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Mexico:
identidad y ruptura
Foundation
Telephonic opens its exhibit season with a closer look at current
Mexican art. The ten participating artists represent various styles
and tendencies, while each of them seeks identity through diversity
and through a rupture with the past.
The collection,
Mexico: Identity and Rupture, organized by Maria Lluïsa
Borrás, is a significant representation of new Mexican art.
It brings together ten artists who are natives of Mexico City, for
the most part, except for Glassford, Santiago and Suter. They all
belong to a generation which seeks a radical divergence. In fact,
they reject the formation of groups and each represents distinct
tendencies and options.
Laura
Anderson Barbata, Monica Castillo, Thomas Glassford, Maya Goded,
Yolanda Gutiérrez, Yishai Jusidam, Victor Pimstein, Paula
Santiago, Gerardo Suter and Boris Viskin are all artists who promote
alternative plastic art. Indeed, they have contributed significantly
to the innovations within the recent art scene in Mexico.
The
artistic options they have chosen are not uniform, but rather,
extremely diverse, whether considering the languages used or the
media relied upon. The artists have used the most widely diverse
materials and have entered into various genres, from painting, to
ecology, to photography, to electrostatic prints, to
installations.
INNOVATIONS IN MEXICAN ART
According to Ms. Borrás, the exhibit’s organizer,
this generation of artists began to look for an answer to the cheap
and artificial exoticism so successfully exported to large art
events, such as ARCO. Instead, they proposed alternative art in which
they experimented with the concepts of identity and memory.
Borrás sees them as concerned with issues such as which
identity should be constructed, how to achieve radical changes, or
just which ruptures they should bring about.
The
official image that is often given of Mexico is not the real one.
Mexico City alone is an example of the contradictions: A city of
eighteen million inhabitants who live with great disparities in
economic status and quality of life. The responses provided by these
artists were myriad, given that their aesthetic interests were not
alike.
THE INFLUENCE OF FOREIGN ART AND ALTERNATIVE
GALLERIES
Borrás continues: "Another factor to consider is
the invigorating interchange that occurred with the arrival of
certain foreign artists to Mexico". These artists came from New
York, Los Angeles, London, Paris and Madrid, and they began to make
art in Mexico. Specifically, those artists causing the greatest
impact were Francis Alÿs, from Belgium, José Bedia, from
Cuba, Santiago Sierra, from Spain, and the Brits, Thomas Glassford
and Melanie Smith.
At
the time, young artists who were starting off in the art scene of
their native country were Monica Castillo, Silvia Gruner and Gabriel
Orozco, to name a few. Borrás explains that the foreign
artists brought a new perspective to the Mexican scene, due to the
differences in their art training; However, "both groups of
artists were united in the sense that they were non-mainstream or
outsiders, their art was met with indifference, and they rejected the
cultural infrastructure of market-oriented extreme nationalism. This
nationalistic force was blind to the diverse subcultures and eclectic
practices of those outside of the mainstream, such as these very
young artists, who used the alternative media of video, installation
and performance."
They
quickly developed their own meeting places and work spaces in
warehouses, garages and shops, where they also exhibited their work
to the public. They organized parties and concerts, like "La
Panadería", which was held on the ground floor of an old
bakery with huge windows, located on a pedestrian corner of the
Condesa Hippodrome Colony. This attracted a young crowd that
didn’t usually frequent art galleries.
FROM OUTSIDERS TO CENTER STAGE
Today, that outsider nature of these young artists has become
a new cultural heritage in Mexico. Borrás believes that
"in the origins of this tremendously solid work we can find the
western art of our day."
Borrás explains that this original work is defined by
its diversity, "by its cosmopolitan nature and by its
reflections on the challenges, tensions and dilemmas between
individualism and globalization, between memory and breaking away
from it." On a similar note, the exhibit includes some of the
artists who took part in the strongly international traveling
exhibit, "Punto de Partida" (Starting Point), in 1997,
which traveled to the U.S. states of Ohio, Texas, Pennsylvania, and
North Carolina: artists Monica Castillo, Yishai Jusidman, Gerardo
Suter, and Boris Viskin.
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