Ling Sepulveda. Un Ciclo de Lavado en Vivo, 2015; performance at Biquini Wax, Mexico City, May 16, 2015. Photo: Ramiro Chavez.

Un Ciclo de Lavado en Vivo [A Live Wash Cycle] (2015) was a performance by Ling Sepúlveda on Saturday, May 16, 2015, at Biquini Wax in Mexico City. This laconic yet descriptive title created an anticipation for what was washed, why, and for whom. The sounds of the process were captured, distorted, and amplified by the artist, confirming the machine in action as a giant beast chewing and spitting, absorbed in its task, indifferent to the bewilderment of the audience. A hundred people, students and connoisseurs, were going up and down the stairs of the old house with clamors of surprise or disgust as inexplicably black water was expelled from the machine during spinning, splashing their clothes and sneakers and entering the other rooms of the house, where it damaged the belongings of both the artist and the Biquini Wax team.

The day of the performance, the artist washed a few pounds of earth as well as a one-peso coin. Sepúlveda is from Sinaloa, and he talks about the difficulty of making a living from a land that is “neglected,” descuidada—and nothing can render the audible violence of the term, the prefix “des” removing all hope from the next slamming syllables, like a care given and then removed. Sepúlveda also invokes the paradoxical infrastructure that has become narco-traffic, through its distorted but effective patriarchal solidarity. He then suggests the performance as an attempt to wash the “weight” (peso) constitutive of Mexican identity, a stereotype made of combined assumptions of cheapness and hard labor.

Un Ciclo de Lavado en Vivo inscribes itself into the long and sensitive tradition of “maintenance art,” art that borrows traditional forms of maintenance as symbolic means to “cure the real”—I think of Mierle Laderman Ukeles and her Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969! To this extent, Un Ciclo de Lavado en Vivo could be seen as a particularly cathartic act, coming just a few weeks before important elections in Mexico that notably saw the population demand a “cleaning” of the political class after the recent dramas and scandals experienced by the country, such as the disappearance of the forty-three Ayotzinapa students. The victory of the PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional, Mexico’s historical revolution party that ruled the country for most of the last century and this one) this very last Sunday, June 7, gives Sepúlveda a reason to create many more washing cycles.

Dorothée Dupuis is an independent curator, writer, and publisher based in Mexico City. She is the founder and director of Terremoto.mx, a quarterly online magazine and blog about contemporary art in the Americas.

Jorge Méndez Blake. The Topographer (Marking a Series of Points from the National Library to the University Museum of Contemporary Art), 2015 (still). Courtesy of Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC).

In this commissioned exhibition, Mexican artist Jorge Méndez Blake explores the intrinsic relationships of space, architecture, and meaning between the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo and the Biblioteca Nacional, the biggest library in Mexico, located just a few steps away. Eight artworks—including actions, books, drawings, poems, sculptures, an imaginary library model, and a video—trace a circular path with multiple outcomes. The artist plays with permanence and absence, highlights materiality, and enables metonymic processes that help the spectator grasp the importance of a 20th-century Mexican poetry collection as space, sound, and color. Unfortunately, the exhibition falls short.

In Méndez Blake’s attempt to bring poetry into the museum, several questions appear: Are literature and visual arts really that far away? Was their split an imposed decision? Why did the artist restrict himself to using the library’s Legal Deposit?[1]

The transferal within language is at all times present during these experiments, and the artist appropriates and subverts the prototypical uses and aims of poetry books. In The Foreigner (all works 2015), a group of volunteers borrowed a book (a prohibited action in this library) and read poems out loud while walking the hallways of the museum. For The Great Inexact Poem of Twentieth-Century, other volunteers walked to the library to read and memorize a couple of lines of a poem, then came back to the museum to write them down using a typewriter, the noise of which resonated all over the gallery. In this way, the poems came back to life but were also altered by the volunteers’ memory. These actions took place before the exhibition’s opening and there is no video documentation available for visitors, and no intention to schedule them as activities for the rest of the exhibition.

In the video Topographer, Méndez Blake traverses the shortest route between the two institutions by walking through an area of thick vegetation and lava rocks. While walking, he plays the role of a topographer who draws a map by tracing a direction, as well as space and a specific time, implicit in thought, language, and poetry. The artist pretends to become a conqueror of new cultural lands, but his performance turns out stiff, as if he wasn’t comfortable with the expedition.

Topographic Transferrals from the Biblioteca Nacional is a good exercise, but it lacks continuity and engagement; if the actions were still open, with scheduled events for the spectators to get involved, the exhibition would have been richer and the reflection could have gone deeper, producing a feast of walking, thinking, reading, resignifying, and rewriting.

Jorge Méndez Blake: Topographic Transferrals from the Biblioteca Nacional is on view at the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo through September 20, 2015.

Tania Puente is an art researcher and writer living in Mexico City. She is the executive editor of Trama Magazine.

[1] The Legal Deposit is a regulation that stipulates that all publishers have to send a copy of what they print to the Biblioteca Nacional.

Acciones Pictóricas Grafiteras por Ricardo Cadena, May 9th, 2015; Mexico City.

The sun in the center of Mexico City was unbearable; an assorted gathering of rappers, artists, hip-hoppers, and activists crowded into the shade in front of Metro Sevilla. They were there for an event called “Acciones Pictóricas Grafiteras por Ricardo Cadena.” A few people were tagging on butcher paper taped to the walls. Curious commuters pushed their way in between the large banners commemorating and denouncing the murder of Ricardo Cadena in the city of Puebla, Mexico, by the police. Initial reports suggested an accidental shooting. Later, eyewitness testimony said that the graffiti artist had been shot while face down on the ground, at point blank range.

Transit police in yellow vests guided traffic around gathering onlookers. A handful of other officers monitored the crowd. People took to a megaphone. Some spoke about plans for the day. Others demanded justice for Cadena. A few people rapped, including a young woman; there was grief and tension in the muscles of her thin face; there was grief and tension in her quavering voice.

From in front of the Metro, the action moved to the streets. Dozens marched on an upscale street named after the city, Puebla, where Cadena was killed. They shook rattle-cans and tagged the pavement with the name of the murdered artist. As the march progressed, so did the police presence. Soon there were trucks loaded with armed and armored officers; soon there were additional foot patrols. Inevitably, small confrontations erupted. One masked artist pushed several police out of the way so he could finish spray-painting “Ricardo Cadena” across an intersection. Afterward, he posed defiantly for photos. Eventually, when the march reached El Angel, truckloads of riot police kettled the entire group.

The artists and activists organizing the event had no way to directly control the police, and their presence and intimidation seemed expected. Some part of the aesthetic and social effect of graffiti stems from its beginnings as a temporary, transgressive art of defiance. The aesthetic strength of this action, of its statement to Cadena—no amount of repression will silence the streets that call out your name; you will not be forgotten—depended upon the confluence of the exaggerated police presence and the defiance of the artists.

Jorge Gomez del Campo is an activist, artist, and academic living in Mexico City. As part of his doctoral investigation at the UNAM, he is currently analyzing spectacular violence as an artistic practice.

Verónica Bapé. Investigación del color sobre el retrato (Investigation of color over portrait), 2015 (detail); oil on wood, acrylic paint, acrylic sheets, and wood; 78 x 248 in. Courtesy of Verónica Bapé and Diagrama. Photo: Andrea Martínez.

In Filtros (Filters), Diagrama presents the work of Verónica Bapé and José Porras, two young Mexican artists whose take on painting and sculpture is one of formal deconstruction and a refreshing detachment from local historicity. Traditionally, Mexican painting is difficult to separate from the monumentality of the muralists, an influential all-male group of militant painters consolidated in the 1920s. Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros, “The Big Three,” not only created a didactic and distinctively Mexican form of representation, they also provided the country with an ideology that turned their art into an institution, thus dividing the 20th-century local art world into followers and angry detractors.[1]

Far from past and present parochial feuds, the characteristics defining Bapé’s work come from 19th-century Romanticism and its scientific approach to color. In Investigation of Color over Portrait (2015), Bapé works from a found black-and-white picture to create a small color painting punctuated by warm tones. The canvas is then divided, the side containing the most defining features of the face detached and replaced with evocative rectangles of colored acrylic. The work is a delicate physical transaction between representation and abstraction; it hovers between expression and an ultimate detachment that favors rationalization over straightforward emotion.

The idea of the filter gets a different treatment from artist José Porras, who has found a couple of unlikely collaborators in moths and paper-eating insects. In Polín (2015), Porras intended to create a ceramic model of a moth-eaten piece of timber. Unable to reproduce it in a single piece, the resulting work is composed of dozens of small chunks that bear witness not only to a technical accident, but also to a cognitive process where visual complexity is perceived but underestimated, becoming difficult to grasp and impossible to cast in a one-piece object.

The exhibition’s high point is in an upper corner of the gallery, where viewers will find a yellow balloon partially trapped by splattered plaster. Now less than half full, the cheerful object is slowly deflating. José Porras’ suggestive Yellow Balloon (2012) insists on what Filters points at: the impossibility of art’s most traditional mediums to translate physical and emotional experiences without removing valuable nuances in the process. Acknowledging the medium as a filter in itself, the artists use painting and sculpture’s constraints to rise above contextual and historical reality. The fact that these works are allowed time to mature while being actively discussed in a noncommercial space adds excitement to a modest but effective exhibition.

Verónica Bapé and José Porras: Filtros is on view at Diagrama through May 30, 2015.

Marisol Rodríguez is a freelance journalist, exhibition maker, and researcher in cultural studies.

[1] Largely supported by the state through the years, Muralism and the values it stood for remain the image of what “proper” Mexican Art is and should be: reachable, public, illustrative of a socialist ideology that the state applied indistinctly during the early 20th century. Although many artists managed to partially escape these constraints (see “The Generation of Rupture”), the influence of the muralists remains present not only in the way art is financed and disseminated in Mexico, but also in how it is perceived internationally. For more information on the politics of the movement, see Frances Stonor Saunders’ excellent text “Mexican Modernism and the Politics of Painting,” http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/jun/29/mexican-modernism-politics-paint-rivera.

Mario García Torres. The Schlieren Plot,n.d.; HD video and sound, 29 minutes. Courtesy of the Artist and Proyectos Monclova, Mexico.

There is an effect in simple physics that explains how invisible atmospheric gases become visible to the eye when they are confronted with similar mediums of differing densities. This effect is called the Schlieren Effect, and in his solo exhibition at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Mario García Torres metaphorically appropriates this theory to suspend histories, mythologies, and realities.

The Schlieren Plot (n.d.) is the central work around which the exhibition revolves. García Torres weaves together a narrative exploring artist Robert Smithson’s trajectory in the state of Texas, and of artistic mythologizing of the state itself. García Torres plays with possible histories and mythologies that were on the cusp of becoming realities; he suspends time to provoke a feeling of nostalgia for events that never actually occurred.

The video follows the story of a fictional gardener and expert on Robert Smithson‘s land work in Texas. Initially, the audience watches the gardner go about his day, but somewhere along a Texas highway the camera angle shifts and the audience is no longer watching the garner but has joined in on his pilgrimage to view the sites of Smithson’s would-have-been projects in Dallas/Fort Worth; and to view Amarillo Ramp (1974), Smithson’s only completed project in Texas, finished posthumously. The ephemerality of Amarillo Ramp is obvious in its erosion from the harsh Texas landscape. As a finished work it really lives in the plans and drawings made by Smithson, which are also part of the exhibition.

The fictitious gardener narrates the sojourn in a semi-organized train of thought, yet never mentions Smithson by name. The audio of the gardener’s narration is projected into the two adjacent galleries where García Torres has installed works on paper mixed with historical drawings and Smithson’s plans for unfinished works. García Torres’s gardener retells Smithson’s history, which acts as a second protagonist in the story; at the same time, the audience can see tangible proof of the work, which is either not completely finished or in a state of decay. These stories and methods operate together to blur the lines of fact and fiction.

García Torres creates a conceptual framework to explore the momentary nature of history. The journey of his fictitious gardener re-embodies the history of Smithson and his work, as ephemeral as the constantly changing Texas landscape that was once the artist’s source of inspiration.

FOCUS: Mario García Torres is on view at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth through June 28, 2015.

Leslie Moody Castro is an independent curator and writer living and working in Mexico City. Writing is a critical component of Moody Castro’s practice and acts as a conduit for ideas, exchange, and to initiate conversation.