Mexico City
“Mexico City: An Exhibition About the Exchange Rates of Bodies and Values,” at P.S. 1 in Queens, is the kind of show that wants to be judged by its politics. It also feels a lot like art for export, designed to communicate to American audiences, in the most sensationalist terms, just how abject and squalid life today can be in this Third World city.
In a way, it is the art equivalent of “reality TV.” The attitude here is that art is not about distilling a personal response or painstakingly crafting an image or object, but about grabbing raw chunks of real life and thrusting them at the viewer. If it were being shown at a Manhattan museum, rather than out in the artistic fringe, it would be a much more controversial show, because it contains videotape footage of people being murdered for sport, and because its artists are given to acts of kidnapping and theft.
The exhibition essay by curator Klaus Biesenbach paints a nightmarish picture of an impoverished, polluted, overpopulated megacity of 20 million people. This is not the romantic bohemia of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, but a society beset by every possible social problem: murder, executions, rape, begging, gang violence, homelessness, child abandonment. In this world, he argues, people’s bodies and lives become a commodity, translated into pesos in such common transactions as prostitution and kidnapping.
This theme is stretched this way and that to accommodate the various pieces, many of which are types of performance art, or, in less friendly terms, publicity stunts. Some are anti-capitalist statements, as with the artist who alters the bar codes on grocery store items so that shoppers can buy them at a cheaper price. Others protest social conditions, such as the one who, in an earlier piece, had himself filmed walking the streets of Mexico City with a gun in plain sight (he was arrested in 12 minutes — a fairly good response time, actually, if the point is to demonstrate lawlessness). One artist previously kidnapped all the guests at an alternative art space opening, took them in a bus to the slums of Mexico City, and dropped them off to fend for themselves.
By far the most radical street theater was that of Miguel Calderón and Yoshua Okón, who videotaped themselves smashing car windows and yanking out the radios. The fruits of their labor, 120 car radios, are stacked in the center of the gallery as sculpture (proving, perhaps, that they didn’t profit from their crime—except artistically).
The most ghoulish of the bunch is Teresa Margolles, whose résumé includes the display of the pierced tongue of a slain teenage gang member and smearing the walls of a gallery with human fat. She literally brings the smell of death into the exhibit by filling a gallery with a thick mist made from water that had been used to wash corpses in a Mexico City morgue.
I confess that I did not actually experience this work. The sign in front of the curtained gallery said the water had been “disinfected by the artist” — not exactly what you want to hear, especially in view of the liability release form that had to be signed. The forms had the smell of carnival hyperbole about them, but, nevertheless … (Someone who did go in described the smell as “musty.”) Some of the artists concern themselves with the relationship between North and South, as in the photographs of ordinary Mexicans sporting corporate logos on their clothes, or a music-video-style documentary about San Diego teenagers going into Tijuana to get drunk and carouse. In one somewhat confused piece, we see photos of a Mexican hairless dog mounting and mating with a white French poodle. By the exhibit’s logic about cultural dominance and exploitation, it should have been the other way around.
The best art in this show is really the simplest, Francis Alys’ clear-lit photographs of workaday Mexicans in open plazas, pushing or pulling their daily burdens: ice cream trucks, hamburger stands, handcarts bearing blocks of ice. Or, Daniela Rosell’s kitschy blondes in their ludicrously ostentatious settings. The women pose like Barbie dolls with gigantic stuffed animals and real taxidermy in rooms that look as if they were furnished by some ironic, feminist New York installation artist. The women are described as “rich and famous,” but look more like high-priced prostitutes in fantasy settings.
But all of the art, good and bad, is drowned out by a shocking piece of video that supposedly shows a true-life hunting expedition with human targets. The hunters are said to be upper-class sportsmen and the victims rain forest people from the Brazilian jungle. The footage comes from a compilation tape of violent acts from around the world that was acquired by Ivan Edeza in a Mexico City flea market. This segment, believed to have been made in the 1970s, shows the men firing from a helicopter at the fleeing tribesmen, cutting them down like wild game. Later, we see them dragging the bodies through the bush, laying them out on the ground, and cutting off the ears as trophies. Edeza has distorted some of the imagery, made the tape fuzzy in places, as some sort of comment about the media, or perhaps to justify calling it his art. In any event, it’s quite clear what is happening.
Showing the tape raises a host of ethical questions. It’s generally considered a violation of human dignity to show people being murdered; the fact that these people, or their relatives, are far removed from our society doesn’t make it any less so. But it is even more indecent to display something like this when it conforms so readily to the desires of the anonymous murderers, who obviously wanted their acts preserved for their own glorification and for the entertainment of the like-minded. To call it art, and to show the tape with the appropriate condemnations, doesn’t mitigate the museum’s participation in this. It shouldn’t even have been a close call.
P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, Queens
2002
