Resisting the Present: Mexico 2000 / 2012 at Musée d’Art Moderne April 2012
The curators of Resisting the Present: Mexico 2000/2012 at the Musée d’Art Moderne claim in the exhibition literature that in today’s world of globalized economies – artistic, technological, financial – featuring the art of a single nation seems almost dépassé while at the same time throwing into sharp relief questions of identify and specificity.
Regardless of European unions, NAFTA, and the borderless regions of cyberspace, if ever the relevance and purpose of art is called into question, witness the work produced by artists whose country is in great flux. The best 20th century example of this is the German Expressionists, who started out merely playing with color, line and form and ended up creating a visual language that aptly gave voice to the jagged, broken horror of Germany – and Europe – under the Third Reich.
Resisting the Present: Mexico 2000/2012 creates a visual zócalo of Mexico’s most prominent contemporary artists as they comment on their country’s current state of flux. The commentary is not bright – there is no evidence of margaritas or Mariachis, no Virgin of Guadalupe, no quirky Dio de lo Muertos, sombreros or cumbia. Instead, the 24 artists featured are quite clearly (and understandably) angry, bitter, dark and bordering on apocalyptic.
Over the past 15 years, Mexico has been (not so quietly) been going through a revolution. In 2000, after 71 years of the ruling PRI’s stronghold on the country, Vicente Fox won the presidency. Ushering in a new era of democracy and transparency, the Fox administration’s main accomplishment was to lay the groundwork for the current president, Felipe Calderón. In office since 2006, Calderón has introduced sweeping social, economic and political changes across the country – mostly innovative and good – while his infamous war on drugs has resulted in escalating violence between the military, law enforcement and the drug cartels, and more and more innocent Mexicans getting caught in the crossfire. Meanwhile, the country is painfully wrangling itself onto the world economic stage; painful because it’s the world’s 5th largest economy, but is perpetually constrained by the complicated social and economic relationships with the United States that often seem designed to give Mexico the short end of the stick.
Art in Mexico has a way of relating to the elements that North American art does not. It is both indoors and out, invites the dust and the heat and the foliage and the blue sky in while at the same time straining to be released back out into the wild, into that very same blue sky.
Walking into the exhibit it is this longing for flight that first impacts the viewer. Arturo Hernández Alcázar’s Black Kites (Bird of Ill Omen) / Papalotes Negros (Ave de Mal Agüero) is a flock of lamp-blackened children’s kites are tethered to the ground by bricks and stones while they strain against the museum’s ceiling for release. The effect is both breathtaking and heartbreaking: the beauty of those kites aloft both tethered to the ground and trapped by the ceiling a poignant metaphor for Mexico’s future which, as long as it is chained to its past, can never truly soar.
Bayrol Jiménez’ Maldito, a wall mural in line-drawing that is both graphic art and baroque masterpiece, explodes across the gallery. Beginning with a cherub whose guts literally spill all of Mexican history onto the canvas, the wall, the floor and all the way across the room, Jiménez’ pen saunters past the majestic Aztec and Mayan ruins, meanders through the cult of San Muerte, wanders across the drug wars and immigration, and ends in Catholicism, presided over by a perverted Mexican coat of arms, the snake strangling the cherub and the Mexican eagle bearing a death’s head and American stars on its breast. It’s an incredibly busy piece that at first overwhelms, like a Mexican oilcloth shopping bag brightly covered in images of the Virgin of Guadalupe, cherubs, stars, rays of divinity, and who knows what else – a jumble of kitsch at first glance, but significant and often charming once the eye gets used to it. Of course, there is nothing charming about Jimenez’ Maldito, although it’s all as significant as the words painted across the floor that bridge the two separate parts of the work: Una piedra en el camino me enseño que mi destino es a robar y robar y robar y robar… (a bump in the road showed me that my destiny is to steal and rob and steal and steal… ).
The rest of the works in the first rooms are more conceptual, although equally moving. A giant structure of windsocks called Credibility Crisis is on the one hand blatantly obvious in its statement about hot air blowing in every direction, but then its overstatement becomes again symbolic. Niños Perdidos is a series of tiny photocopied reproductions of the missing children flyers plastered all over Mexico’s major cities, the images themselves often blurry and vague as though the longer the child is missing, its image disappears too. A wall of bricks without mortar is meant to represent Kafka’s The Castle, but works also as a comment on the walls and fences America keeps threatening to build along the Mexican border as futile attempt at stemming illegal immigration.
Unfortunately, the curators saved all the best works for the beginning of the exhibition. It’s a great way to seduce you into the following rooms, looking for and expecting to be as powerfully impacted by the first few paces. This isn’t the case. While there are notable installations, they are either so abstract or performative as to effectively lose their punch. The most sensational piece in one of the subsequent rooms is a room – sit in a dark room and watch a videotaped interview of a killer for the drug lords, a highly disturbing (or satisfying, depending on your kind of kink) experience that recreates the videographer’s experience of being locked in a hotel room with a man who has, unconscientiously, killed literally hundreds of people. Other film and video installations include Carlos Reygadas, Nicolás Pereda, and Natalia Almada’s El Velador, a far more subtle and strange documentary of one of the most incredible cemeteries you’ll ever see.
The final piece is video installation of a women’s football game played at high altitude. The curators called the combination of female teams in a traditionally male dominated society playing a match against the backdrop of the ancient ruins “surreal” (although: have they not seen Mexico’s National Women’s Football Team? They came in second in the 2010 Women’s CONCACAF). Without the liner notes, I’m not sure I would have come to the same conclusion as the curators, but sitting and watching for a while – that blue sky, the hot dust, and two teams straining against their environment to win a game – it does strike one as surreal, especially when you consider that the real struggle in that breathtaking geography is against each other.
Vingt Paris Magazine, May 2012