JOHN ZEAMAN

Contemporary

Cloaca

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Cloaca

I always thought that one of the advantages of machines over humans is that machines don’t have all those biological needs. The robots that assemble cars don’t sleep, eat, or go to the bathroom.

Which is why, I suppose, there are no big corporations sponsoring “Cloaca” at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in Manhattan. “Cloaca” is the first machine ever designed that eats, digests, and eliminates. It has, of course, no practical value. It is the creation of a Belgian artist named Wim Delvoye, who put it together with the help of scientists from the University of Antwerp and then found a surprising number of critics and theorists to comment on it.

“Cloaca” looks like an elaborate medical apparatus, with lots of tubes and a series of large glass containers. The name means sewer, and also refers, in biology, to an excretory duct or cavity found in birds, reptiles, and other animals.

Every afternoon at about 4:30 a museum attendant climbs a metal staircase and throws some food into a large plastic funnel that serves as the apparatus’s mouth. There it is chewed up by a garbage disposal and a meat grinder. Then it begins a 22-hour passage through six glass chambers containing enzymes, bacteria, bile, and other digestive juices. As it is pumped from chamber to chamber and mechanically stirred, the liquified food becomes progressively darker. Finally, it goes into a metal box that extracts the liquids and, at 2:30 p.m. every day, museum visitors can see the remaining solids extruded onto a green conveyor belt.

Contrary to a popular saying, s—- doesn’t just happen.

It struck me as the sort of thing a perverse, ingenious high school student might do for a science project. Were it a science project, however, more attention would probably be paid to the extraction of the nutrients from the food and how they go into building and fueling the body. Here, the roles are somewhat reversed. The nutrients are discretely siphoned off and disposed of as if they didn’t really exist, while the waste is presented as the end product.

What could it mean? Freud had a lot to say about people who remained preoccupied with excretory functions, a stage that all children pass through. But Delvoye is also an artist who likes playing with his food: He makes elaborate mosaic floors out of neatly cut pieces of ham and salami. And, like every teenager, he has popped a zit or two and, in big, blown-up images, explores the eternal question – just what is that stuff that comes out?

Delvoye, then, is that familiar figure in the contemporary art world – the bad boy. He is the art-world equivalent of Tom Green eating a handful of mealworms.

Bad art gives off an effluvium of critical theory, and for those who need to feel that a defecating machine has intellectual significance, the catalog should prove handy. In the early throes of postmodernism, we are told, we dwelt in what the critic Neville Wakefield called “the twilight of the real.” God had died, history was at an end, and there was nothing left to doubt except reality itself.

But this got tiresome, according to critic Dieter Roelstraete. Artists, always quick to flip an idea, decided to resurrect the real. You want real? We’ll give you real, they seemed to say, and seized on the physical body as something that was undeniably real. Body fluids were particularly favored. So there were jars of urine, and drawings made from blood, and evocations of semen and breast milk. Dead bodies were popular subjects. The so-called Formaldehyde School of photography photographed jars of specimens and body parts, and museum visitors found themselves face to face with bisected cows.

Humans have a strong aversion to feces, however, and this did not become a popular art material, although Chris Ofili got a lot of attention with his elephant dung.

But a machine that poops – well, that’s not actually the real thing, and so Delvoye seems to have gotten around the problem. And the New Museum has gotten around the problem of odor by enclosing the final stage of the process in a sealed chamber that vents into a back alley.

Then there’s a whole other take on “Cloaca,” as a satiric comment on the quest for artificial intelligence, which really isn’t bad, but the theorists tend to get a little carried away here —with windy reflections on Marcel Duchamp, the mystery of consciousness, and the meaning and purpose of art—and hence ruin what might be a perfectly good joke.

The exhibit has its moments. The guard on duty the day I was there had a funny story to tell about some of “Cloaca’s” feeding problems. It seems they started out giving it fancy food from Soho restaurants – eggs Benedict, salmon mousse, that sort of thing. But the rich diet gave it diarrhea. “And you know,” said the guard, “I ate the food from that same restaurant and I got sick, too.”

Thumbing through the catalog, there was a previous work by Delvoye that I also found amusing: his tattooed pigs. The artist (or more likely a tattoo artist) decorated the pink backs and flanks of the animals with an array of biker-type tattoos: Harley-Davidson logos, grinning skulls, flaming devils, and hearts with knives thrust into them. The brawny pigs, wallowing about in the yard and seeming to leer at us, look the part, actually. And you can almost imagine one saying to the other: “I got drunk. Woke up like this. Can’t remember a thing.”

 

New Museum of Contemporary Art

2002

Grounds for Sculpture

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I’ve never known quite what to make of Grounds for Sculpture. Is it a legitimate sculpture park? Or is it a gigantic outdoor vanity gallery, where its founder, J. Seward Johnson Jr., an heir to the Johnson & Johnson fortune, can showcase his own work?

After 10 years, the answer seems to be … both. There’s no denying that it’s an important venue for contemporary sculpture. Since it opened in 1992, 545 artists have exhibited here, among them Magdalena Abakanowicz, George Segal, Marisol, Ursula von Rydingsvard, Red Grooms, Tom Otterness, Isaac Witkin, and Mel Kendrick.

J. Seward Johnson’s three-dimensional take on Renoir’s “Luncheon of the Boating Party.”

But Johnson’s quirky imprint and presence are dominant, and it’s hard to avoid the sense of visiting a rich man’s architectural folly.

His painted bronze castings of famous impressionist paintings are among the oddest, kitchiest things in today’s art world —which is saying a lot.

This is not meant to discourage you from going. Go, by all means. Pick a quiet weekday, a time most conducive to it unique, Alice-in-Wonderland experience.

This place is all about small surprises, about following curious little paths that lead into tiny bamboo forests or hedge-enclosed rooms, of mysterious courtyards and ancient-looking walls. It’s about charming, sun-dappled tables nestled in around the willows that edge a quiet lake. It’s about fanciful bronze animals and portentous, Stonehenge-like columns. It’s about lotus ponds and gazebos with watchtowers. It’s about coming around a bend and scratching your head with disbelief as you find yourself in the middle of Renoir’s “The Luncheon of the Boating Party.”

It’s not at all like visiting the 500-acre Storm King Art Center in New York, where the emphasis is on monumental, welded-steel abstractions and the way they play against sky and mountains. Storm King is about modernist purity. Grounds for Sculpture, formerly the New Jersey State Fairgrounds, has only 22 acres. Contemporary sculpture is the focus, rather than classic modernism. It is much more gardenesque in scale and design — the landscaping is at least half the show here — and more eclectic and eccentric in its tastes.

Temporary exhibits are held in three renovated buildings that once belonged to the fairgrounds. Two date from the Twenties and are handsome structures of yellow stucco, brick, and green wood trim, with colorful ceramic tiles arching over their entrances. The other, more utilitarian building was built in the Forties for 4-H-type shows and has been cleverly transformed into an airy, high-tech exhibition hall.

There and in the Domestic Arts Building are where you’ll find the 10th Anniversary Invitational exhibit. One of my favorites among the 20 artists here is Dana Stewart, who sculpts imaginary animals, such as “Boomer,” a prehistoric wolf with a Brontosaurus tail.

John Newman is best known at Grounds for Sculpture for “Skyhook,” a 25-foot-high S-shaped wire-mesh construction, partially filled with stone, that is one of the first pieces you see on setting out. On view here is “Gone Awry”: a cartoonish length of segmented duct. Spewing out of one end is a braided steel cable that spills onto the floor in a tangle, while, out of the other is a pinkish, organic probe of seemingly alien origin.

A rising star here is James Dinerstein, whose “Sky-gatherer” is pigmented pink cement with the soft look of clay. It is a nest of biomorphic flap-like forms that suggest such things as a human ear, a whale’s tail, and a shark’s fin.

Beverly Pepper’s “Hera Triad” and “Demeter Fragment” are both bronzes, but bronzes with a patina that makes them look like stone, a trick favored by contemporary sculptors. As the titles from Greek mythology suggest, these rock-like columns might have been people turned to stone by some whim of the gods.

One of the more flamboyant pieces is Robert Ressler’s “On Fertile Ground,” a giant green snake coiled around a tree trunk and holding a blue egg up to the sky in its fork-tongued mouth. The wall text explains that this piece was made from the trunk of a rare tree, a blue atlas cedar that was given to New York City by the emperor of Japan for the 1964 World’s Fair. It was accidentally destroyed during the expansion of the Tennis Center and has been reincarnated in this form.

Of the 183 pieces found on the grounds, 13 are by Johnson, all in the vein of impressionist knockoffs.

There is “Dejeuner Déjà Vu,” which is based on the famous Manet “Dejeuner Sur L’Herbe,” a portrait of two fully dressed men having a picnic with a nude woman. Or, “Lakeside Table #1,” in which he has sculpted an entire table setting: plates, bottle of bordeaux, wine-filled glasses — even a bowl of escargots.

His latest, “Were You Invited?,” is based upon “The Luncheon of the Boating Party,” one of Renoir’s most celebrated multifigure compositions. Johnson’s treatment allows for visitors to mingle with the charmingly inebriated young boating people who sit at a table covered with food and drink. In this one, though, the Puckish sculptor has gone beyond tribute and added another table at the back of the composition, where he has depicted himself with artists Bill Barrett, Red Grooms, and Andrzej Pitynski as party crashers.

And, I almost forgot, one more reason to go: The roses are in bloom, and they’re spectacular.

Hamilton, NJ

2002

 

Whitney Biennial 2002

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The funny thing about the Whitney Biennial is that it operates as if everyone had amnesia. Every two years it exhibits what it describes as “the most important recent work made by American artists.” Usually about a hundred artists are selected. It’s an honor. Whitney Biennials launched the careers of such artists as Edward Hopper, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Milton Avery.

Karin Campbell in “When I Close My Eyes.”

The problem nowadays is that every Biennial brings forth a whole new batch. You have to wonder, what happened to the ones from two years ago? They don’t even make the cut anymore? And that new style that was all the rage– neoconceptualist-appropriationism, or whatever —is likewise a thing of the past, or at least fading fast?

Everyone’s gotten used to this, so it’s hardly mentioned anymore. Everyone recognizes that the Biennial is basically a big fashion show – fickle, full of hype, and prone to shallow shock tactics. The only difference is that in fashion, as in every other field of art and entertainment, there are rules, and also stars who rise or fall from year to year based on the creative risks they take.

But the Biennial is more of an ensemble production, with a new cast every two years. Quick, name your five favorite contemporary American artists, people whose careers you follow with interest, as with a favorite writer, actor, director, or singer. Can’t think of any?

It’s an odd situation. Of course, the art world has always been insular, a small town of artists, curators, dealers, collectors, critics, and art historians. The public doesn’t play much of a part, as it does in literature or film or drama. No Biennial has ever bombed and been forced to close prematurely.

So there really is no such thing as a good Biennial or a bad one, or if there is, there’s no point in saying it, because that’s not what this game is about. The purpose of the Biennial is to tell you that, once again, art has changed. It is not what you thought it was. It has not just changed its content, as do films, books, and drama from year to year. Nor is it simply a matter of changing style, as from, say, realism to expressionism in painting. The changes are more like redefinitions of art.

This tends to make the Biennials sort of critic-proof as well. New things tend to be exempt from criticism, because the aesthetic standards don’t exist yet.

Take, for example, something from the current Biennial, “A Visit With Joseph Cornell,” by two Los Angeles “sound artists” who call themselves Archive. Their art form consists of interviewing deceased artists through seances conducted by professional psychics. Their Biennial artwork is a 10-minute CD based on four of these posthumous interviews that were held at the museum.

Not to complain, but it’s hard to know where to start with something like this. What exactly is it? Since it’s all words, it might fit into some literary category. Or maybe it’s theater. Or a comedy routine. But art? And what about the seance part of it, the alleged spiritualism?

If you put these questions to the artists, they would answer that the questions themselves are the point, that they are engaging issues of interpretation, art history, identity, storytelling, etc., etc. In other words, they themselves are critics, of a sort. Even critics of criticism. Try criticizing that, and you’re into a Calvin and Hobbes routine.

If a lot more artists started talking to the dead, then some critical standards might evolve. You could compare them. Probably there are good seances and bad seances. But the Whitney is too quick on its feet for that. Because novelty, not quality, is what the Biennial is peddling.

Barring some obscenity scandal or censorship controversy that needs explicating, there really is only one critical approach to the Biennial, and that is to ask what’s new this time around? How’s it different from two years ago? And then get busy with the taxonomy, the classifying and naming of these exotic artistic variations, hybrids, and mutants.

So let’s get down to it. This year the buzzwords are performance art, Internet art, installation art, and sound art.

Hmm. First, be suspicious of all art that requires the word “art” in its name. (We don’t say “painting art,” or “sculpture art.”) Consider performance artist Karin Campbell, whose performance art consists of sitting in a gallery with her eyes closed, talking to people. And, oh yeah, she has large cartoonish eyes painted on her closed eyelids. People, of course, want to know why she’s doing that, but by asking and talking to her, they’re falling into her artist trap and becoming part of the performance artwork themselves.

William Pope.L crawling up Broadway in a performance piece for the Whitney Biennial

Another performance artist is William Pope.L (whose middle initial seems to have migrated to the end of his name, and gotten in front of the period). He plans to don a Superman costume, strap a skateboard to his back, and crawl on his belly like a reptile the entire length of Manhattan Island – all 22 miles. Critics—don’t even think about it. Photographers —form a line! Pope.L plans to take a lot of time off during this crawl, with an estimated arrival time at the top of Broadway sometime in 2007. Nice try, Pope.L, but there’s no way you’re going to be in the next two Biennials with that tired act.

Then there are the couple who call themselves Praxis (collaboratives, a vestige of the Sixties, is another buzzword of the 2002 Biennial). Once a week, either at the museum or their East Village studio, they will offer foot washes, hugs, Band-Aid applications (no wound required), and gifts of one-dollar bills (no repeat customers). Notice that it is no longer necessary to actually be in the museum to be in the Biennial. Five of the artworks, in fact, are in Central Park, including a 50-foot-tall steel tree (completely disease-resistant) and a splash-producing device in a pond that tricks passers-by into thinking that something just fell from the sky.

Installation art isn’t new to this Biennial, but this year’s models have more moving parts and more noisemaking capacity. Installation art used to consist of very quiet things, like rooms full of dirt. Now, every other installation has a TV in it, or mechanical arms, or, at the very least, a sound system, making this a very noisy Biennial of murmuring , electronic whirrs and clicks, howling winds, and creepy robotic voices.

Internet and computer art remain hopelessly boring and hard to understand. In a show where the inexplicable is commonplace, the Whitney has felt the need to provide docents at these stations. Their job is to try to explain why, for example, one artist used data visualization software to transform the 200,000-word text of Mark Twain’s “Innocents Abroad” into a dynamic spherical web of lines and words.

But by far the most stunning innovation at this year’s Biennial is the addition of “sound art.” You feel your way into pitch-black galleries and then you listen as weird and scary sounds whirl around you. Nothing to look at at all. It takes real courage for a visual arts museum to mount exhibits that have absolutely no visual content.

Of course, by now there should be no mystery as to why there are so few repeats at Whitney Biennials and absolutely no stars. The artists can’t keep up. Oh, you’re still making visible art? Sorry, this isn’t your year. Then again, there’s something sort of democratic about it, everyone getting their 15 minutes of fame and all, not to mention the even more democratic, anti-elitist conviction that there is no idea too vague or convoluted, no object or non-object, nothing in fact, that can’t be considered art.

 

 

Star Wars at the Brooklyn Museum

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Star Wars at the Brooklyn Museum

I should have realized it was no ordinary art event when a museum publicist yanked me away from the Princess Leia display so that a television crew would have a clear shot.

Welcome to “Star Wars: The Magic of Myth” at the Brooklyn Museum—no ordinary art event to be sure. This is the show that drew more than a million visitors at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington. So, you can sort of understand the museum’s point of view. Who wants a bunch of critics rubbing their chins when the point is to get out the visual message that Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker are in town?

Actually, only their costumes are in town.

The Brooklyn Museum keeps trying to be just a little hipper than the other art institutions. A few years ago, it mounted an exhibit on obscenity, the purpose of which was to examine the, uh, “art history issues” surrounding art labeled obscene. The lines to get into this one backed up to Grand Army Plaza. Then there was the sensation over “Sensation,” with its elephant dung and its sliced-up pigs. Another big hit. And Jesus as a nude black woman a little while ago.

And now, Jabba the Hutt and Obi-Wan Kenobi.

I know, I know. What’s so wrong with an exhibit that kids and the average moviegoer can relate to? Does everything in a museum have to be high culture? Lighten up, why don’t you?

But there’s a point in this exhibit—about two minutes into it—where you feel that this is really just a pretend exhibit. Its true identity is an extended Hollywood promotion. The show’s run in Brooklyn coincides with the release May 16 of the latest “Star Wars” movie, “Episode II: Attack of the Clones.” You don’t want to be in the way when that publicity machine revs up.

Of course, this is not supposed to be just some memorabilia exhibit. This show is about “myth,” and “archetypes,” and “the human unconscious.” The Brooklyn Museum has even gathered up a batch of its own artifacts, including a marble head of Cleopatra, an African mask, a Polynesian club, and a Rembrandt etching of Faust to show the art history continuum that runs from ancient Egypt through the European Baroque to George Lucas.

There are two mythologies here. One is the mythology within the movie, all that Joseph Campbell “Hero-With-a-Thousand-Faces” business, in which Luke Skywalker is found to be a sci-fi version of Prometheus, King Arthur, and Beowulf all wrapped into one (not to mention Moses, Jesus, Buddha, and Mohammed). The other mythology is the impression the show gives that all these Jungian archetypes percolated up into the “Star Wars” saga in the same way they did in the ancient stories.

In fact, Lucas used Campbell’s studies of mythology as an instruction manual, a template for the “Star Wars” saga, methodically hitting on every stage of the hero’s quest, from “The Call to Adventure” to “The Labyrinth” and the “Rescue of the Princess.” In the system of Jungian archetypes, Darth Vader is “the Shadow,” Yoda is the “Wise Guide,” Han Solo is the “Hero Partner,” and Princess Leia is the damsel in distress (although feistier than most fairy-tale princesses).

Finding myth in “Star Wars” is like shooting fish in a barrel. No system has been neglected: Zoroastrianism, Greek and Roman mythology, Arthurian legend, Egyptian, Navaho, Norse, biblical—you name it. One, maybe two mythical strands suffice for most works of art. In “Star Wars,” Lucas strings together myths the way he strung together oldies in “American Graffiti.”

But the costumes and the film clips are fun, right?

Well, truth be told, Darth Vader and the Imperial Stormtroopers look much more impressive on film. Detached from all the supporting special effects, the empty costumes look like something you might rent at Ken’s Magic Shop, although it’s interesting to learn where some of the design ideas came from. Vader’s headgear combines World War II German army helmets with those worn by medieval samurai. Han Solo, with his vest and his holster, is none other than the American cowboy.

The 25-minute film about the making of the movies looks like something from an Academy Awards tribute. And it’s a little difficult, after Mel Brooks’ “Spaceballs,” to listen to actors reverently invoking the great moment in the beginning of the first movie when a spaceship the size of Rhode Island passes overhead.

In reality, those gargantuan spacecrafts fit quite comfortably inside a museum case. And what a variety of souped-up space jalopies there are: the Imperial Star Destroyer, the Millennium Falcon, the Rebel X-Wing Fighter. They remind me of the plastic models of battleships and bombers I used to make as a kid. Despite their futuristic inventiveness, they have that heavy, dented-up, scorched, World War II rusted steel aesthetic that Lucas liked.

Their construction is amazingly detailed, and yet, like the old plastic models, you can see how sections are made from sheets of plastic on which the hardware—pipes, coils, hatches, transformers—and all the rest of that cool stuff—have been stamped right on. And someone has had a little in-joke on the Millennium Falcon, where, if you look very closely, you can see a tiny decal that advertises a popular spark plug.

There are modest diversions to be found in the concept drawings that show how various characters evolved. In Ralph McQuarrie’s drawings of Yoda, for example, the diminutive green guru originally had a much different demeanor, less cutesy, more reptilian. The Yoda alcove in the exhibit, by the way, is named “The Sacred Grove” because it explains another mythic motif, the forest enclosure, a place where magical transformations take place and a symbol of the unconscious mind.

And so, on we go, into the “Belly of the Beast,” through the “Father Quest,” and down the “Path to Atonement,” until we come to the final path and the end of our journey at—where else?— the mother of all gift shops.

 

The Brooklyn Museum

2002

 

Peter Homitzky

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Artists have been chronicling the changing American landscape for several hundred years. Early Hudson River School painters such as Thomas Cole were as fascinated with the rugged North American wilderness as with the efforts of settlers and farmers to tame it. George Inness, noting the way industry was transforming countryside, inserted tiny smoking locomotives into otherwise pastoral vistas.

Today, Inness’ single railroad track has given way to 16-lane highways, gigantic industrial developments, malls, and so on. In some places – stretches of the New Jersey Turnpike, for example – industrialization is so entrenched it no longer seems like an intrusion so much as a visual phenomenon in its own right.

“Industrial Landscape” by Peter Homitzky.

Peter Homitzky is a Hoboken artist who has spent much of the past 30 years painting the Meadowlands and the surrounding industrial scenes. He brings to these subjects the same devotion that Monet lavished on his haystacks and Cézanne on his Mont Saint-Victoire. What he finds there is much more subtle and interesting than a critique of land use policies. Homitzky’s stuff from the Seventies looks like 1930s precisionism – clean, geometric forms stripped of detail. A stack of oil drums on a loading dock look like children’s toys, displaying their circular tops in bright, primary colors; likewise, the shipping containers at Port Elizabeth, scattered like chunky sticks of colored chalk.

Of course you might ask, where’s the dirt, the grime? Should industrial stuff look this pretty? But this turns out to be Homitzky’s game, to find the beauty and grandeur in bleak and degraded places. He often overstates his case: views of bright green sedge grass and jagged pools of blue water, skies that are always in the throes of a garish sunset, the soft contours of landfill mesas in the hazy distance. When Homitzky paints conventionally beautiful places, such as the fall colors along the Northway or a ski lift going up a humpbacked mountain, the colors seem to be trying less hard.

In one group of paintings, Homitzky takes a bird’s-eye view of sprawling development – an oil refinery, power station, tract housing. He wants to show you the full extent of it, which he can do only by getting up above, and then painting it, building after building, storage tank after storage tank, until we’re made aware of what a mad process is taking place. There’s an aesthetic risk here, because the obsessiveness in the subject can easily be read for obsessiveness on the part of the artist. The same thing applies to a painting of Manhattan Island, in which it looks as if the artist has vowed to paint every single building from 57th street down to the Battery.

“Farm Panorama” by Peter Homitzky.

Homitzky can be a very satisfying painter when he brings it all together, as in “Twin Peaks Turnaround,” which looks like a scene from Northern California. As in all his works, it plays off the natural and the manmade world. The view is from the top of a hill. To the left is a dark stand of fir trees. A highway curves to the right, drops off the bottom of the painting. In the distance, a city sprawls across a valley floor, more hills, the ocean, an orange suspension bridge. In the middle ground is a circular pool, some sort of water treatment pool it looks like, the water a dark, dark blue. The various elements of the composition fit together like precision carpentry, but the key to the painting’s mood of mystery is the play of dark and light passages.

Another great one is “Snake Hill Walker,” a view across the Meadowlands to the New Jersey Turnpike and that rocky promontory, Snake Hill, that rises incongruously from the swamps. From this vantage point you can see its blasted-out center, quarried over the past hundred years for construction fill. I searched the painting in vain for the title’s walker, and finally decided that it must be the artist himself. Not too many people walk around in the Meadowlands, considered one of the most degraded landscapes in the world. Through the painter’s eyes, you discover something – if not beautiful – then sublime.

Jersey City

2002

Mexico City

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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