Rosângela Rennó. Exhibition view with (left to right) Los Angeles (Lori Shepler, Los Angeles Times); Senador Camará (Wania Corredo, O Globo News Agency); Assunción (Ruben Alfonso, Reuters), 2009; Digital print, inkjet, on Hahnemülle Photo Rag 308 paper; 
66 x 44 in. Courtesy of the artist.

In Body of Soul (the state of the world) (2003-2016), Rosângela Rennó amplifies and digitally modifies newspaper pictures that document a diverse range of public demonstrations. From a distance, Rennó’s three large-format photographs show crowds, but are zoomed in to focus on one person who stands holding a small portrait of, presumably, a lost loved one. From afar, the images are crisply legible, but sharpness dissolves as viewers approach the images and the halftone dots that were hard to distinguish from a distance appear outsized when up close. It becomes evident that the dots are not uniformly distributed; there are different densities deliberately arranged throughout the image, with tighter and smaller dots composing the image of the loved one, thus rendering it visible from all distances.

Although in her artist statement, Rennó aims to create a link between the spectator’s reflection in the frame’s glass and the daguerreotype technique of mirror imaging, what is most striking in the context of this show are the work’s titles. Each is named for the image’s original photographer, or the operator for Barthes: Ruben Alfonso from Reuters, Lori Shepler from the Los Angeles Times, and Wania Corredo from O Globo. It is the photographers who are identified—a surprising contrast to their amplified yet anonymous subjects. However, it is not these photographer’s original works we are seeing, but an image cropped and modified by Rennó to highlight a certain feeling; thus the work shifts not only each image’s authorship, but also its original punctum. By focusing on the image within the image, Rennó is altering the photograph’s effect from one that emphasizes the force of collective mobilization to the power of an individualized story, while granting the right of those who have already physically disappeared to not be swallowed in a sea of mechanically flattened visual narratives.

Teresa Margolles. El Exhumado, 2014; Armchair and plastic wrap; 47 x 35 x 43 in; C-print; 64 x 48 in. Courtesy of the artist.

In El Exhumado (The Exhumed, 2016), Teresa Margolles disrupts the safe distance between viewer and image by bringing a piece of evidence—a specter itself—out of the photograph that hangs in the gallery’s wall and placing it in the exhibition space. Concerned by structural violence in northern Mexico, Margolles photographed a dilapidated home in Juárez, a city infamous for its permanently high rate of femicides and drug-related crimes. In the photograph we see a sofa—framed by wooden ornaments and once flamboyant red upholstery highly significant of a middle class status—trapped beneath the rubble of the collapsed ceiling. Exhumed as if it was a wounded body, the sofa now stands stoically in the gallery, its colors and features barely visible under protective plastic that wraps it and keeps it together. By saving this object from its otherwise inevitable demise, the artist refuses to accept what appears to be an unchangeable, doomed fate of Juárez, while also invoking a powerful embodiment of human struggle into the otherwise immaculate exhibition space.

Fredi Casco. The Return of The Sorcerers, Vol. 1, 2005; Digital prints; 7.8 x 9.8 in., each. Courtesy of the artist.

In the gallery’s lower floor, Fredi Casco’s The Return of The Sorcerers (2005, 2011, 2012) is presented in its three volumes, each a separate episode in which the artist uses a different set of photography-based strategies to confront the toxic legacy of Alfredo Stroessner, Paraguay’s dictator from 1954 until 1989. The eponymous horror story by Clark Ashton Smith, written in 1931, seems to have influenced the artist whose dark humor is unmistakable even when dealing with his own country’s most harrowing episodes. While in Smith’s story the unarticulated limbs of a corpse come back from the grave to haunt its killer, in Casco’s work, it is the lost or amputated images—collected by the artist in Asunción’s flea markets—of military men and their enabling cronies that come back to our present day to be identified, if only metaphorically, as culprits in the many crimes of Stroessner’s regime.

Fredi Casco. The Return of The Sorcerers, Vol. 1, 2005; Digital print; 7.8 x 9.8 in. Courtesy of the artist.

Twenty-four black-and-white pictures belonging to Volume 1 of the series line three walls of the gallery. At first sight the photographs appear to document diverse state dinners with middle-aged men and women, older military and clergymen, and what looks like leaders from different countries talking, signing papers, and drinking in official monotony. Upon closer inspection, we see that these characters not only appear homogenous in attire and attitude, but they’ve actually been digitally cloned; some have had their faces interchanged, while the heads of others have been covered with gas masks. The effect is both comical and disturbing, as the artist’s manipulations highlight the fact that in order to succeed in its genocidal enterprise, the Paraguayan dictatorship required—as all repressive regimes do—the compliance of an interchangeable set of minions coming from civil, religious, and political circles, both national and internationally.

From Strossner’s years of cold-blooded rule in Paraguay to present day Juárez, Spectres presents a distressing picture of a continent in which institutions seem to suffer systemic amnesia. The artists in this exhibition prevent their respective specters from vanishing by zooming into appropriated images to get to their symbolic cores, unearthing the symbols of a domesticity interrupted by crime and corruption, and by creating archives and imagining their corresponding stories out of what the system conveniently deems trash.

Written in the first person, Camera Lucida was Barthes’ attempt at grasping the power of photography to invoke the dead in the eyes of the living. For as important as the spectrum was for him, it was the spectator—himself in grieving—who was at the center of his argument. In these images it is again the spectator who is pressed to recognize the power of photography to have effects on things far larger than sentiment, indeed making us see and feel, but also forcing us to remember, think, and even act.

Spectres is on view at Mor Charpentier through December 22, 2016.

[1] Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981).

Carmen Argote. Tias, 2016; archival inkjet print; 45 x 60 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Shulamit Nazarian.

The Los Angeles–based artist Carmen Argote has generated an immense body of work based on her return to her ancestral family mansion in Guadalajara, Mexico. From this oeuvre, she and curator Seth Curcio selected just over a dozen photographs, currently on view at Shulamit Nazarian. Her family’s stately neoclassical manor, Mansión Magnolia, was built in the late 1890s; it now primarily serves as a rental space for events, as well as law offices for one of her cousins, and contains no permanent residents. In the building, remnants of las tias, Argote’s grandmother’s aunts, the last people who lived in there, commingle with the incongruous leftovers of weddings, quinceañeras, and raves.

Only one photograph depicts the exterior of the building; the rest of the images give the sense of an unending interior, like Jay Gatsby’s Long Island mansion. Room after room contain the ad hoc constructions and structural improvisations from generations of repairs and additions. Plaster walls bisect huge spaces and fit snugly against preexisting columns. Mismatched tiles bear the residue of decades of leaks. Faded shadows of bygone furniture remain next to recently installed bathroom sinks. Ancient-looking vending machines sit beside older refrigerators, in front of dumbwaiters. Argote has captured the mansion in a state of never-ending transition. Like the house in One Hundred Years of Solitude, the building seems like it’s constantly expanding and receding in a struggle against the vagaries of time.

Carmen Argote. Brincolin, 2016; archival inkjet print; 58 x 80 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Shulamit Nazarian.

Several photographs contain the blurry smudge of Argote’s figure, moving too fast for the long exposure to capture. To create these phantoms, the artist descended staircases or rolled around on the floor. In Tias (2016), Argote conjures her relatives’ former presence with what seems to have been wild gesticulations in front of the camera, resulting in an eerie puff of beige smoke with a discrete shadow underneath. This apparition floats on top of an intricately tiled floor that recedes into an endless distance. Argote seems to haunt the space with an ephemerality akin to Ana Mendieta’s works.

Throughout, Argote has exhibited projects based on her ongoing interest in the architecture of home and Mansión Magnolia in particular, including hosting a sleepover at Human Resources. Part installation, part cooperative performance, the 2014 event included storytelling and tarot-card readings while participants were surrounded by the artist’s installation of fabric structures made of manta, a textile ubiquitous in Mexico. For the current show, she replaced the sense of humor and play of previous exhibitions with a mix of Victorian gothic mystery and 19th-century spirit photography.

Carmen Argote. Black Chairs, 2016; archival inkjet print; 58 x 80 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Shulamit Nazarian.

Many other artists—including Mendieta, Francesca Woodman, Cindy Sherman, and Bruce Nauman—have toyed with inflecting their photographs with the personal intonations of their bodies. Argote leans heavily on these practices, particularly Woodman’s. Her photographs feel most significant when they also contain the architectural investigations exemplified by sculptors like Rachel Whiteread and Gordon Matta-Clark. For the Turner Prize–winning sculpture House (1993), Whiteread poured a concrete cast of the interior of an East London house. Like Whiteread’s House, the works in Mansión Magnolia preserve the negative imprints of spaces, like the unrequited ghosts of a familial past. And like House, which was torn down within a year to make way for new business development, the interiors shown in Argote’s works are perpetually threatened by rampant capitalism.

It’s hard to say if Argote’s return to her family home is tragic, redemptive, or something else entirely. In her most compelling images, she cuts through a feeling of melancholia and summons the uncanny—in Sigmund Freud’s sense, a return to familiar things made strange through repression. The remainders of a series of parties as well as years of improvised repairs obscure whatever homelike qualities the mansion may have contained, as well as access to a family history that might have survived. Instead, a hazy urgency of generic celebrations saturates the space, represented by stacks of chairs, dance-floor panels, and a bounce house. Argote’s dual gesture through photography—of resurrecting ghosts and capturing the slow-motion obliteration of a family home through merchandising—allows viewers to share the sting Argote feels from the lances of her own nostalgia.

Carmen Argote: Mansión Magnolia is on view at Shulamit Nazarian in Los Angeles through May 28, 2016.

Edgardo Aragón. Mesoamerica: The Hurricane Effect, 2015 (detail of map); HD video, color, sound; 16:20, with 10 maps. Coproduction: Jeu de Paume, Paris, Fondation des Arts Graphiques et Plastiques and CAPC Musée d’Art Contemporain de Bordeaux. Courtesy of the Artist and Jeu de Paume.

Magnus’ monsters take on a new dimension in Mesoamerica: The Hurricane Effect, Edgardo Aragón’s exhibition of maps, a video, and an accompanying publication at Jeu de Paume in Paris. Aragón takes viewers on a journey that starts with an array of ten maps that illustrate the economic and political forces struggling for control of the region comprising Mexico and Central America known as Mesoamerica. Departing from an 1857 map that, as the artist notes in the publication, “interestingly” includes the totality of the region as part of the United States’ territory, we perceive Mesoamerica as a route for the trafficking of people, drugs, and natural resources.

The sea creatures depicted in the maps of yore are used here to represent the main culprits: drug lords, political parties, and mining companies. Although clearly destructive, the beasts in Olas Magnus’ map remain at bay in the vastness of the cold sea, whereas in Aragón’s interpretation they almost cover entire countries, turning them into vulnerable vessels doomed to sink. Three final maps show us Oaxaca, the small town of Cachimbo in the state of Chiapas, and a route traced in red between the two that hints at the trip developing in the single-channel video projected in an adjacent room.

Edgardo Aragón. Mesoamerica: The Hurricane Effect, 2015 (detail of maps); HD video, color, sound; 16:20, with 10 maps. Coproduction: Jeu de Paume, Paris, Fondation des Arts Graphiques et Plastiques and CAPC Musée d’Art Contemporain de Bordeaux. Courtesy of the Artist and Jeu de Paume.

The first image—a wind turbine tower ablaze, its white blades still turning in the air—sets a gloomy, disturbing tone. Viewers follow Aragón on a road trip from Ocotlán to Cachimbo, encountering on the way a hydroelectric plant, a wind park, and their surrounding stories of social injustice. Contemplative shots of a silent, deserted landscape alternate with views of the road and the artist’s smartphone screen, where he shows us maps and hashtag searches relating to local news of industrial accidents. The role of social media in the dissemination of otherwise ignored local scandals echoes the now internationally known murder of forty-three students from the neighboring state of Guerrero in 2014.

The story of Cachimbo resonates throughout the region thanks to policies like the North American Free Trade Agreement signed between the U.S., Canada, and Mexico in 1994, and the Mesoamerica Project, a development plan with dubious long-term goals established in 2008 by then-president Vicente Fox. In line with the reality of these policies, Cachimbo—a town regularly battered by hurricanes—is surrounded by sources of energy and natural wealth, yet the locals have no access to any of it. Aragón’s mission to bring to this town some much-needed electricity, if only in the form of what appears to be a small motorbike battery, is as absurd as it is significant.

Edgardo Aragón. Mesoamerica: The Hurricane Effect, 2015 (detail of video); HD video, color, sound; 16:20, with 10 maps. Coproduction: Jeu de Paume, Paris, Fondation des Arts Graphiques et Plastiques and CAPC Musée d’Art Contemporain de Bordeaux. Courtesy of the Artist and Jeu de Paume.

The profusion of references employed by the artist may prove challenging for a public who may know only the generalities of the complex and idiosyncratic relations of power and capital in Latin America, yet the artist’s choices seem to be an appeal and an insistence to be read and understood in his own undiluted terms.

Aragón lays out a final, if impossibly thick, layer of meaning in a beautiful last scene in which a fragment of Andrés Henestrosa’s The Men Dispersed by the Dance (1929) is read aloud while a small electric fan whirls, powered by the artist’s battery. Henestrosa’s work is fundamental to the Mexican movement of indigenous narrative, and his prose is used by the artist to point to a conflicting religious syncretism between the ancient Zapotec cosmogony and an imposed Christianity that dictates compliance to adversity, turning tragedy of all kind into an unchallenged part of everyday life.

Contemporary art from Mexico often shows the urgent need of its producers to engage with the social issues in the world around them. As Edgardo Aragón shows in his unapologetic work, these issues are centuries old, scary, and more destructive than any sea monster. Maybe, like Olas Magnus’ creatures, their horrors also precede great social upheaval. Only time will tell.

Mesoamerica: The Hurricane Effect by Edgardo Aragón is on view at Jeu de Paume through May 22, 2016. It will travel to the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Bourdeaux, where it will be on view from September 15 until November 6, 2016.

Poster calling for the return of the disappeared normalistas. Photo: Jorge Gomez del Campo.

According to some critics, neoliberal reforms account for much of this violence. The chapter on Ciudad Juarez in Ed Vulliamy’s book Amexica is a particularly good example; it situates the epidemic of femicides in that city in the context of the structural changes brought about by the North American Free Trade Agreement. Furthermore, Vulliamy asserts that the particularly brutal character of narco/state violence in Mexico results from the drug war’s neoliberal form.

The question of how art responds to, or ignores, this climate is of utmost importance. Recently, the College of Art and Design of the National Autonomous University of Mexico organized a conference, XI Simposio Internacional del Posgrado en Artes y Diseño, on management and professionalism in design, documentary film, and the visual arts. Peppered throughout the talks given by important and august museum directors, curators, art-investment bankers, copyright lawyers, and gallerists were many dissident voices calling for and describing another, more socially conscious art world. The presentation by curator and artist Carlos-Blas Galindo Mendoza, in conjunction with the roundtable he moderated, revealed the contradiction implicit in staging a conference about professionalism and management in the context of the social, political, and humanitarian crises facing contemporary Mexico.

In his talk, “Inserción de Productos Artísticos Visuales en Circuitos Establecidos de Distribución y Consumo, así Como en Redes Independientes,” Galindo ironically explained how to “make it” in the art world: The number-one rule is to never make anything that poses a real threat to neoliberal capitalism. He went on to describe the extant art world as globalized and generic; art objects have to be like a pair of jeans, equally sellable in China, Europe, or Thailand; curators and critics are thinkers-for-hire, justifying what the market values. This art, according to Galindo, is masculinist and authoritarian.

Santiago Ortega Hernández, speaking at the roundtable moderated by Galindo, further indicted the art world. In his thoroughly researched talk, “La Sartén por el Mango. El Coleccionismo Empresarial en el Mercado del Arte,” the artist and academic traced the links between big business, investment banks, and art. This link between art and capital is a matter of record; at one point, however, Ortega Hernández suggested that anyone who participates in these markets and institutions tacitly supports the human-rights abuses carried out by some of the businesses and banks heavily invested in art.

Galindo challenged the audience to develop a solution to these ethical, moral, and aesthetic questions. He called for the development of a new kind of art, a postcolonial art that is feminine, militant, solidary, irreverent, and diverse. This new art would be tied to a particular place and time, it would interrogate power and capital, and it would act with a communitarian—and even revolutionary—spirit. Fortunately, at least to some extent, this art already exists in the work of dozens of local artists and collectives operating within and on the periphery of the art world.

Ambra Polidori. Recuerdo de Ciudad Juarez, 2011; postcards and display rack; 200 x 30 x 30 cm. Courtesy of the Artist and the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico D.F. Photo: Jorge Gomez del Campo.

Internationally recognized artists like Teresa Margolles directly confront the worst results of neoliberal reforms in Mexico. Her work at the Venice Biennale, ¿De Qué Otra Cosa Podríamos Hablar? (2009), and En el Aire (2003) at the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC), are examples of how art speaks to power from within the institution. In one work, someone mops the floor with water impregnated with crime-scene remains; in the other, the artist mixes these remains with soap bubbles that float around the viewer. The suggestion is clear; these rarefied art spaces have some relationship to the violence that exists outside of their hermetic walls. Ambra Polidori exhibited a piece in the MUAC that powerfully addressed the ideological and economic realities of femicides in Ciudad Juarez. Recuerdo de Ciudad Juarez (2011) consisted of a rack filled with postcards of crime-scene photographs of femicides with the text Recuerdo de Ciudad Juarez (“Souvenir of Ciudad Juarez”) in playful, colorful script. This piece still resonates as one of the most powerful and complex denouncements of violence by a contemporary Mexican artist.

Casa Gomorra. Photo: Gustavo Ruíz

There are many other works coming from important Mexico City museums and commercial galleries that address this reality, but Galindo’s talk suggests that these works might not meet the criteria of the new art he calls for. Why, he asks, do we include some of this work in the material and ideological institutions of the art world and not others? It seems that for Galindo, any art included in the field is complicit with the politics and conventions of the gallery and museum; nonetheless, countless artists and collectives, which meet most, if not all, of the criteria set forth by Galindo, operate within, and on the periphery, of the art scene in Mexico City. Some important collectives facilitate the production of dissident culture and cultural artifacts. For example, Casa Gomorra is a home and cultural center dedicated to post-porn, trans-feminist, and queer/cuir projects, shows, workshops, performances, and parties. Tepetongo Balneario Crítico works at the boundary between art projects, political activism, and academic research.

Photo: Tepetongo Balneario Crítico.

Rexiste is an informal association of individuals and artists dedicating themselves to arts-based political action. They helped organize two key events this last year: the action commemorating the assassination of a young graffiti artist by police, and the “occupation” (the building was used with the permission of sympathetic administrators) of the Palacio de Bellas Artes as the center of a weekend of art and protest. Cráter Invertido, a collective with anarchist leanings, is one of the most active groups in the contemporary art scene. They are one of the few groups to operate simultaneously on the periphery and in the center of the art world (they were invited to participate in the most recent Venice Biennale). They have been active for a few years and routinely have shows, workshops, free communitarian meals, and performances informed by anarchist aesthetics. There are many more of these groups in Mexico City, and countless more throughout the country. Mexico is full of art whose themes and structures actively work against the worst results of neoliberal policies in the country.

The story of one artist and activist in particular is indicative of this reality. At Casa Gomorra, Denise (last name withheld to respect her privacy) recounted her experiences organizing resistance to narco/state violence in Monterrey, the capital of the state of Nuevo Leon in the north of Mexico. She told us about strategies that mostly centered on reclaiming public space from violence. For instance, if a cartel hung bodies from a bridge, they’d organize a queer/cuir bike ride across it. Or, when violence shut down all the bars and parks of the historic downtown, artists and activists rented apartments and studios, and opened cafes and galleries as artistic and political actions.

This kind of praxis is remarkable and brave on its own; however, Denise continues to work even after being harmed by the worst of narco/state violence. She was one of two women on a bus that was stopped on the highway by what she believes were government paramilitaries. The paramilitaries separated the women. They lined up all the men and executed them. They then kidnapped the two women, beat, tortured, and gang-raped them, and left them for dead on the side of the road.

The women managed to flag down a passing bus. The driver let them travel to the nearest town in the luggage compartment. When Denise arrived at the town, she made her way to a local hospital. The doctors concluded that there had not been a rape; her vagina had lubricated. This horrifying experience has not impeded Denise’s ability to resist, to organize, to write, and to make art. Mexico is filled with stories like this—of people who will not give up hope that their lives will continue, that their loved ones will be found alive, or that the perpetrators of violence will be brought to justice.

Artists and artists’ collectives have been key in building community, maintaining awareness, and pressuring the state for justice and accountability. Galindo is absolutely right in calling for a new art. I hope that sympathetic people within the most important government and private art institutions listen. This new art already exists; it simply needs more of the material and social support the art world could provide.

Lorena Wolffer. Lorena Wolffer Expuestas: Registros Públicos, 2015; installation view, Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico D.F.. Courtesy of Lorena Wolffer and Museo de Arte Moderno. Photo: Jorge Gomez del Campo.

Documentation of several of the artist’s actions and performances make up the majority of the exhibition, which includes documentation of four pieces in particular. The red text along the wall is from an installation titled Acta Testimonial (2009), in which the artist wrote the insults directed at clients of a woman’s shelter on the walls of a gallery, while the clients’ own recorded voices described their experiences.

A large photograph of the artist handing out chocolates to passing motorists, and a plastic tube filled with those chocolates, documents 14 de Febrero (2008). In this piece the artist handed out chocolates with wrappers containing written accounts of the experiences of a woman named Mari who was forced, along with her four children, to sell chocolates on the busy streets of Mexico City. If Mari failed to sell enough, she was beaten and abused by her husband.

On a table in the center of the space, photographs and texts document Antimemorias: Enmiendas Públicas (2011), in which Wolffer invited passersby to interact with her body in such a way that it came to represent the wounds that the individual women had suffered. These interactions included actions such as washing Wolffer’s skin, or placing bandages on the artist’s body at the locations where the victims had been injured.

Lorena Wolffer. Antimemorias: Enmiendas Públicas, 2011; installation view, Lorena Wolffer Expuestas: Registros Públicos, 2015. Courtesy of Lorena Wolffer and Museo de Arte Moderno. Photo: Jorge Gomez del Campo.

On the far wall of the gallery is a video monitor and a small shelf with a text that invites gallery visitors to take a sticker to indicate publicly whether they “have experienced some type of violence against women.” This installation presents another of Wolffer’s actions, Encuesta de Violencia a Mujeres (2008), which consisted of a kiosk with a survey about violence against women. Each participant was then given a sticker to indicate whether or not she had been victimized. Next to this display, in a closet-size black room with a single chair, plays a looped video. This silent, untitled video (2015) of white text on a black background was made specifically for this show. It lists the names of those close to the exhibition that have been harmed by violence against women. In its own words, it is a “manifesto against oblivion” so that this violence will “never be repeated.”

Lorena Wolffer. Lorena Wolffer Expuestas: Registros Públicos, 2015; installation view, Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico D.F.. Courtesy of Lorena Wolffer and Museo de Arte Moderno. Photo: Jorge Gomez del Campo.

This small exhibit, and Wolffer’s work, makes present the serious and heart-breaking violence that one in five Mexican women report having experienced; it plays with concepts of public and private space in such a way that these forms of violence become something that the viewer has to confront in himself or herself. Wolffer’s work empowers women harmed by violence. It says, “You are not alone; you will not be forgotten.” Her work is also a powerful political message; the performances and actions documented here take place in very public and political spaces, like the Zócalo (main square) of Mexico City, suggesting that violence against women is a public/social problem embodied in private spaces. Unfortunately, the museum presents Wolffer’s work as a solely private, voyeuristic affair.

The viewer is invited to move through a small space filled with horrifying narratives and images about violence (like the account of the beating of a pregnant woman’s belly by her husband until she aborts). But except for the curator’s text on the wall, there is little to push the viewer out into the world, to consider the material and ideological realities of contemporary Mexico that allow for this kind of violence: corruption, machismo, and impunity, to name just a few. This exhibit reads as a human-interest story designed to move the viewer emotionally but not critically. Considering the gallery show as a whole, it becomes clear that it is driven by this specific kind of TV-journalistic and voyeuristic ethos. Documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis describes this type of situation as “Oh Dearism,” in which tragedy is presented without the contexts that might open up strategies of political action, in which the only reasonable response is to enjoy wringing your hands and saying, “Oh dear, how terrible.” Wolffer’s work empowers and challenges, it takes action; this show betrays her activism.

Fortunately, the show includes other elements besides the gallery exhibit. Before the show’s closure on October 18, the museum has scheduled a series of related events that includes a performance and talk by the artist, as well as workshops led by others. Hopefully these peripheral activities might mitigate some of the disempowering elements of the show.

Lorena Wolffer Expuestas: Registros Públicos is on view at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City through October 18, 2015.

Enrique Metinides. Mexico City, September 19, 1985; photograph. Courtesy 212berlin

The journalistic expression “If it bleeds, it leads” is particularly resonant in Mexico, where an entire subgenre of daily tabloids, devoted to crime and disaster, cover train wrecks and murders in lurid detail. Enrique Metinides made a career as a crime photographer for these nota roja (“bloody news”), earning the sobriquet the “Mexican Weegee” for his obsessive chronicling of accidents and crime scenes throughout Mexico City from the early 1940s through the 1990s.

In 101 Tragedies of Enrique Metinides, currently on view at Chelsea’s Aperture Gallery, Metinides selects his favorite images from his fifty-year career, drawn from an eponymous book made in collaboration with filmmaker Tricia Ziff. The photographs are gruesome and disturbing, but also beautifully composed and compelling in their narrative complexity. In the introduction, Metinides remarks, “I would try to capture the whole scene in a single frame—not just the corpse or the weapon, but the entire story.” His self-contained photos, which resemble film stills, make the case that the horrors of daily life are both stranger and darker than fiction.

Enrique Metinides. Mexico City, April 29, 1979 ; Courtesy 212berlin.

The majority of Metinides’ works feature accidents (plane, train, and car crashes, gas explosions, earthquakes), but he also captures more personal disasters such as suicides, crimes of passion, and bar brawls that spiraled out of control. The contrast between these images of mass calamity and individual loss is striking. While the shots of flipped buses are grizzly, they don’t carry the same emotional intimacy as the image of a woman weeping over the body of her murdered husband or the grainy photo of a drowned teenager floating face-down in a public swimming pool. In January 1971, Metinides photographed an engineer named Jesus Bazaldúsa Barber, who had been torn apart by 60,000 volts of electricity while installing a telephone line. Even as his harness keeps him suspended from the top of the pole, his torso is flung back at an oddly elegant angle, like an image of Jesus in a Deposition scene, asking for some final grace.

Though Metinides claims in the book’s introduction to always remember the exact circumstances of each scene, the caption of one harrowing photo of a man who had jumped to his death from the Torre Latinoamericana suggests otherwise: “I don’t remember any more about him; there were suicides every day.” This tension between voyeurism and empathy—the desire to honor individual death amid a sea of gore—features prominently in the crowds who populate Metinides’ photographs. While some onlookers gape with horror, others chatter and laugh. Ice-cream vendors, he notes, were fixtures at major accidents, providing refreshments to the rubbernecking crowds.

Enrique Metinides. Chapultepec Park, Mexico City, 1995; Courtesy 212berlin.

A 1960 image of a lifeguard swimming out to a corpse found in Lake Xochimilco, on the outskirts of Mexico City, captures the ambivalence at the heart of Metinides’ photography. At first glance, the scene appears oddly serene; gentle ripples move across the water as the lifeguard swims toward the body of this man whose story lies buried among the reeds. But on a closer look, the reflection in the lake shows the omnipresent onlookers gathered along the shore, watching the scene unfold but with their faces obscured, no names provided. As ever in Metinides’ world, it is both an anonymous crime scene and a hauntingly specific tragedy.

Robert Motherwell. Pancho Villa, Dead and Alive, 1943; cut-and-pasted printed and painted papers, wood veneer, gouache, oil, and ink on board; 28 1/4 x 35 7/8 in.

“Mexico is truly the promised land for abstract art.”
Anni & Josef Albers, 1936

“Mexico is the most surrealist country in the world.”
Andre Breton, 1938

Why Mexico? It was not only that Mexico was nearby and easily accessible to U.S.–based artists, although that was certainly true. And it was not just that Mexico had powerful ancient arts that were alien and mysterious to the Euro-American public, though that was true as well. It was also that Mexico was, in the 1920s, a significant cultural center. As historian Amy Lifson notes in “Art of Influence” from 2010, “[O]ne of the hottest venues in the art world was the Mexican Ministry of Public Education, where Diego Rivera was painting the frescoes that would revive mural painting in the West. Rivera was world-famous, considered one of the three great living artists—the other two being Picasso and Matisse. It took him seven years to paint the cycle, which consisted of 235 panels. Artists, intellectuals, students, and curiosity-seekers from all over came to see the work.” Rivera’s work employed a new stylistic language, combining the European avant-garde with Mexican indigenous traditions. The following is a short survey of artists and the years they were in Mexico, where they were inspired and transformed.

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We must be in downtown Guadalajara, but all I can see is the glisten on the streets as I bail out.  I run through the torrential rain across the pavement, dodging granizo and landing on the dry doorstep of an airy, modern restaurant called Café Benito. Having just escaped the rain and hailstones, I am now immediately bombarded by something else. Blasts of an unexpected kind of music: vintage, improvisational jazz pulsates from the DJ booth with astonishing force. Music you usually imagine softly breathing from a record player booms against the cement walls like a dubstep concert. Shaking out my hair, I quickly realize this isn’t just a restaurant – but a uniquely hybridized and multi-disciplinary space. The back of the bar is connected to a theatre of sorts and I can catch a clean white glimmer of an adjoining gallery space. Naturally we head for the bar and order a round of cervezas. My friend advises that, despite being 2 hours late, we are right on time for the performance, a thing I’m liking more and more about Mexico.

Cafe Benito in Guadalajara

Meandering through the modern décor scattered throughout the hard-edged cement space towards the gallery, I meet a number of Guadalajara’s tight knit crew of contemporary artists, who, in addition to all being good friends, seem to have matching mustaches and tattoos. (I discover that these ‘homemade’ tattoos were the handiwork of visiting artist Thomas Jeppe’s recent residence and assumingly, a night full of escalating dares and mezcal.) Guadalajara’s art scene is personal and friendly – after a few days, these guys all know my name. Thankfully, I missed tattoo night. The curator, Antoine Thelamon, shouts his hellos over the music, reluctant to clarify what I am about to see, except for teasing about a little surprise in store. The artist on show is a locally based artist, Adrian S. Bara, who walks me towards the installation.

Adrian S. Bara sculpture installation, Cafe Benito, 2012

Beyond the bar, and still reverberating with loud jazz, is a pristine gallery space scattered with minimal sculpture objects. A low steel platform with a golden yellow top humbly blushes in the centre of the floor, a hint of colour in the cool space. Roughly polished with hints of iridescent circular marks, a grey steel bar juts from a high corner, sloping 45 degrees and before being mechanically bolted directly to the concrete floor. Across the cavernous space is a curious scene: a blank section of wall seems taped off, as if to signify an invisible, white painting that once was there. Below either side of the black perimeter, two spotless concave wooden objects hug the lower corner of the wall. In the typical fashion, since Minimalist sculpture encourages the viewer to walk around the space, I pace around and under, along and through….but soon Bara curiously encourages me to stay close to the walls as the a hip crowd gathers to watch the performance.

Adrian S. Bara sculpture installation and performance, Cafe Benito, 2012

I am slowly piecing together the work when two teenagers roll in on skateboards battering through the space. Uh, is that allowed? It takes the sound of a skateboard deck smashing and scraping along the yellow sculpture at the centre of the gallery for me to realize exactly what’s happening here. The steel bar becomes a rail and the two wooden sculptures across the space now so obviously become ramps. Artworks turn into obstacles, as gallery becomes skate park – and all the usual rules of either arena go right out the ventana. The world where artwork is precious, jealously guarded and forbidden to touch is shattered with the loud slap of wood, metal and wheels.

The skaters recoil and then paw at the floor like charging bulls, flinging themselves down to the end of the gleaming gallery where the wooden ramp pilots them up the wall and across the blank taped off space. Between the perimeters of the black square, a gray arch appears on the white wall, the first stroke in an unusual action painting. This action is repeated at intervals by the two skaters, who soon start to compete for the longest and highest mark. We lap it up.

Broadway Boogie Woogie, Piet Mondrian, 1942-1943

The untitled performance by Bara, the first in a series and loosely described to as ‘abstract skating’, is inspired by Piet Mondrian, and specifically his late painting from 1942-3 called Broadway Boogie Woogie. Famously Mondrian painted it after moving to New York after the onset of WWII, and, in discovering American jazz, redefined his painterly style as more staccato and rhythmic, echoing the beats of the new music and of the bustling city of New York itself. The yellow platform in Bara’s installation echoes the gold hues of the piece, and Mondrian’s famous black thick lines is repeated in the steel rail bar.

It is at this point when I realize how macho the whole amalgamation is – it’s the string that ties all these seemingly disparate elements together: Minimalism, skateboarding, jazz and Action Painting. The machismo historically intertwined with Minimalism and sculptors like Carl Andre, Richard Serra, Donald Judd and Robert Morris is legendary. Indeed the artist group I fell into is also a bit of a boy’s club. Contemporary comparisons to the likes of Aaron Young also come to mind, who combines daredevil antics and action painting. Working as the ‘artist as bad ass’, Young’s works are executed with motorcycles doing doughnuts instead of a paintbrush, and, like the original crash and burner, Pollock, places the painterly surface on the floor. Using athleticism in much the same way, Bara in turn keeps the painting surface vertical. The skateboard scrapes index and chart the escalating skills and masculine prowess of the skaters. Of course the typically masculine-dominated street art also comes to mind, as graffiti ridden skate parks are the usual host to such activities.

Adrian S. Bara Installation (in series), Cafe Benito, 2012

The evening progresses with continued enthusiasm as the skaters re-arrange the sculptures in to more and more difficult and complex jumping obstacles. As the rain subsides, passer-bys wander in to see what all the noise is about while the sculptures endue further and more creative abuse. A few onlookers grab their skateboards and join in. The white painting on the wall becomes s a scribbled arch of repetitive grey marks, and the sculptures have all acquired a healthy peppering of injuries, from scrapes and gauges to heavy cracks and collapsed walls. The violence done to the sculptures record this creative act of destruction, which serves as the sole element that admittedly brings to mind some of my favorite female artists including Niki de Saint Phalle and Angela de la Cruz. Whether purposefully testosterone charged or not, Bara leaves us all with something very complex and interesting to absorb. As I crack open another beer, the skaters exhaust themselves and also head to the bar. A gestured record of the night’s festivities, I realize most of the action’s evidence remains behind in the gallery… but not all of it. A few marks are taken out of the gallery and back onto the streets: the bruises and scrapes on the performer’s skin. Worn like trophies, a few drops of blood make for an interesting confirmation that some of Bara’s artwork bites back – perhaps a sculpture’s revenge for decades of abuse by generations of artists.

http://www.adrianbara.com/

Teresa Margolles, Las Llaves de la Ciudad (detail), 2011. Performance and installation. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Rafael Burillo.

There have been several recent shows considering how art is affected by nationality. Maybe it’s a response to the generic aura found on the floors of art fairs. Disponible at the School of the Museum of the Fine Arts, Boston is a good example that asks what it means to be a Mexican artist. It’s an incomplete exhibition that deserves a books worth of supporting texts, but as a rough exploration of Mexico’s current potential, it’s lucid and descriptive.

The title is taken from Mexico’s empty billboards, advertising that they are not currently taken. Disponible is an ambiguous word, translating to available or changeable. Disponible partially functions as a metaphor for Mexico’s adjustable, compelling, and dynamic contemporary art scene. The title also slyly points to the sizable share of international art sales Mexican artists and galleries are generating (See: Kurimanzutto). After all, the billboards in question are a constant reminder to “the job creators” that they could be enhancing their brands right now.

The most interesting pieces included in Disponible display Mexico as more than a place for drug dealers and low-wage workers. Marcela Armas‘s video Ocupación shows her 2009 performance where she walks like she’s a car in the flow of traffic. She wears a backpack that has an air horn like a car would and she uses it when she has to wait in the string of traffic. The crush of congestion is something we all have insights into, yet can’t keep from happening. It’s a material reality for all seven billion of us.

Hector Zamora, White Noise – Shed 6 Installation (detail), 2011. Installation originally developed for the Auckland Arts Festival, New Zealand. Courtesy of the artist.

Hector Zamora‘s White Noise- Shed 6 is an installation about the relationship between land and colonial rights in New Zealand. After England made New Zealand a colony, land rights were delineated by planting white flags on the borders of private property. Zamora planted 500 flags on a Aukland beach to begin a conversation on this issue and after one day was relegated by the Mayor to exhibiting his work on private property. There was no physical connection to public space after that. This public question was exiled to a private location, transforming his artwork from a sociable interaction into a private sculptural territory. The Mayor tried to exclude the public policy issues and transformed the work from an investigation of a very local, esoteric law to a universal and emblematic colonial critique. Exhibiting it in Boston reflects how it will be a displaced art piece, deported from its appropriate venue no matter where it’s displayed now.

Manuel Rocha Iturbide, I Play The Drums With Frequency (detail), 2007–11. Drum set, sound installation. Courtesy of the artist.

Manuel Rocha Iturbide‘s I Play Drums with Frequency, is the stand out work in Disponible. It’s the least politically formulaic, the most seductively mysterious, and best example of the ambiguity in the title of the show. Is begs the audience to confront their stereotypes about Mexican art. This inventive sound sculpture plays a drum set not with sticks, but with small speakers. A electronic soundtrack composed by Itrubide vibrates the set, and in turn the room. I want to be able to play with this sculpture. I want to put my own soundtracks into the speakers and hear the results. It is a discrete and a most salable object that would look great in an art fair. The noise would draw as much attention as the empty billboards do in a city. “Come buy me! I’m available!”

Disponible, on view at SMFA from September 13- November 19, 2011, was co-curated by Hou Hanru and Guillermo Santamarina for the San Francisco Art Institute. In includes Natalia Almada, Arturo Hernández Alcázar, Edgardo Aragón, Marcela Armas, Manuel Rocha Itrubide, Mauricio Limón, Teresa Margolles, and Hector Zamora

Ignacio Uriarte began his career in business administration before quitting “to work as a full time artist,” as he describes in his statement. Translating his administrative expertise to a creative context, Uriarte incorporates the quotidian tools and habitual methods surrounding the office environment into his artistic practice. His materials include Bic pens, Xerox machines, ink cartridges, and other office paraphernalia; his process is driven by routine and repetition. His new video work, which was displayed in Nogueras Blanchard‘s booth at Art Basel Miami Beach earlier this month, comments on the iconic machine, the typewriter, and its decline into obsolescence.

The History of the Typewriter Recited by Michael Winslow documents the actor’s recreation of the distinct mechanical sounds generated when using a typewriter. Michael Winslow is known for his role in the Police Academy movies, as well as his uncanny ability to simulate sound effects using his voice. In the video, Winslow attempts to mimic the sounds of various typing machines from the 1870s to the 1980s. Uriarte recorded the sounds of over 3,000 typewriters from the Schreibmaschinenmuseum in Partschins, Switzerland and the Deutsches Technikmuseum in Berlin. The artist then chose 68 models for Winslow to work with. The actor was only able to recreate the sounds of 32 models in the film, a powerful reflection on the interaction between man and machine, and the limitations of both. The specific timeframe of the work points to the invention of the typewriter and its ultimate demise with the launch of the first personal computer and accompanying word processing software by IBM in 1984. The first Police Academy movie was also released in 1984.

Uriarte received a degree in Business Administration in 1995 before studying audiovisual arts in Guadalajara, Mexico. Born in Krefeld, Germany, he currently lives and works in Berlin.