MÉXICO: política y poética
MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY WORKS ON PAPER AND ANIMATIONS
February 17 - March 24, 2011
Featuring the work of: Francis Alÿs, Carlos Amorales, Miguel Calderón, Mathias Goeritz, Máximo Gonzalez, Daniel Guzmán, Dr. Lakra, Ilán Lieberman, marcelaygina, Teresa Margolles, Moris (Israel Meza Moreno), Gabriel Orozco, José Guadalupe Posada, Alfredo Ramos Martinez, Jaime Ruiz Otis, and Eduardo Terrazas.
MÉXICO: política y poética
Modern and Contemporary Works on Paper and Animations
February 17 - March 24, 2011
Featuring the work of: Francis Alÿs, Carlos Amorales, Miguel Calderón, Mathias Goeritz, Máximo Gonzalez, Daniel Guzmán, Dr. Lakra, Ilán Lieberman, marcelaygina, Teresa Margolles, Moris (Israel Meza Moreno), Gabriel Orozco, José Guadalupe Posada, Alfredo Ramos Martinez, Jaime Ruiz Otis, and Eduardo Terrazas.
MÉXICO: política y poética
Modern and Contemporary Works on Paper and Animations
This exhibition spotlights a new and widely celebrated generation of conceptual artists from Mexico that has caught the attention and imagination of the art world. Their work stands in sharp contrast from the most recently acclaimed generation of Mexican artists from the decade of the 1990s such as Julio Galan (1958-2006), Ismael Vargas (1947- ) and Nahum Zenil (1947- ), who themselves achieved renown for their culturally-coded and identity-based figurative painting. This new conceptual group is distinguished by their cool and sophisticated approach to format, materials and ideas that bear less obvious 'Mexican' stylistic markers, although the content of their work is often highly specific to that country's contemporaneous cultural and political environment. The international visibility of artists like Francis Alÿs and Gabriel Orozco in solo exhibitions at major European and American museums including the London's Tate Modern and the New York Museum of Modern Art, and in 'contemporary art' auctions rather than in auctions of 'Latin American art,' suggest that these artists are being embraced and appreciated in an altogether new and different way.
The development of this exhibition is thanks principally to the involvement of two people. They are adviser Julio Cesar Morales, an artist, curator and friend working in San Francisco, who advocated for the current project's inclusion of both animation media and an explicitly political focus. And Bera Nordal, Director of the Nordic Watercolor Museum located in Skärhamn, Sweden, whose invitation to work together to explore water media and works on paper from this important generation set everything in motion. Ironically, the exhibition follows a similar trajectory to one proposed for San Francisco State University by artist Eamon Oré-Jiron a decade ago - and in the meantime this generation of artists have achieved international renown. Eamon Oré-Jiron's curatorial premise appears prescient today.
The current exhibition features the work of a handful of these recent figures, of which Francis Alÿs (born 1959) is the eldest. The others were born in the decades of the 1960s and 1970s (Carlos Amorales, 1970; Miguel Calderón, 1971; Máximo Gonzalez, 1971; Daniel Guzmán, 1965; Dr. Lakra, 1972; Ilán Lieberman, 1969; marcelaygina (Georgina Arizpe, 1972 and Marcela Quiroga, 1970); Teresa Margolles, 1963; Moris (Israel Meza Moreno), 1978; Gabriel Orozco, 1962; Jaime Ruiz Otis, 1976). A 2007 survey exhibition of the work of this generation organized by the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art noted a relationship in these artists' approach to the 'social sculpture' of influential German artist Joseph Beuysi. In fact, several of this generation's influential artists attended art schools outside of Mexico - both because they were born and educated abroad, or by choice. Francis Alÿs is a Belgium national; Máximo Gonzalez was born and educated in Argentina; Miguel Calderón graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute.
Yet the work of this generation operates as a bridge to the concerns of earlier generations of artists, and evidences a deep if subtle rootedness in Mexican culture. To suggest this bridge, this exhibition includes a small selection of work by historic figures from Mexican art history: José Guadalupe Posada, Alfredo Ramos Martinez, Mathias Goeritz, and Eduardo Terrazas. This is not meant to imply that these four major figures from Mexican art history are unique in their relationship to the current conceptual generation, nor to suggest any intention by either generation to articulate a narrow Mexican nationalism or essentialism. Neither do we claim this art historical perspective as a first for this exhibition (Sweden's Museum of Sketches in Lund mounted a Mexico historic/contemporary exhibition of studies for public art projects in 2010), or that this survey is exhaustive. But the inclusion of historic work here shifts the frame from one highlighting only today, to an alternative refocusing on histories and matrices in Mexican and Latin American art that have profound relevance in California.
Although not represented in the current exhibition, Mexico City video artist Yoshua Okón agreed in a conversation with the organizers that "there is a bridge - but without propaganda or party" that links artists in this generation with those of the past. Okón's comment pointed to the lack of a common ideology in the current generation - what Communism was for many artists of the early twentieth century. We invite our viewers to draw their own connections between artists and generations; this poster/publication initiates discussion about a few of these threads.
For example, Gabriel Orozco's well-known abstract circular imagery on his (now maybe obsolete) airplane tickets, might be easily seen within the context of John Baldessari's familiar use of circular forms on appropriated imagery. But in a Mexican art context, we can appreciate it both as air travel as an analogy of a new globalism - as well as for its art historical relationship to work from decades earlier by sophisticated geometric systems-based Modernists in Mexico including Eduardo Terrazas. Terrazas's work provides a remarkable visual link to Orozco's project, and his use of Huichol artists in fabricating these textile/graphic works in turn makes a connection to abstraction from an even earlier history. Similarly, Jaime Ruiz Otis's use of monochrome in his edgy environmental installations harkens back to the reductive gilded panels by Mathias Goeritz who was active in Mexico beginning in the 1940s. Goeritz was noted for his gold monochromes that evoke Mexican Churriqueresque. Awareness of the work of these earlier Mexican masters expands our appreciation for the work of the twenty-first century generation.
Among the most striking aspects of this exhibition is the surprising mix of conceptual approaches with emphatic political content. It is interesting to track this thread over the last century - in Posada's populist broadside parodies and Ramos Martinez's inspiring imaging of revolutionary campesinos. In Francis Alÿs's installation The Jungle, this political content is quietly stated in beautiful and fragile preparatory drawings and a related oil triptych featuring imagery including skeletons with scythes, and a mother holding a baby in bandoleer who himself holds a rifle. This work was begun at the time of the Chiapas uprising, and the visual relationship to Posada's calaveras and Ramos Martinez's revolutionary soldier is strong. Anti-aesthetically, Miguel Calderón's watercolor documenting the infamous motorcycle crash that opened Mexico's recent double-centennial celebration parade, likely not painted by the artist but instead created to the artist's specifications by a commercial painter, echoes these influences inversely; Calderón has stated that this accident evidences a distinctively Mexican appreciation of simultaneous hilarity and tragedy. Calderón's use of a commercial "craftsman" to fabricate the work also mirrors Terrazas's commissioning of traditional Huicholes to create his yarn and wax work. Similarly, a modern use of traditional forms can be seen in Máximo Gonzalez's weavings as well as his naughty cut paper/papel picado works. The exploration of anti-art and almost taboo subjects also informs Daniel Guzmán's 41-piece wall installation Fe/Faith included in this exhibition, with its references to heavy metal bands and beer, and in Dr. Lakra's sexual and sometimes nude tattoos on vintage advertisements, photographs and plastic cups and dolls.
At first glance nothing could be more disparate than the large color field paintings of Teresa Margolles and the small, detailed pencil portraits of the artist Ilán Lieberman or the multimedia installation by the artist collaborative marcelaygina. Upon closer inspection remarkable parallels begin to emerge. Each image of Niño perdido/Lost Child represents an individual. In the case of Lieberman's drawings, they are reproductions of the lost children advertised in one of Mexico City's newspapers. The small portraits, often excerpted from a larger photo from happier times, are accompanied by the hard facts: age, height, last known whereabouts, and distinguishing characteristics -"small scars on both arm," "difficulty pronouncing the letter "R"- a loved one's desperate attempt to distill a young personality to the few words allowed by the width of a newspaper column.
Margolles's saturated color fields tell a different, but no less tragic story. Each sheet of Papeles/Papers has been dipped in the post-autopsy fluids of corpses from one of Mexico City's morgues, dead through what in Mexico today is referred to as narcoviolencia - the violent repercussions of the drug trade, or dead from other more mundane reasons. Reduced to their essential fluids, these portraits-for each is unique and represents an individual-shimmer with the residue of the minerals and chemicals remaining when life has departed. Objetos recuperados/Recovered Objects, the title of the work by marcelaygina, also presents unconventional portraits. Here individuals are seen through the remnants they have left behind while crossing (or attempting to cross) the Rio Bravo on their way from Mexico to the United States in what the artists call a "barbaric migration." This presentation includes twenty-one objects, each bagged as "evidence" and tagged with the location found, physical description, and the date collected. Projected on the wall are images of the pieces as they were found along the banks of the river.
The pathos of these works evidences the dramatic nature of the conceptual work about socio-political issues impacting Mexico. This drama is also evoked in Carlos Amorales's video installation Manimal with running wolves and careening airplanes in a bleak environment of cropped trees and fenced apartments. Alternately, Francis Alÿs's installation Time is a Trick of the Mind juxtaposes two projections of the same hand-drawn animation loop. Each shows a grown man walking along a fence and dragging a stick across its vertical stakes, like a child might, listening to the subtle percussive sound generated. In fact, the two loops move in and out of alignment, encouraging us to consider the same scene from different perspectives. Also included in the exhibition are two works by the artist Moris (Israel Meza Moreno), whose beautifully executed watercolors in fact document sites where great violence has occurred.
This remembering of our relativity is especially important to keep in mind as we contemplate the assembly of works gathered together here. We hope this exhibition encourages consideration of some of these many connections between these powerful and provocative works. Clearly, contemporary art in Mexico is currently among the most engaging anywhere; it has achieved an international resonance that matches earlier moments of greatness in the history of Mexican art.
Sharon E. Bliss and Mark Dean Johnson
