t ions i nclude : What is the Context?,
Haus der Kultur der Welt , Berl i n, Germany ( 2002 ) ;
20 Mi 77 ion Mexicans Can't be Wrong . Sout h London
Ga ll ery , London, UK (2002 ) ; Sala de Recuperaci 6n,
Mus eo de Arte Carri 11 o Gi 1. Mexico City ( 2002 ) ;
See What I Saw. Casa-Museo de Luis Barragon,
Mexico ( 2002 ) ; ABCDF, Palacio de Bellas Artes .
Mexico City ( 2001 ) ; Do It, Museo de Arte Carri l lo
Gi l, Mexico City (2001) ; 21 Zonas . Uxmal ,
Yucatan . Mex i co ( 2001 ) ; 4x. Mus eo de 1 as Artes .
Guadalajara. Mexico ( 2001 ) ; Metro Candelaria
( installation in Mexico City's subway ) , Mexico
City ( 2000 ) ; Action Videos by Latin American
Artists. Artists Space, New York ( 2000 ) ; ZMVM,
Museo de Arte Carrillo Gi l, Mexico City ( 2000 ) ;
Punto Ci ego . Art & Idea Ga 11 ery . Mexico (1999 ) ;
Paradas Continuas . Mus eo de Arte Ca rri 11 o Gi 1 .
Mex i co City ( 1998 ) ; Arte Nativo-Alternativo.
Poliforum Cultural. Siquerios, Mexico ( 1996 ) .
212
Ruben Ortiz Torres, born 1964 , Mexico City
(267-27 5 ) Alien Toy, 1997
Custom low rider Datsun / Nissan pickup truck with
hydraulics, video player and projector, speaker
and related electrical equipment
Collection of Tom Patchett . Los Angeles
Education: Becario del Consejo Nacional para la
Cultura y las Artes . Si sterna Naci on a l de
Creadores , Mexico City (1993 ) ; M. F.A. California
Institute of the Arts , Valencia, California
(1990- 1992 ) ; B. F. A. Escuela Nacional de Artes
Plasticas, Universidad Nacional Aut6noma de
Mexico, Mexico City (1983- 1988 ) .
Sol o exhibiti ons include: Calimocho Styles,
Galeria OMR, Mexico City ( 2002 ) ; New World
Monarchies, Revolutions and Alien Abductions
after Maximi 1 iano de Habsburgo, Graz Kunsteveri n.
Graz, Austria (2000 ) ; Power Tools, Tr ack 16
Gallery, Los Angeles , California (2000 ) ; American
Monarchy/ Raza C6smica, Jan Kesner Gallery. Los
Angeles , California (2000 ) ; Alien Toy, Site Santa
Fe, Santa Fe, New Mexico ( 1999 ) ; Desmothernismo,
Museo de Ar t e Contemporaneo de Aguasca li en t es ,
Aguasca li entes . Mexico and Museo Universitario de
Ciencias y Arte , Mexico City ( 1999 and 1998 ) ;
Desmothernismo, Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de
Aguascalientes, Aguascalientes, Mexico (1999 ) ;
Photographs, Zeitgeist, Seat tl e , Washington
(1999 ) ; Alien Toys, Track 16 Gallery, Los
Ange l es, California (1998 ) .
Group exhibitions include : The X- Files , La
Panaderia, Mex i co City ( 2002 ) ; Ultrabaroque ,
Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth , Fort Worth ,
Texas ( 2001); Cus tomized: Art Inspired by Hot
Rods, Low Riders & American Car Culture, The
Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston .
Massachusetts ( 2001); Departures : 11 Artists at
the Getty, The Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.
California ( 2000 ) ; Made in California, Los
Angeles County Museum , Los Angeles , California
( 2000 ) ; Ultrabaroque, Aspects of Post-Latin
American Art , San Diego Museum of Cont emporary
Art, San Di ego, California ( 2000 ) ; Alma
Colectiva, Colecci 6n de la Familia Lopez
Martinez, Museo de las Artes , Guadalajara, Mexico
(1999 ) ; Myself and my Surroundings , Mu see de s
Beaux -Arts de Montr eal. Montreal. Canada (1999 ) ;
lnSITE97, Nuevas Proyectos de Arte Publico del
Continente Americana, San Diego, California and
Tijuana , Mexico ( 1997); l Oth Biennial of Sydney ,
Sydney. Australia ( 1996 ) .
266
Santiago Sierra, born 1966, Madrid, Spain
(245 ) 24 Blocks of Concrete Constantly Moved During
a Day's Work by Remunerated Laborers, 1999
C-print
Courtesy of the artist and Galeria Enrique
Guerrero, Mexico City
(247 ) Laborers who cannot be paid, remunerated to
remain in the interior of carton boxes, 2001
C-print
Courtesy of the artist and Galeria Enrique
Guerrero, Mexico City
(249 ) Line of 160 em Tattooed 'On Four Remunerated
People, 2000
C-print
Courtesy of the artist and Galeria Enrique
Guerrero, Mexico City
(251) 20 Workers in a Ship's Storage Room, 2001
C-pr int
Courtesy of the artist and Galeria Enrique
Guerrero, Mexico City
( 253 ) Tarpau 1 in Suspended from the Far;:ade of a
Building, 2002
American flag
Installation view, P. S. 1
Courtesy of the artist and Galeria Enrique
Guerrero . Mex i co City
Photo credit : Jason Mandella
24 BLOCKS OF CONCRETE CONSTANTLY MOVED DURING A
DAY'S WORK BY REMUNERATED LABORERS .
ACE Gallery. Los Angeles. July 1999.
In four rooms and a hallway of this gallery 24
cement blocks were introduced by mechanic means.
They were modular units commonly employed in
breakwaters, weighing two tons each and measuring
approximately 250 x 150 x 100 em . Once the blocks
were brought in, Si erra hired 10 laborers of
Mexican or Central-American origin, who usually
work in public places in Los Angeles . Th ey were
asked to proceed, during the work-day, to cont in -
ual l y move the 24 pieces along the spaces of the
gallery , without concern for its physical wellbe-
ing and using only metal bars as handles . The
exposed result consisted of marks left behind by
their work in the form of damages on the floor
and walls of the gallery, together with the tools
and materials emp l oyed by the workers, the
remainders of consumed food and drinks , and the
concrete blocks.
24 BLOQUES DE CONCRETO MOVIDOS CONSTANTEMENTE
DURANTE UNA JORNADA POR OBREROS REMUNERADOS.
ACE Gallery. Julio de 1999.
244
Teresa Margolles, born 1963, Culiacan, Sinaol a,
Mexico
(197 - 201) Vaporization, 2002
Vaporized water obtained from the washing of
corpses at the Medical Forensic Serv ice during
autopsies .
Installation view. ACE Gallery, Mexico City,
Mexico
Courtesy of the artist and ACE Gallery, Mexico
City
Education : Artistic Initiative, DIFOCUR,
Cul i a can ; Sciences of Communication. Uni vers i dad
Nacional Aut6noma de Mexico; Diploma in Forensic
Sc i ence . Servic io Medico Forense .
Sol o exh ibitions include: Vaporizaci6n, ACE
Gallery, Mexico City ( 2001) ; El Aqua en el
Ciudad, Sa la 22a, Barcelona. Spa in (2001) ; Grumos
Sabre la Piel, Barcelona. Spa in (2001) ;
Photographs and Video, Espace d Art Yvonamor
Palix, Paris, France ( 2001 ) ; Bondaje, Kunsthaus
Sante Fe, San Miguel, Mexico ( 2000 ) ; Lienzo.
Espacio Contexto, Guatemala City, Guatemala
( 2000 ) ; Lengua, Ace Gallery, New York ( 2000 ) ;
Anden, Cali, Colombia (1998 ) ; Tarjetas para
Cortar Cocafna. Galer1a Caja Dos, Mexico City
( 1998 ) , Autorretratos en la Morgue , Museo de la
Ci udad de Queretaro. Queretaro. Me xi co ( 1998 ) ;
Cadaveres. El Getho, Madrid, Spain (1997) .
Group exhibitions include: Arte Contemporaneo en
el Carrillo Gil, Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil,
Mexico City ( 2002 ) ; Escultura Hexicana . La
Academia a la Instalaci 6n, Museo del Palacio de
Bellas Artes, Mexico City (2001) ; Habitat Global,
Uni vers i dad de Guanaj uato. Guanaj uato. Mexico
(2001 ) ; Exhibition ofHexican Video, Ecole
Supe rieure des Beaux-Arts. Toulouse, France
( 2001 ) ; Extramuros. Biennial de La Habana.
Havana. Cuba ( 2000 ) ; Er6gena. Museo de Arte
Carrillo Gil, Mexico City ( 2000 ) ; Exotismos, IV
Biennale de Lyon, Lyon, France ( 2000 ) ; Cinco
Continentes y una Ciudad, Museo de l a Ci udad de
Mexico. Mexico City ( 2000 ) ; Senales de
Resistencia. Museo de la Ciudad de Mexico, Mexico
City ( 2000 ) ; Biennial de Fotograffa. Centro de la
Imagen. Mexico City (1999 ) . In 1990, Margolles
and other artists initiated the group SEMEFO.
196
Yoshua Ok6n . born 1970, Mexico City
( 205-209 ) Chocorrol, 1997
C-print
Courtesy of the artist and Galeria Enrique
Guerrero
Education : Concordia University, Montreal,
Canada .
Sol o exhibitions in clude : Yoshua Ok6n, Gal er ia
Enrique Guerrero, Mexico City ( 2002 ) ; Cockfight,
Modern Culture at the Gershwin Hot el, New York
(2002 ) ; Yoshua Ok6n , Black Dragon Soc i ety , Los
Ange l es, California ( 2002 ) ; Orillese a la orilla ,
Centro de la Imagen, Mexico City and It e rr alde
Gallery, Los Angeles, California ( 2000) ; Yoshua
Ok6n, Es pa ce d'Art Yvonamor Paliz, Pari s , France
(1999 ) ; Ballades a Annecy, Galerie BF - 15, Lyon,
France (1998 ) ; Koblenz, La Pana deria , Mexico City
(1997) ; Beautiful Fluffy Stylish Hair Butts,
Chorus, Minneapolis, Minnesota ( 1997 ) ; A
Prop6sito, La Panaderia , Mexico City (1997).
Group exhibitions in clude : Mesoamerica :
Oscilaciones y Artificios, Centro Atl ant i ca de
Arte Moderno, Las Palma s de Gran, Canaria, Spain
(2002 ) ; The California Biennial, Orange County
Mu s eum of Ar t, Orange County, California (2002 ) ;
Coartadas I Alibys , Centre Culturel du Mexique,
Pari s , France ( 2002 ) ; Sala de Recuperaci 6n , Mu seo
de Arte Carrillo Gil ( 2002 ) ; The End of the
Eclipse, Fundaci 6n Telef6nica , Madrid , Spain
( 2001); Pay Attention, Mu s eo d Arte Provincia di
Nuoro, Cerdegna, Italy (2001); Zoning, The
Project, New York ( 2001); Mutations: La Video
Mexicaine Actuelle, Palai s des Beaux -Arts ,
Toulouse and Iconos cope, Montpell i er, France
(2001) ; c/ o La Ciudad, SAW Gallery, Ottawa ,
Canada ( 2000 ) ; Extramuros , parallel project to
Biennial de la Habana, Havana, Cuba ( 2000) .
204