New Tendencies in Mexican Art: The 1990s (New Directions in Latino American Culture)

NEW TENDENCIES IN MEXICAN ART THE

1990S

Rubén Gallo

for Terence Gower

New Directions in Latino American Cultures A SERIES EDITED BY LICIA FIOL-MATTA & JOSé QUIROGA Published in 2004 New Tendencies in Mexican Art, by Rubén Gallo Jose Martí: An Introduction, by Oscar Montero Published in 2003 Bilingual Games: Some Literary Investigations, edited by Doris Sommer Tongue Ties: Logo-Eroticism in Anglo-Hispanic Literature, by Gustavo Perez-Firmat Velvet Barrios: Popular Culture & Chicana/o Sexualities, edited by Alicia Gaspar de Alba, with a foreword by Tomás Ybarra Frausto The Famous 41: Sexuality and Social Control in Mexico, 1901, edited by Robert McKee Irwin, Edward J. McCaughan, and Michele Rocío Nasser New York Ricans from the Hip Hop Zone, by Raquel Rivera Forthcoming Titles None of the Above: Contemporary Puerto Rican Cultures and Politics, edited by Frances Negrón-Muntaner The Letter of Violence: Essays on Narrative and Theory, by Idelber Avelar The Masters and the Slaves: Plantation Relations and Mestizaje in American Imaginaries, edited by Alexandra Isfahani-Hammond

NEW TENDENCIES IN MEXICAN ART Copyright © Rubén Gallo, 2004. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published 2004 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS. Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 1–4039-6101–8 hardback ISBN 1–4039-6100-X paperback Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available from the Library of Congress A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Autobookcomp. First edition: August 2004 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

Contents List of Illustrations

vi

Acknowledgements

viii

Introduction: Tendencies

1

Chapter One: Orientalism

19

Chapter Two: Voyeurism

47

Chapter Three: Radiophonism

71

Chapter Four: Urbanism

91

Chapter Five: Institutionalism

135

Notes

160

Works Cited

173

Index

178

List of Illustrations Figure 1: Fernanda Brunet, Heroínas (1996). Figure 2: Yishai Jusidman, Sumo VII (1995). Figure 3: Eduardo Abaroa, Vicisitudes iniciáticas [initiatiaton vicissitudes] (1996). Figure 4: Pablo Vargas Lugo, Finale (1998). Figure 5: Pablo Vargas Lugo, Rising Sun (1996). Figure 6: Daniela Rossell, Pecados (1996). Figure 7: Daniela Rossell, Pecados (1996). Figure 8: Edgar Orlaineta, My Melody (1998). Figure 9: Julio Galán, China poblana (1987). Figure 10: Yishai Jusidman, Geishas al descubierto [geisha uncovered] (1992). Figure 11: Daniela Rossell, Untitled, from the series Ricas y famosas (1994–2001). Figure 12: Daniela Rossell, Untitled, from the series Ricas y famosas (1994–2001). Figure 13: Daniela Rossell, Untitled [Paulina Díaz Ordaz], from the series Ricas y famosas (1994–2001). Figure 14: Daniela Rossell, Untitled [Paulina Díaz Ordaz with Salinas Painting], from the series Ricas y famosas (1994–2001). Figure 15: Daniela Rossell, Untitled [Wendy and Zapata], from the series Ricas y famosas (1994–2001). Figure 16: Daniela Rossell, Untitled [Banuet and Zapata], from the series Ricas y famosas (1994–2001). Figure 17: Daniela Rossell, Untitled [Siqueiros], from the series Ricas y famosas (1994–2001). Figure 18: Daniela Rossell, Untitled [Empache cristiano / Christian Gorging], from the series Ricas y famosas (1994–2001). Figure 19: Francis Alÿs, from the series Ambulantes I (1995–2001). Figure 20: Francis Alÿs, from the series Ambulantes I (1995–2001). Figure 21: Francis Alÿs, from the series Ambulantes I (1995–2001). Figure 22: Francis Alÿs, from the series Ambulantes I (1995–2001). Figure 23: Francis Alÿs, The Collector (1991–92). Figure 24: Mejor Vida Corporation webpage (www.irational.org/mvc). Figure 25: Minerva Cuevas cleaning the Mexico City Metro—a free service provided by Mejor Vida Corporation. Figure 26: Mejor Vida Corporation, student identification card. Figure 27: Santiago Sierra, Pedestrian Bridge Obstructed with Wrapping Tape (1996).

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Figure 28: Santiago Sierra, Obstruction of a Freeway with a Trailer Truck (1998). Figure 29: Francis Alÿs, Turista (1996). Figure 30: Santiago Sierra, Wall of a Gallery Torn Out, Tilted at an Angle of Sixty Degrees, and Supported by 5 People (2000). Figure 31: Teresa Margolles, Tongue (2000). Figure 32: Teresa Margolles, Cards for Cutting Cocaine (1998). Figure 33: Teresa Margolles, Cards for Cutting Cocaine (1998). Figure 34: Teresa Margolles, Dermis (1995). Figure 35: Jonathan Hernández, from the series Credencial Sordumudos (1995). Figure 36: Jonathan Hernández, from the series Credencial Sordumudos (1995). Figure 37: Museo Salinas, installation view (1996). Figure 38: Museo Salinas, installation view (1996). Figure 39: Salinas-Chupacabra rubber mask, Museo Salinas (1996). Figure 40: Street kid in Mexico City wearing a Salinas-Chupacabra mask (1996). Figure 41: ‘‘Chupa-Mex’’ and ‘‘Chupacabras’’ tattoos, Museo Salinas (1996). Figure 42: Luis Felguérez, Carlos Salinas as Fantasia’s Sorcerer, Collection Museo Salinas (1996). Figure 43: Aurora Boreal, Self Portrait (1995). Figure 44: Gustavo Prado, Museo del Prado, corner with the souls of Purgatory (1999). Figure 45: Museo del Prado, Aurora Boreal’s coffin (1999). Figure 46: Museo del Prado, detail (1999). Figure 47: Museo del Prado, installation view with Pornografía Infantil on the back wall (2000). Figure 48: Miguel Calderón, from the series Artificial History (1995). Figure 49: Miguel Calderón, from the series Employee of the Month (1998). Figure 50: Miguel Calderón, from the series Employee of the Month (1998).

Acknowledgements I would like to express my gratitude to Princeton’s University Committee on Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences and to the Office of the Dean of the Faculty for awarding me a generous research grant that allowed me to complete New Tendencies in Mexican Art. I thank Professor Angel Loureiro, chair of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Cultures at Princeton, for his support of the project and for creating an extremely collegial and intellectually stimulating work environment. I wish to express my gratitude to Jean Franco and Ken Lum, who graciously read an earlier version of this manuscript and offered insightful suggestions. I am also grateful to Licia Fiol-Mata and José Quiroga, editors of the New Directions in Latino American Cultures series at Palgrave, for selecting this book for publication. I thank Gabriella Pearce, my editor at Palgrave, for her patience and skill in seeing this book through completion, and Gayatri Patnaik for encouraging me to write a book about recent Mexican art. Thanks also to Elyse Kovalsky, who proofread the manuscript and offered numerous stylistic suggestions. In Mexico City, many artists and critics were kind enough to meet with me and discuss their work. I am grateful to Eduardo Abaroa, Pablo Vargas Lugo, Teresa Margolles, and Taniel Morales, who also provided me with invaluable recordings of his radio programs. I thank Daniella Rossell for discussing Ricas y famosas and answering numerous queries by e-mail and telephone. Patricia Martín, curator of La Colección Jumex, helped secure images and permits. Gustavo Prado and Miguel Calderón were kind enough to discuss their work and their vision of Mexico City museums. Finally, I would like to acknowledge Terence Gower, who has shared his encyclopedic knowledge of art in countless conversations. His insights have shaped my own understanding of art, Mexican and otherwise. To him I dedicate this book.

I

NTRODUCTION

T ENDENCIES

The decade of the 1990s was one of the most turbulent periods in recent Mexican history, marked by political assassinations, the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, the signing of NAFTA, a catastrophic economic crisis, and the defeat of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), after 70 years of one-party rule. How did art respond to these events? To answer this question, we will examine some of the most radical artistic experiments produced in this period, from Daniela Rossell’s photographs of Mexican millionaires to Teresa Margolles’s manipulations of human remains, from Santiago Sierra’s exploitation of manual laborers to Vicente Razo’s creation of a museum devoted to Carlos Salinas, the disgraced ex-president. Though critics have argued that Mexican art of the 1990s is for the most part apolitical and obsessed with formalist concerns, I will show that many of these works establish a fascinating dialogue with the traumatic events that defined the history of this last decade of the twentieth century. Many of these works go beyond traditional forms of representation: They do not merely portray recent history but they stage events that aspire to become historical in their own right and alter the course of politics or the economy. Minerva Cuevas, for example, launched Mejor Vida Corporation, an art project that is also a real corporation devoted to identifying and solving the problems affecting Mexico City’s poorest residents. But before launching into a discussion of these radical experiments in art making, let us review some of the most significant events that marked Mexican history of the 1990s. The decade of the 1990s was the most tumultuous in Mexican history since the Revolution ended in 1920. It was a period marked by social upheaval, political intrigues, bitter power struggles, and a string of highprofile assassinations. This was a decade of rapid and radical changes that brought the way of life that Mexicans had known for most of the century to an abrupt end.1

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The changes began in the summer of 1988, when Carlos Salinas de Gortari was elected president after a bitterly contested election: As ballots were being counted and Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, Salinas’s opponent and a son of the revered president Lázaro Cárdenas, was taking the lead, the computer system that was tallying the votes mysteriously crashed. Days later it was announced that Salinas had won, albeit by a tiny margin: He received a mere 50.36 percent of the ballots, which was unprecedented for a PRI candidate (especially when compared to the two previous presidential candidates: José López Portillo won nearly 100 percent of the ballots in 1976 and Miguel de la Madrid won 72 percent in 1982). Salinas took office on December 1, 1988, amid widespread allegations of fraud and electoral irregularities. Salinas, a Harvard-trained economist, abandoned the PRI’s traditional socialist platform—economic protectionism, generous social spending, and government control of industry and finance—and instituted a series of neoliberal reforms designed to modernize the economy: He privatized thousands of state-owned companies, including Teléfonos de México, the telephone company (bought by Carlos Slim Helú, a businessman who soon became the richest man in Latin America and, according to Forbes magazine, the twenty-fifth wealthiest and tenth most powerful billionaire in the world),2 and the banking system, which a previous president, Luis Echeverría, had nationalized in 1976. Salinas also amended the constitution’s articles on land ownership and religion: He repealed the ejido system of communally owned farmland established after the Revolution, and he lifted restrictions that kept the Church from owning property and its officials from voting or wearing religious garb in public. In 1992, Salinas signed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with the governments of the United States and Canada. This treaty marked the most radical reversal of the PRI’s traditional stance on economic and foreign policy. NAFTA drastically reduced customs duties on foreign goods, unleashing an avalanche of cheap imports that ruined thousands of local manufacturers who were ill prepared to compete against foreign rivals after decades of protectionism. One example: from the 1950s to the late 1980s, the Guadalajara-based Fábricas del Calzado Canadá, owned by the López Rocha family, was one of the country’s largest shoe manufacturers, with hundreds of stores in every city. Aurelio López Rocha, one of the company’s officials, was one of the richest men in Mexico, and the owner of one of the country’s most important contemporary art collections. After NAFTA went in effect, the local marked was flooded with imported shoes; Calzado Canadá could not compete against the bargain-priced, mass-produced imports, and the company, along with

I NTRODUCTION

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hundreds of smaller shoe manufacturers, declared bankruptcy in 1995 and was eventually bought by a foreign investor. The free trade agreement’s effects on international relations were equally drastic. Historically, Mexico’s foreign policy was fiercely autonomous from the United States: Many of the Mexican government’s actions, including support for Castro’s Cuba and Nicaragua’s Sandinista government, were in open defiance of the American stance. This changed during Salinas’s presidency: The main goals of Mexico’s foreign policy became to promote free trade and attract foreign investment, and disagreements with Washington in matters of internal or external affairs were now feared as disruptions that would cause market volatility. Salinas’s reforms were extremely unpopular, even within the ranks of his own party. After the signing of NAFTA, a power struggle broke out between older party members committed, at least rhetorically, to the PRI’s ‘‘revolutionary’’ mandate, and the younger technocrats who favored neoliberal reforms. Salinas and his followers dismissed the old guard as ‘‘dinosaurs,’’ old fogeys who were behind the times, while senior party members derided reform-minded newcomers as unpatriotic and proAmerican. The rift between the two factions widened, and the conflict came to a head with a string of high-profile and still unresolved assassinations.3 In May 1993, Cardinal Posadas, the archbishop of Guadalajara, was gunned down as he was leaving his car to board a plane at the Mexico City airport. After an investigation that dragged on for years, the special prosecutor appointed by Salinas reached an unlikely hypothesis: a gang of traffickers, he suggested, had mistaken the archbishop for a rival drug lord. No one had really meant to kill the archbishop, and the poor man just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. Church officials were unconvinced: It was hard to imagine, they argued, that a 60-year-old priest wearing a black frock and a large crucifix on his chest could be mistaken for a Mafioso. The crime was never solved, but many believe that Salinas played a hand in the killing: In the weeks before his death, the archbishop had met with the Arellano Félix brothers, the country’s most notorious drug traffickers, as well as with Salinas. Church officials have suggested that the ex-president felt threatened because the archbishop had proof that Salinas was involved in the drug trade.4 The Posadas assassination was just the beginning of a wave of violence that would shatter the peace and stability Mexico had enjoyed for several decades. On January 1, 1994, the day NAFTA took effect, an armed insurrection exploded in the southern state of Chiapas, one of the poorest in the nation. Led by Subcomandante Marcos, a group of self-proclaimed Zapatistas rose against the central government, demanding Salinas’s

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resignation, the cancellation of the free trade agreement, and improved living conditions for the country’s Indians. Though the fighting lasted only a few hours (the Zapatistas quickly declared a cease-fire and turned their offensive into a media blitz, using the Internet to dart off hundreds of eloquent declarations to an attentive audience of local and foreign journalists), Mexico was now technically in a civil war and the last year of Salinas’s presidency had been irremediably tarnished. (Though negotiations dragged on for years, a peace agreement was never signed. Gradually the Zapatistas evolved into a peaceful advocacy group for Indian rights).5 Back in Mexico City, the conflict between the PRI’s dinosaurs and the technocrats culminated with the assassinations of three high-ranking party officials. In March, Luis Donaldo Colosio, the PRI’s presidential candidate (and, given the workings of Mexican politics, the de facto presidentelect), was shot to death during a campaign rally in the border city of Tijuana. The crime was never solved, but from the beginning many Mexicans suspected Salinas: It was rumored that Colosio had broken with the president and planned to reverse many of the recent neoliberal reforms to engage in a more compassionate social welfare program. Six months after the Colosio murder, the PRI’s secretary general, José Francisco Ruiz Massieu, a man who was once married to a sister of Carlos Salinas, was gunned down as he was leaving his office in downtown Mexico City. The gunman was caught, and he revealed that he had been hired by Manuel Muñoz Rocha, a minor PRI official who vanished the day after the murder and has never been found.6 On December 1, 1994, Salinas handed the country over to his successor, another ivy league–educated technocrat, Ernesto Zedillo. Zedillo inherited a country still shaken by the Chiapas uprising and the political killings. The economy was under enormous pressure: Foreign investors had been fleeing the Mexican stock market as if it were a sinking ship, and the country’s foreign reserves fell from a high of 29 billion dollars in March 1994 to 5.8 billon by the end of 1994.7 Zedillo decided to devalue the Mexican peso, which lost over fifty percent of its value almost overnight, plunging the country into the worst economic crisis of the century: Inflation and interest rates skyrocketed, borrowers defaulted on their loans, businesses went bankrupt, the banking system nearly collapsed, and millions lost their jobs. Under pressure from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Zedillo drastically reduced government spending and cut social programs, a move that compounded the crisis’s disastrous effects on poor Mexicans. Violent crime soared, and Mexico—especially the capital—became one of the most dangerous places in the world, attaining a rate of kidnappings second only to Colombia.

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As Mexicans’ fortunes plummeted, their resentment against Salinas mounted. Many demanded that the ex-president be tried for treason and corruption (Jesusa Rodríguez, who runs a Brechtian cabaret in Coyoacán, staged a play titled Juicio a Salinas [Salinas on trial]), and t-shirts and toys depicting Salinas as prison inmate, devil, or vampire became best-selling items on Mexican markets and street stalls. As Carlos Monsiváis has written, ‘‘In terms of public ridicule, 1995 was the year of Salinas . . . And the endless representations of Salinas not only sought to stigmatize a much-hated politician, but also to turn him into a living emblem of the PRI.’’8 Faced with such generalized hatred, Salinas left Mexico in disgrace and would not return from his self-imposed exile until 2000. In 1995, at the peak of anti-Salinas sentiment, the ex-president’s older brother, Raúl Salinas, was arrested and accused of masterminding the Ruiz Massieu murder. Shortly afterward, his wife, Paulina Castañón, was detained in Switzerland as she attempted to withdraw funds from an account holding 84 million dollars.9 Though the evidence against him was inconclusive, he was sentenced to 50 years in prison, the longest term under Mexican law. In a curious twist, life behind bars brought out Raúl Salinas’s creative side: He turned to writing erotic poetry and painting colorful, naïve portraits of his family (one was photographed by Daniela Rossell [see Figure 14] and will be discussed in chapter two). Zedillo’s six-year term, though much calmer than his predecessor’s, was marked by an increase in violent crime and student unrest. His presidency saw the longest student strike in the history of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), one of the world’s largest public universities, with over 250,000 students. For almost ten months, from April 1999 to January 2000, classes were suspended and the campus was occupied by a group of students belonging to the ‘‘Comité de Huelga’’ or ‘‘strike committee.’’ The conflict ended when President Zedillo sent an elite army force to evict the students—an operation that unfolded peacefully but raised the specters of the 1968 student massacre ordered by President Díaz Ordaz. During his presidency, Zedillo introduced a number of reforms to strengthen democracy in Mexico. He curbed the executive’s powers, which had been almost unlimited in the past (a popular joke captured the situation: ‘‘¿Qué horas son?’’ [‘‘What time is it?’’] asks the president, ‘‘Las que usted quiera, Señor Presidente’’ [‘‘Whatever time you desire, Mr. President,’’] responds an obsequious assistant). Zedillo changed the law so that the mayor of Mexico City, one of the most powerful figures in government, would be elected instead of appointed. In 1997 Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, Salinas’s opponent in the 1988 elections, became the city’s first elected mayor. Cárdenas was the PRD’s candidate, and for the first time in

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Mexican history, the president and the mayor of Mexico City belonged to different parties. Zedillo also strengthened the powers of the Federal Electorate Institute (IFE), an independent body, to reform the voting process and oversee the fairness of state and federal elections. Ironically, Zedillo’s reforms worked so well that they led to the defeat of his own party in the 2000 elections, the fairest and smoothest in the country’s history. After winning every election since 1929, the PRI lost to the National Action Party (PAN), a right-of-center party, in 2000. The victorious candidate was Vicente Fox, a rancher and entrepreneur from the state of Guanajuato who once headed Coca Cola’s Mexican operations. When the election results were announced on July 6, 2000, tens of thousands of people flocked to the streets to celebrate the beginning of a new era. The enthusiasm and excitement on the streets of Mexico City recalled Prague on the wake of the Velvet Revolution. But once Fox took office on December 1, the honeymoon period did not last long: In a situation that paralleled the experience of Eastern Europe’s transition to democracy in the early 1990s, the Mexican people’s unbridled optimism soon gave way to exasperation when change did not come fast enough. Fox began his presidency with an ambitious plan to reform the economy, overhaul the tax system, and amend the constitution, but he failed to get most of his proposals approved by Congress, where the PRI continued to have a majority. Voters became increasingly disappointed with Fox and with the slow pace of reforms, and the president’s approval ratings plummeted. Ironically, the president would have been able to pass his reforms more expediently under the old PRI system, based on the rule of an all-powerful president. Bipartisan rivalry and political impasses were vexing aspects of democracy—a concept that sounded so positive and desirable in the abstract—that few Mexicans anticipated. With the defeat of the PRI, a long chapter in the modern history of Mexico came to an end. In retrospect we can see that the decade of the 1990s was one of transition, a period in which the old system—which the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa once called ‘‘the perfect dictatorship’’—gradually came apart at the seams: The assassinations and political intrigues were the most visible symptoms of this unraveling. In 2000 a party and a way of life that Mexicans had known for most of the twentieth century suddenly vanished. How did artists respond to the traumatic events that marked the decade of the 1990s? One would expect art produced in this period to reflect the turbulence, chaos, and social unrest of a country on the brink of collapse. One would expect an art full of references to political intrigue, Chiapas,

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the Zapatistas, the PRI’s unraveling. One would expect an engaged art, done with a sense of urgency. The reality, however, is more complicated. Most art produced during Salinas’s presidency was entirely apolitical. The first years of his term saw the rise of a young generation of painters who became known as ‘‘neo-Mexicanists’’ and included figures like Julio Galán, Nahúm Zenil, and Dulce María Núñez. They painted huge canvases filled with every conceivable symbol of Mexicanness: exotic fruits, flags, charros, sarapes, Guadalupes, and bleeding hearts (The Bleeding Heart was the title of the most important exhibition of this period, curated by Olivier Debroise in 1991).10 Julio Galán’s China poblana (1987, Figure 9), a painting of a Mexican woman dressed in folkloric garb, is one of the most accomplished—and most representative—works of this period. But the Mexico explored by these painters was a mythical construct, a timeless universe filled with pyramids, Mayan glyphs, and religious symbols, and not a reflection of the Mexican reality of the 1990s, with its uprisings, assassinations, and social unrest. Neo-Mexicanism was, to use a term coined by the art critic Hal Foster, an ‘‘art of simulacrum’’: one filled with empty images that, despite their allegedly nationalistic content, did not point to the historical context in which they were produced.11 It is no wonder that these paintings met with great commercial success, locally and abroad: They presented a palatable image of Mexico as a colorful, festive country filled with age-old traditions and untouched by the complex troubles of present-day life. In 1993, a new generation arrived on the scene. A number of foreign artists, including Francis Alÿs and Melanie Smith, moved to a crumbling building on Calle Licenciado Verdad, a few blocks away from Mexico City’s central square, and turned the building into an improvised art center to discuss ideas and show work.12 Following the foreigners’ lead, a group of Mexican art students in their early twenties opened an exhibition space in a dilapidated mansion: They called it Temístocles (the house was located on Temístocles 44, in the upscale district of Polanco) and used it as space to hold discussions, artists’ talks, and informal workshops. They even published a xeroxed newsletter, Alegría, featuring art reviews and random opinion pieces. These artists—Eduardo Abaroa, Pablo Vargas Lugo, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Daniela Rossell, and Sofía Táboas, among others13—began producing work that departed from the neo-Mexicanist legacy in at least three ways. First, they rejected painting in favor of alternative media like installation, video, ready-mades, and performance. Second, they dispensed with the use of nationalist symbols and adopted a visual vocabulary taken from the globalized mass media (including references to television, film, comic books, and other products of American

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popular culture). Third, they renounced the commercialism that characterized neo-Mexicanist paintings by producing works—many of them ephemeral—that were virtually unsellable in Mexico at the time. The Temístocles artists made art that was fresh, fun, and irreverent, as can be seen in the catalog accompanying Acné, the 1995 exhibition that brought their work together.14 The piece that best captures the spirit of this generation was Invasión metafísica de los hombres desperdicio (1995), an installation by Eduardo Abaroa consisting of tiny, hand-crafted soap sculptures strategically placed over the pages of porn magazines to cover penises, breasts, and vaginas, as if to wash away their sinful postures. Abaroa’s installation is a radical departure from neo-Mexicanist aesthetics: While neo-Mexicanists favored monumental canvases, Abaroa works with the dimensions of the 8 1/2 x 11 inch piece of paper on which the magazine image is printed; while neo-Mexicanism engaged the epic themes of national identity, Abaroa works with porn magazines, a universal (and universally censored) form of popular culture. And ironically, though neo-Mexicanist paintings claim to represent Mexican culture, Invasión metafísica offers a more realistic depiction of life in 1990s Mexico City—one where subway stations are crowded with vendors peddling hundreds of trashy American magazines, like the one used by Abaroa in his installation, rather than canvases filled with idealized Aztec imagery. Though Temístocles was short-lived (it was funded by grants from the Mexican Arts Council [Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes (FONCA)]), and the U.S.-Mexico Fund for Culture that expired in 1995), it started a fad of artist-run spaces. Many artists whose work did not fit into the programs of the city’s state-run museums or private galleries followed Temístocles’ example and opened alternative galleries: Miguel Calderón and Yoshua Okón founded La Panadería in 1994 (it closed in 2002); Stefan Brüggemann and Edgar Orlaineta launched the short-lived Art Deposit in 1996; Pedro Reyes transformed Gonzalo Fonseca’s monumental sculpture La Torre de los Vientos (one of the public works built along Mexico City’s Periférico on the eve of the 1968 Olympic games) into an exhibition space, thus creating a parasitic project in which artists installed their pieces inside another artist’s work. Even non-artists followed suit: Robert Punkenhofer, an Austrian diplomat, opened an independent space called Art & Idea in 1996. But there was one aspect of neo-Mexicanism that the Temístocles artists did not reject in their work: ahistoricism. Though these works look different from their neo-Mexicanist counterparts, they, too, are hermetically sealed from the history and politics unfolding around them. Writing in 1994, Coco Fusco observed that ‘‘the brash contradictions that mark everyday life are visible only intermittently as decorative detail in most of

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the art of the post-NAFTA era, despite the heated debates in the Mexican press about globalization, maquiladoras, political corruption, the drug trade, and the Zapatistas,’’15 a fitting assessment for the work of most Temístocles artists. But this refusal to engage ‘‘the brash contradictions of everyday life’’ began to cede around 1995, the year in which the economic crisis hit rock bottom and Salinas left the country in disgrace. Artists experimented with innovative ways of responding to the momentous events that were unfolding around them. Daniela Rossell, an artist who had been involved with the Temístocles group, began photographing the country’s political elite in their lavish homes to create shocking portraits of the PRI’s corruption and cynicism. Vicente Razo began assembling a collection of the myriad Salinas tchotchkes—from t-shirts to figurines—that filled the streets of Mexico City and illustrated the generalized resentment against the ex-president. His collection, which would eventually grow into the ‘‘Salinas Museum’’ (discussed in chapter five), illustrates an ingenious strategy through which the victims of the ex-president’s reforms used popular art forms to exact a symbolic revenge. We have reached what Hal Foster, in another context, has called ‘‘the return of the real.’’16 The wall that for years had protected art from the ugly reality around it came crashing down, and artists used their work to explore, comment, and even resolve the country’s grave problems. In the late nineties, the harsh reality of life in Mexico became the central concern for many artists. The artist and activist Minerva Cuevas, for example, set up a corporation—part art project, part utopian scheme—to identify and propose solutions for the most pressing problems affecting Mexico City’s poorer residents, including unemployment and crime. Santiago Sierra, a Spanish-born artist who moved to Mexico on the wake of the Salinas scandals, staged several controversial performances that brought the art public face to face with unskilled workers, drug addicts, prostitutes, and other marginal elements of society. And Teresa Margolles turned the tradition of ready-mades on its head by taking paraphernalia from the Mexico City morgue—an overcrowded depository of corpses that is the most gruesome indicator of the wave of violence that shook the country in the 1990s—and displaying it in art museums and galleries. What had been repressed earlier returns with a vengeance in the work of these artists (discussed in chapter four). In this brief overview of art in the 1990s, we can see a radical transformation from object-based practice (the modus operandi of neo-Mexicanist painters) to action-based experiments (the radical projects of artists like Minerva Cuevas and Santiago Sierra). Cuevas and Sierra do not create

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objects: They stage real-time events in which the city—and its chaotic reality—becomes the support of the work. This is an example of what Lucy Lipard, in her writings about American conceptual art, has called ‘‘the dematerialization of the object of art.’’17 The 1990s also witnessed a radical change in the institutional receptivity to experimental art. Most artists who began showing in alternative spaces like Temístocles or La Panadería have since exhibited in prestigious museums in Mexico and abroad, and most are now represented by commercial galleries in New York and Europe. And just like it happened with the dematerialized conceptual projects of the 1960s and 1970s, work that was once deemed unsellable has suddenly become a hot commodity in the global art market. The most recent development in Mexican art has been its sudden—and lucrative—insertion into the global art circuit and its frenzied world of biennials, art fairs, and international exhibitions. In 2002 alone, over half a dozen major museums around the world devoted large-scale exhibitions to Mexico featuring many of the artists discussed in this book: Twenty Million Mexicans Can’t Be Wrong at the South London Gallery, Axis Mexico at the San Diego Museum of Art, Zebra Crossing at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, and—perhaps the most high-profile show— Mexico City: An Exhibition about the Exchange Rates of Bodies and Values, which opened at New York’s P.S.1 and then traveled to Berlin’s KunstWerke. This flurry of interest culminated in September 2003 with Mexico Illustrated, a mammoth project organized by Albright College (in the unlikely locale of Reading, Pennsylvania) that was billed as ‘‘the largest exhibit ever, everywhere, of Mexican art,’’ featuring 61 artists and a budget of half a million dollars.18 As part of the global spotlight on Mexico, a number of international art publications have devoted special issues to Mexican art: Parachute, a Canadian magazine, in 2001; FlashArt in 2002, and the artist-run journals Felix and Rim in 2003.19 But perhaps the clearest indicator of Mexican art’s insertion into the global art world is the number of artists who are now represented by foreign galleries. In New York, Eduardo Abaroa is represented by Jack Tilton, Pablo Vargas Lugo by Massimo Audiello, Daniela Rossell by Greene Naftali, and Miguel Calderón by Andrea Rosen. In Europe, Francis Alÿs is represented by London’s Lisson Gallery, Santiago Sierra and Teresa Margolles by Galerie Peter Kilchmann in Zurich. Two Mexican institutions have contributed to the global projection of Mexican art. The first, La Colección Jumex, is Mexico’s largest private collection of contemporary art, owned by Eugenio López, heir to the billon-dollar fruit-juice empire Jumex. Since the late nineties, Jumex, under the curatorial direction of Patricia Martín, has amassed an impres-

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sive collection of blue-chip artists, including Douglas Gordon, Gabriel Orozco, Doug Aitken, and Paul McCarthy. In 1999 La Colección opened a permanent museum inside the juice factory in Ecatepec, an industrial neighborhood on the outskirts of Mexico City.20 López’s multimilliondollar budget for collecting art has put Mexico in the radar screens of the most powerful galleries and museums around the world, whose directors and curators are invariably in attendance at La Colección’s openings. The second institution is Kurimanzutto, an ambitious private gallery founded in 1999 by José Kuri and Mónica Manzutto (a former staff member of Marian Goodman Gallery in New York). Kuri and Manzutto are close friends of Gabriel Orozco, and they have catapulted the dozen artists they represent—among them Minerva Cuevas, Daniel Guzmán, Jonathan Hernández, and Gabriel Kuri—into the global world of biennales, art fairs, and international exhibits. Contrary to what one might expect, this sudden projection of Mexico into the global art world has had some very positive effects. It has encouraged the exhibition and discussion of controversial works— especially those dealing with political issues—that might have never been shown in Mexican museums, state-run institutions that have long exercised a tacit form or censorship. As recently as 1996, Silvia Pandolfi, then director of Carrillo Gil, one of Mexico City’s most prestigious museums, acknowledged that there were clear though unspoken limits imposed from above: ‘‘the National Institute of Fine Arts [INBA],’’ she told an American journalist, ‘‘has always been clear that we should not be political.’’21 This veiled form of censorship was the flipside of the PRI’s historical support for the arts. Beginning in the 1920s with the state patronage of Diego Rivera and the muralist painters, PRI governments poured millions of pesos into the arts (in the form of commissions, fellowships, grants, and prizes), sending a clear message that the promotion of Mexican culture was one of the regime’s central policies. The most money went to artists who—like the neo-Mexicanists—celebrated Mexican identity but stayed clear of controversial topics like religion or politics. As art critic Shifra Goldman has shown, state support effectively ‘‘laundered’’ artistic production by rewarding artists who avoid the political and the controversial, as became manifestly clear in the blockbuster exhibits of Mexican art organized by PRI governments.22 Ironically, the possibility of showing and selling work in the global art market has given Mexican artists a healthy degree of independence from state grants and government interference. One recent example: in the summer of 2002, Sala Siqueiros, a Mexico City museum, organized a book launch for Vicente Razo’s The Official Museo Salinas Guide (2002),

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a catalog of anti-Salinas toys and figurines collected by the artist and discussed in chapter five. A few weeks before the launch, Itala Schmelz, the museum’s director, was advised by INBA officials that the book’s subject was too controversial (despite the fact that the PRI was no longer in power and that the Sala was founded by Mexico’s most radical artist, the muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros), and the event had to be moved to a different location.23 Razo’s book was released in the United States by Smart Art Press, a publisher associated with Track 16 Gallery in Santa Monica. Ironically, Razo found it easier to disseminate his politically charged art in the commercially driven Los Angeles artworld than in a Mexican institution devoted to political art! But this global projection has also had negative consequences, especially for younger artists who are beginning their careers during Mexico’s 15 minutes of fame in the global spotlight. Young artists now dream of participating in the next Documenta, exhibiting in a blue-chip gallery in New York, and being selected for the Venice Biennale. These grand ambitions are not only unrealistic for most young artists, but they have inspired a lot of bad art: works strategically designed to please gallerists or capture the attention of the international curators. And the atmosphere of the Mexico City artworld has gone from refreshing and irreverent, as it was in the days of Temístocles, to stuffy and pretentious. One cannot help but feel nostalgic for the days when artists showed in rickety collectives visited only by a handful of aficionados, considered their career choice a form of financial suicide, designed outrageous works, and had a lot of fun in the process. A sad situation, for as Mexican art critic Cuauhtémoc Medina has pointed out, most artists do not realize that Mexico’s place in the spotlight will soon be over, and tomorrow the global art world’s attention will turn to Turkey or Belarus. ‘‘There is no doubt,’’ Medina writes, ‘‘that Mexican art is caught up in the cyclical current through which every five years, a given country . . . is suddenly incorporated into—and rapidly discarded from—the geographies of global culture.’’24 One thing that this sudden wave of interest in Mexican art has not produced is a body of solid criticism. Though artists like Rossell, Margolles, and Sierra have shown in museums around the world, there is a dearth of serious, critical writing on their work. Historically, art criticism has been a neglected discipline in Mexico (in contrast to the country’s rich and ongoing tradition of literary criticism), and the trend continues today. Those interested in learning more about the local reception of Mexican artists will find only a handful of cursory reviews, brief magazine articles, and catalog texts, most written by a single individual: Cuauhtémoc Medina, Mexico’s most prolific art critic. Medina is an intelligent, serious,

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and devoted writer, and one often gets the impression that he runs the Mexico City art scene single-handed (for the P.S.1 exhibition, for example, Medina served on the curatorial team, wrote a catalog text, and discussed the show in the newspaper Reforma), but one person is not enough to generate a body of criticism for an entire generation, a task that requires discussion, debate, and the ongoing exchange of ideas among critics with different viewpoints. Because of the dearth of critical literature, many of these works are routinely misread and misinterpreted, especially when shown abroad. Perhaps the clearest example can be found in the texts of the P.S.1 catalog, where Klaus Biesenbach, the exhibition’s German curator, presents a number of readings that border on the comical. Consider, for example, his interpretation of Elotes/maíz trangénico (2002), a piece by Eduardo Abaroa and Rubén Ortíz consisting of a pile of ceramic corn cobs. The title alludes to one of the paradoxes of NAFTA: Corn is one of the staples of the local diet, yet under the free trade agreement Mexico must now import five million metric tons of corn—some of it genetically altered—from the United States, where farmers are heavily subsidized by the government. A 2004 article in the New York Times warned that ‘‘genetically engineered corn . . . could ultimately displace native corn varieties unless the government moves to protect them.’’25 Ignoring the politics of agriculture under NAFTA, Biesenbach reads the piece as a representation of how poor Mexicans use chewed corn cobs as a substitute for toilet paper: ‘‘The halfeaten corn implies a consumer’s digestion, capturing both the transformation of the snack into energy and the disposal of the remainder. In this case, the corn—a rural product commonly eaten by workers—becomes a valuable and rare art piece, cast with hand-painted resin, creating a sharp contrast with the traditional rural practice of using the chewed corn for various hygienic purposes.’’26 Instead of serious criticism, Biesenbach offers a scatological fantasy! It is my hope that New Tendencies in Mexican Art will make a small contribution to remedying this lack of critical literature on art of the 1990s and that it will inspire readings more enlightened about works that have much to say about recent history, politics, and culture. This book does not aim to present a comprehensive history of Mexican art, nor is it an exhaustive study of every artist who produced work in the 1990s. I have focused on a dozen artists whose work is in dialogue with the history, politics, and larger cultural problems that defined this period. Readers might be surprised to discover that my discussions do not touch on Gabriel Orozco, who for many years was Mexico’s best known artist in the global art circuit, or on other well-known individuals. This is simply

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because their work, however interesting from an art-historical perspective, is not in dialogue with the turbulent history of Mexico in the 1990s. In writing this book, I was less concerned with individuals than with tendencies, larger trends in art production marked by various artists exploring a similar topic or using comparable strategies. The book is thus organized around five tendencies I have identified in Mexican art of the 1990s: orientalism, voyeurism, radiophonism, urbanism, and institutionalism. Chapter one is devoted to a curious phenomenon that emerged in the wake of neo-Mexicanism. In the early nineties many younger artists rejected the nationalist iconography favored by their predecessors in favor of an unlikely alternative: a visual language full of references to Japan, China, India, and other Asian cultures. Many of the Temístocles artists, including Daniela Rossell, Eduardo Abaroa, and Pablo Vargas Lugo, along with others like Yishai Jusidman and Edgar Orlaineta, filled their work with geishas, sumo wrestlers, rising suns, and references to Buddhism and Hinduism. How are we to read this Mexican orientalism? Though we might be tempted to turn to Edward Said’s Orientalism for answers, the Mexican phenomenon differs from its European counterpart in one key aspect: In Mexico cultural representation is not at the service of real-life imperialism, as it was in nineteenth-century Europe. It stems, rather, from a misapprehension of ‘‘the Orient’’ that can be traced to the origins of Mexican history. Mexican orientalism of the 1990s, I argue, is merely the most recent manifestation of a centuries-old equation of the Orient and radical alterity. These artists’ fascination with an imaginary orient—a construct analogous to Roland Barthes’s Japan in The Empire of Signs—should also be read as symbolic flight from reality. The rise of orientalist art coincided with the most turbulent years of the decade, and at times it seems as if the artists were fleeing the painful reality of political intrigues and gory assassinations into an unreal world of geishas, sumos, and zenlike tranquility. But not all artists averted their gaze from the painful reality of recent Mexican history. Chapter two, ‘‘Voyeurism,’’ focuses on Daniela Rossell, an artist who photographed Mexico’s wealthiest and most corrupt political families in their kitschy mansions in a series (and later a book) titled Ricas y famosas [Rich and famous]. Though the photographer conceals the identity of her sitters, I show that Rossell’s subjects are close relatives of high-ranking PRI officials, including relatives of ex-presidents Salinas and Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, who ordered the 1968 student massacre. I argue that these photos should be read as portraits of the endemic corruption that characterized the PRI’s seven-decade rule. Rossell docu-

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ments how the homes built by the party’s most powerful figures are littered with the powerful symbols of the Mexican Revolution—from the Mexican flag to paintings of the agrarian leader Emiliano Zapata—which years of abuse by the official party’s rhetoric transformed into empty clichés. But despite her choice of a politically charged subject matter, Rossell’s stance toward these powerful and corrupt politicians is ambiguous at best. Afraid of her own creation, the photographer did everything in her power to obscure the identity of her subjects: All her photographs are untitled, and when they were published in book form, she did not include captions, identify the sitters, or even record the place and date of the shoot. If Rossell photographs the super rich, Taniel Morales uses radio to represent the experience of Mexico City’s more ordinary residents. Morales is a sound artist whose radio programs illustrate how the real has returned as a central concern in art of the late nineties. Chapter three, ‘‘Radiophonism,’’ examines Sin cabeza [The headless woman], one of Morales’s radiophonic representations of the myriad problems that haunt the inhabitants of Mexico City. Morales uses sound to represent everyday life in Mexico City, including the daily nightmares of transportation (his program includes a segment on the metro and another on the danger of boarding city buses), and violence (Sin cabeza features various gory segments describing dismembered bodies). The program also presents an acoustic snapshot of the last 30 years of music by including bits and pieces of melodies ranging from Mexican versions of Beatles tunes to cumbias and norteño ballads. Radio is the perfect medium to represent an urban space that many have described as unrepresentable, since broadcasting shares many of the city’s attributes. Both are heterogeneous spaces: All kinds of music, from cumbia to classical, are jumbled in the airwaves, just like races, social classes, and even architectural styles are jumbled in the metropolis. Both are violent: Radio sounds enter our ears without our consent, just like armed robbers penetrate their victim’s homes. And, as Morales shows, both radio and Mexico City are examples of what the French theorists Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari called ‘‘the body without organs,’’ a construct that favors the irrational over Cartesian logic and chaos over order. Chapter four, ‘‘Urbanism,’’ examines five artists—Francis Alÿs, Minerva Cuevas, Santiago Sierra, Teresa Margolles, and Jonathan Hernández— whose work explores the streets of Mexico City and exemplifies the return of the real as a central concern in recent artistic production. There are postmodern flâneurs who create not simple representations but actual interventions—in the form of performances and actions—in the urban fabric. In a series of Walks through the streets of the city’s working-class

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downtown districts, Alÿs represented the experience of the neighborhood’s impoverished residents. Cuevas created a corporation devoted to identifying and fixing the problems, including unemployment and violence, faced by Mexico City’s poorest inhabitants. Sierra staged a number of radical actions, including blocking the city’s expressways and hiring unskilled workers to take part in performances, designed to bring the city’s grave problems into the gallery. Margolles produced gory ready-mades that point to the epidemic of violence that characterized the decade of the 1990s. And Hernández staged a performance at UNAM that evinces the bureaucratic nightmares that Mexicans must confront when dealing with state institutions. Despite their differences, these works have one important trait in common: They are in direct dialogue with the effects of the most traumatic historical events of the 1990s, from political assassinations to the wave of violent crime that followed the 1994 economic crisis. Performances, actions, and interventions allow these five artists to illustrate how the traces of a violent history are imprinted on the urban fabric. Chapter five, ‘‘Institutionalism,’’ explores the museum as institution in Mexico. As Octavio Paz has shown in The Labyrinth of Solitude, the PRI governments used the country’s museums to present a teleological vision of history culminating with the triumph of the post-revolutionary regimes—a reading that validated the party’s hold on power. This process is most clearly manifest in the Museum of Anthropology, where even a field as remote as the history of pre-Columbian civilizations is placed at the service of glorifying the PRI.27 This final chapter examines the work of three artists—Vicente Razo, Gustavo Prado, and Miguel Calderón—who propose radical alternatives to the state-run museums. Vicente Razo and Gustavo Prado create their own museums to exhibit material that would never be shown in Mexico’s museums: Razo created a museum of popular toys portraying Carlos Salinas as crook, inmate, or vampire, while Prado amassed a permanent collection of sexual paraphernalia and articles relating to his own erotic obsessions. Most state-run museums would consider Razo’s work too political and Prado’s too personal, and thus unfit for exhibitions. To remedy this situation, both artists installed private-run museums in their homes. Miguel Calderón did not create his own museum but made an intervention in a state-run institution, Museo Nacional de Arte, that points to the abyss separating the rarefied world of art museums from the concerns of working-class Mexicans, many of whom are employed as cleaners, guards, and installers in museums. Calderón designed a project that would involve

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the museum’s workers, asking them to mimic the poses found in the famous paintings in the history of art. We have come a long way from the object-based practice of neoMexicanist painters: All of these works are immaterial actions in which the city itself becomes the support of the work. Finally, a word about my approach in reading these works. I analyze most of these pieces, from Jusidman’s orientalist paintings to Margolles’s bloody ready-mades, less as art works than as cultural productions. I am mostly interested in relating them to the historical context in which they were produced, and in establishing links to other contemporary cultural productions, including literature and film. The reader will thus find that I am less concerned with art history than with cultural history, a perspective that allows for richer readings of these radical experiments. One example: Minerva Cuevas set up her Mejor Vida Corporation to give away products and provide free services like cleaning subway platforms. An art-historical reading would relate Cuevas’s project to artists who have deployed an aesthetics of the gift, like Félix González Torres or Rikrit Tiravanija, and would necessarily find her work derivative. I have found it more useful, however, to relate Cuevas’s practice to the history of Mexico City in the 1990s, with its population explosion, rising crime rates, and perennial transportation nightmares. From this perspective, her work emerges as an original representation of Mexico City, one that uses new technologies like the Internet to continue the long tradition of writing the city. And now, let us begin this cultural history by going back to the early nineties, when the art world was just recovering from the hangover of neoMexicanism . . .

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One of the most salient characteristics of Mexican art in the early 1990s—including most of the works produced by the Temístocles artists—was the fact that it made almost no references to the national culture in which it was produced. Many critics and audiences abroad were baffled that there seemed to be nothing ‘‘Mexican’’ in these paintings and photographs, installations and videos. I often heard perplexed viewers complain that these works could have been made anywhere in the world, and that they seemed entirely disconnected from their cultural context. Once, as I was showing slides of a recent exhibition to the editor of an influential Italian art magazine, he brushed them aside and said, ‘‘I want work that looks Mexican: I want to see pyramids, jungles, Mayan temples.’’ Though the Italian editor did not have a very sophisticated understanding of the Mexican cultural scene, he did have a point: There was nothing in the work of these young artists that could have been identified as specifically Mexican, even by viewers well acquainted with the culture. But then again, the same critique could be leveled against most contemporary art from around the world: Is there anything particularly British about Young British Art? What is French in the work of Sophie Calle or Fabrice Hybert? Do young Spanish artists make work that references Spain? Artists from around the world seem to have arrived at a post-national stance. More than a specific cultural context, recent works tend to reflect the condition of living in a globalized world, where lifestyles—and artistic styles—are gradually becoming the same. The case of Mexico, however, was slightly different. It was not that young artists had renounced making references to all national cultures, but merely references to Mexico; in fact, works from this period teem with references to other cultures and other nations. While there are no pyramids or jungle landscapes—as the Italian editor observed—there are

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plenty of sumos, geishas, Buddhas, yogis, Chinese characters, and Japanese words, and these works are undeniably inflected by a fascination with all things Asian. Here are a few examples of Mexican artists born after 1965 who devoted works to Asian themes: Fernanda Brunet made a series of smallformat paintings of geishas and courtesans taken from Japanese comic books (Figure 1); Yishai Jusidman painted a series of monochromatic Geishas (the white geishas are barely perceptible against a white background, giving an orientalist twist to Robert Ryman’s experiments) and various series of Sumos (depicting pairs of Japanese wrestlers caught in tight embraces, Figure 2); Pablo Vargas Lugo, an artist who often travels to India, created an inflatable map of Japan in the style of Claes Oldenburg, as well as numerous collages filled with rising suns and the colors of the Tibetan flag (and bearing titles like Sati and Madona Tsunami); Rodrigo Aldana, who since 2001 has lived in a Buddhist monastery in Thailand, made hundreds of drawings inspired by classical Chinese painting, a subject he once studied in Malaysia, and he edited a video—titled Por un México mejor [For a better Mexico] (1998)—showing scenes of his life as a monk; Eduardo Abaroa, an avid reader of Eastern philosophy, produced a series of plastic sculptures recreating the colors and patterns of tankas and Tantric art, as well as numerous installations featuring yogis, Chinese dragons, and references to yoga; Edgar Orlaineta—one of the founders of the artist-run space Art Deposit—made plastic sculptures of Japanese cartoons and popular characters, including Hello Kitty and My Melody. This predilection for Asian themes is not the exclusive domain of the visual arts: There are also a good number of Eastern enthusiasts among younger writers, including Pablo Soler Frost—whose Cartas de Tepoztlán, written to an imaginary Japanese correspondent, compares everyday life in a Mexican village to the mores of samurais and zen priests—and Hugo Diego Blanco, who has collected his meditations on the Far East in a little volume titled Tinta china.1 (Aurelio Asiain, a poet who was also the editor of Vuelta, the prestigious literary journal founded by Octavio Paz, took his love for Asia even further: He learned Japanese and eventually moved to Tokyo, where as of this writing he serves as the Mexican cultural attaché.) All these images reveal a marked orientalist trend in Mexican art from the 1990s. We will use the term ‘‘orientalism’’ to refer to the numerous and constant references to Asia—especially to India, China, and Japan— found in artistic and literary works. But how are we to decipher this peculiarly Mexican version of orientalism? What does this explosion of interest in Eastern religions and Asian imagery have to do with Mexico? Why does this orientalizing tendency

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Figure 1: Fernanda Brunet, Heroínas (1996). Image courtesy of the artist.

appear at this specific point in the history of Mexican art? How does it relate to larger aspects of Mexican culture? Does this tendency have anything to do with Mexico’s foreign relations with Asian countries? Are we to read it as a comment on the fate of culture in the age of globalization? The reader’s first impulse might be to look for answers in Edward Said’s Orientalism, the most comprehensive analysis of cultural representations of the construct of ‘‘the Orient.’’ The orientalist discourses analyzed by Said, however, are entirely different from the material at hand. First of all, Said focuses on the European perception of the Orient— by which he means the region of the world we now know as the Middle

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Figure 2: Yishai Jusidman, Sumo VII (1995). Image courtesy of the artist and Galería OMR, Mexico City.

East—and specifically on the intricate relation between power and knowledge. He demonstrates that from the beginning, the discipline of ‘‘oriental’’ studies was entwined with imperialist projects to subjugate the Orient. In some cases, scholarly interest in oriental art, oriental history, or oriental languages was contemporaneous with colonial expeditions into the Orient; in other, more extreme cases, orientalist scholars—who presented themselves as apolitical researchers at the service of knowledge— participated and lent credibility to colonial projects. ‘‘There is,’’ writes Said, ‘‘a remarkable (but nonetheless intelligible) parallel between the rise of modern Orientalist scholarship and the acquisition of vast Eastern empires by Britain and France.’’ Ultimately, knowledge about the Orient did not serve to understand alterity, but to subjugate it: ‘‘Much of the

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information and knowledge about Islam and the Orient that was used by the colonial powers to satisfy their colonialism derived from Orientalist scholarship.’’2 As we can see, Said discusses a phenomenon that is altogether different from the Mexican artists’ fascination with Eastern cultures. Said’s strategy consists in reading cultural practices—including literature and art—in light of the political context in which they were produced: He shows the parallels, for example, between Flaubert’s literary treatment of the Near East and the accounts of Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798.3 Said’s analyses cannot be simply transposed to Mexico, a country that has never invaded, colonized, or attacked other nations (but has itself been the object of many colonizations, attacks, and invasions). Unlike Flaubert’s writings or Napoleon’s Déscription de l’Egypte, Mexican depictions of Eastern cultures cannot be related to real-life imperialist designs. How, then, are we to read other orientalisms, especially when they take place in countries that were never colonial powers? This problem has led many critics to tie themselves into conceptual knots. Consider, for example, Julia A. Kushigian’s Orientalism in the Hispanic Literary Tradition, a book that attempts to interpret a phenomenon that is quite similar to the Mexican artists’ obsession with Asia: the predominance of Eastern themes in the writings of Jorge Luis Borges, Octavio Paz, and Severo Sarduy. Kushigian begins by pitting Latin American orientalism against its European counterpart, as if the two regions were engaged in a competition to see who could be more orientalist! She laments that Said had placed ‘‘Hispanic orientalism in a dubious and inferior position in relation to the Anglo-French phenomenon’’ (a curious assertion, especially since Said treats orientalism as a reprehensible discriminatory practice; she might as well have complained that ‘‘Hispanic anti-Semitism is in a dubious and inferior position in relation to the Anglo-French phenomenon’’) and worries that ‘‘Hispanic Orientalism has been denied its rightful place in the contemporary revision of the concept of Orientalism,’’ as if Latin America were in danger of being excluded from some Orientalist Hall of Fame!4 Kushigian’s thesis could be paraphrased as follows: Orientalism consists in writing about the Orient (which for her includes the Arab countries, as well as India, China, and Japan); there are pejorative representations of the Orient (those analyzed by Said in his book as participating in imperialist projects), but there are also positive, harmless accounts—and this is where she places the writings of Borges, Paz, and Sarduy. She concludes that not only are these Latin American representations of the East devoid of colonialist intentions, but they ultimately

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promote good will and mutual understanding: ‘‘Hispanic Orientalism is political,’’ she writes, ‘‘in the sense that it is committed to opening a dialogue and exchange with the East for the purpose of learning about the self from the Other, revealing truth through dialogue and ending cultural dominations’’5—orientalism, she seems to suggest, can be a form of social work! Clearly Kushigian’s study does not serve as a useful model for understanding Mexican orientalism—or even the profusion of Asian themes in the literature she studies—since her analyses accomplish little else besides passing a moral judgment: In her view, representations of the Orient are either well-meaning (as in the three authors she describes) or disparaging (as in the figures described by Said), and this ultimately amounts to a moralizing binarism that does not get us very far. What is lacking in Kushigian’s study—and what would prove extremely useful for understanding Mexican orientalism—is Said’s method of relating works of art and literature to the larger historical context in which they were created, especially his insistence on how representations of the Orient are always shaped by the extraliterary circumstances of the author’s life, including the political climate, cultural debates, and economic interests. We can emulate Said’s method without necessarily reaching the same conclusions, since, as we have seen, Europe and Mexico have completely different histories in their dealings—and power dynamics—with the Orient; but we can certainly take Said’s lead in asking how the fascination with the Orient in these artworks relates to the history of Mexico in the 1990s, and how artistic creations relate to the larger cultural context of their creation. There is one point that Said makes in Orientalism that will prove extremely useful to our analysis of Mexican art: the realization that in most representations, the Orient is a construction that has more to do with the author’s—and his or her culture’s—fantasies than with a real place. ‘‘The Orient,’’ Said argues, ‘‘is an idea that has a history and a tradition of thought, imagery, and vocabulary that have given it reality and presence in and for the West.’’6 Said thus investigates the Orient much as a psychoanalyst would interpret a fantasy: His emphasis is not so much on factual accuracy but on the desires and fears that are projected into its construction. Analyzing the Orient as a fantasy constructed by Mexican artists will allow us to interpret the cultural desires and anxieties about alterity that permeate the sumos and geishas, mandalas and rising suns found in these artworks. Said shows how the European construction of the Orient has a long history that goes back at least to the Middle Ages. We should ask a similar question about Mexican orientalism: Is the fascination with Eastern

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cultures a new phenomenon, or are there precedents in Mexican cultural history for this orientalist enthusiasm?

Mexican Orientalism: A Historical Overview The Orient has a long history in Mexican culture. In fact, the origins of Mexico as a nation are imbricated with orientalist constructs: the European discovery of Mexico was itself a frustrated orientalist undertaking. As we know, Christopher Columbus stumbled upon the American hemisphere in his failed attempt to discover a new route to the Indies. In a prank of history, the Europeans were under the impression for a short time that Mexico—along with the entire American continent—was part of Asia. Columbus’s Diary, which can be read as the first orientalist work in Latin American literature, is filled with fanciful descriptions of the lands Columbus assumed to be ‘‘Cathay’’ and ‘‘Cipango’’ (the ancient names for China and Japan) but which were actually the islands of Hispaniola and Cuba. On Monday, October 21, 1492, as he prepared to leave Cuba, the admiral made the following entry in his logbook, addressed to the Spanish monarchs: ‘‘I will leave for another very large island that I believe must be Cipango . . . I have already decided to go to the mainland and to the city of Quinsay and to give Your Highness’ letters to the Grand Khan and to ask for, and come with, a reply.’’7 The world eventually learned to distinguish between east and west, and Mexico got caught somewhere in the middle of this polarizing construction before proceeding to develop an elaborate orientalist tradition of its own. In the visual arts, the first orientalist impulse appeared at the end of the sixteenth century as the product of a curious incident that culminated in the canonization of the country’s first martyr, San Felipe de Jesús. The story, tinged with orientalist fears, goes like this: In 1596, a Spanish ship that had sailed from the Mexican port of Acapulco got lost in a storm and was shipwrecked off the coast of Japan at a time when—to the misfortune of the 26 passengers aboard—anti-Christian prejudice was at its peak. No sooner did the travelers touch land than they were imprisoned, mutilated, exposed to public torment, and eventually crucified. One of the victims was a Mexican friar who went down in history as San Felipe de Jesús. This episode became one of the favorite subjects of colonial painting; countless canvases and prints were made over several centuries showing the young, defenseless friar attacked by heartless Japanese heathens. The murals in the Cuernavaca cathedral executed toward the end of the seventeenth century and the 1801 engravings by

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José Maria Montes de Oca are among the finest examples of this pictorial tradition.8 The pictorial representations of San Felipe’s torture inaugurated a tradition of orientalist prejudice that seems fit for inclusion in Edward Said’s catalog of predatory cultural enterprises: the picturing of the Orient as a dangerous place, the seat of horrendous cultures that represented mortal peril for Christians in general and Mexicans in particular. This negative and paranoid outpouring of orientalism reached its most ominous extremes in the early years of the twentieth century, with one of the most aberrant but least-known episodes in Mexican history: the antiChinese movement.9 In 1888, the U.S. government, in an effort to halt the wave of Asian immigration to the state of California, ceased granting work permits for Chinese immigrants. As a result, the Chinese population in Mexico began to grow: Hundreds and hundreds of Chinese workers settled near the border, hoping that the United States would eventually allow them in. Over the years, Chinatowns flourished in the northern Mexican cities of Mexicali, Mazatlán, Tampico, and Chihuahua. By 1910, Torreón had the most numerous and prosperous Chinatown, packed with shops named after distant places—‘‘El puerto de Shanghai,’’ ‘‘Abarrotes Wing Hay Lum,’’ ‘‘Lavandería Oriental,’’ ‘‘Banco Wah Yick’’—and streets with names like ‘‘Calle Chee King Tong.’’ In spite of their prosperity, the Chinese were not very popular in Torreón. The poor ones, willing to work for a pittance, were accused of undercutting Mexican wages and the wealthy ones were suspected of hiring only Chinese workers and sending their profits back to their homeland. Resentment and hostility mounted until the disorders of the Revolution touched off an explosion: On May 15, 1911, Madero’s troops took the city by surprise. Amidst the confusion and chaos, the revolutionary mob attacked the Chinese businesses. There was a wave of looting, violence, and innumerable killings that culminated in a massacre that took the lives of 300 Chinese. In northern Mexico, anti-Chinese prejudice emerged as one of the most terrible effects of the intense nationalism fostered by the post-revolutionary government: Mass deportations of Chinese were carried out in the twenties; in 1930, a law was passed prohibiting marriage between Mexican women and Chinese men; and in the years that followed, ultranationalistic organizations were founded with names like Comité Directivo de la Campaña Nacional Antichina [Executive Committee of the National Anti-Chinense Campaign], composed of representatives of the state legislatures of Sonora and Sinaloa; Comité Antichino Asiático del Puerto de Veracruz [Anti-Chinese Committee of the Port of Veracruz]; and Liga Mexicana Antichina [Mexican

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Anti-China League]. José Angel Espinoza, one of the most violent of the anti-Chinese propagandists, published a series of pamphlets bearing such titles as El problema chino en México ([The Chinese problem in Mexico], 1931) and El ejemplo de sonora ([The example of Sonora], 1932), and proposed numerous strategies for achieving the ‘‘deschinatización,’’ or de-Chinefication, of Mexico. The anti-Chinese movement is not, however, the last chapter in the history of Mexican orientalism. Paradoxically, an intense Sinophilia flourished among Mexico City intellectuals even as the anti-Chinese carnage unfolded in the north. In 1920, the poet José Juan Tablada published LiPo, an exquisite book of ideographic poems that includes the following dreamy composition (the original written by hand in the form of a waning moon): Creyendo que el re flejo de la luna era una taza de blanco jade y aú reo vino por cogerla y beberla una noche bogando por el río se ahogó Li-Po.10 [Thinking that the moon’s re flection was a cup of white Jade with aureatic wine upon reaching out to drink it one night he drowned having gone out

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Li-Po contains many other poems devoted to fanciful meditations on Chinese themes—including some innovative compositions that skillfully rhyme Chinese place names with Spanish words, like the palanquinshaped calligramme ‘‘mejor viajar / en palanquín / y hacer / un poema / sin fin / en la torre / de Kaolín / de Nankín,’’12 which Eliot Weinberger has rendered in English as ‘‘better to travel / in a palanquin / and make / a poem / without end / in the tower / of Kaolin / in Nankin.’’13 What is striking is that while Tablada sang the praises of Chinese classical culture in Mexico City, petty politicians and nationalist mobs in the north were intent on expelling flesh-and-blood Chinese men and women from their towns (there is no evidence that Tablada, despite his Sinophilia, concerned himself with the fate of the thousands of Chinese who were murdered, harassed, or deported). This baffling coexistence of love for Chinese culture and intolerance for Chinese people recalls many of the orientalist episodes described by Edward Said: One of his arguments is that Western discourses have always privileged abstract concepts like ‘‘art,’’ ‘‘culture,’’ or ‘‘history’’ over the real people who inhabit the Orient: Even at times when colonial subjects were being massacred by imperial armies, Western orientalists had trouble seeing any connection between their object of study—oriental culture—and the brutal events that often unfolded before their eyes.14 But perhaps we are being too harsh on poor Tablada: it is possible that he knew nothing about the antiChinese episodes, especially since he spent long periods living abroad, and little was known about the massacres until the publication of several historical accounts in the 1990s. After World War II, some Mexican intellectuals embraced a different type of Sinophilia: a revolutionary enthusiasm for Maoist China. Diego Rivera included portraits of Chairman Mao in several murals, and he was fond of suggesting parallels among the Mexican, Russian, and Chinese revolutions, events which he saw as paving the way to a not-so-distant communist utopia. Vicente Lombardo Toledano, one of Mexico’s most radical communists, did something similar: In 1949, he set out on an ideological pilgrimage to the recently proclaimed People’s Republic of China—a trip that prefigured the voyage that Philippe Sollers, Julia Kristeva, and other members of the Parisian Tel Quel group would undertake in 1974. Lombardo Toledano narrated the details of his trip in Diario de un viaje a la China nueva ([A travel diary to new China], 1950), a curious pamphlet

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filled with ardent praise for the land of Maoism, whose great achievements were to inspire not only Mexico but all the rest of humankind. ‘‘Just as the sun travels from East to West,’’ Lombardo Toledano wrote, ‘‘so, before long, will the Chinese Revolution bring light to the peoples of the West.’’ He sees Mao Tse-tung as ‘‘the leader of the greatest national antiimperialist revolution of history, the liberator of the Chinese people who make up a quarter of the planet’s population.’’ Bedazzled by such achievements, Lombardo Toledano concluded that Mao’s China had achieved nothing less than the elimination of suffering. ‘‘I have witnessed,’’ he declared, ‘‘how a long past of man’s exploitation of man, of ignorance, enslavement, and grief is dying, and how a new world of energy, creative spirit, social justice, economic progress, popular education, and heightened political awareness is being born.’’15 Poor Lombardo Toledano! A victim—like Diego Rivera and so many others at the time—of what Octavio Paz once called ‘‘starry-eyed fatalism’’: His orientalist enthusiasm for the revolutionary potential of Mao’s doctrine kept him from seeing the dark side of communist China: the mass trials, purges, concentration camps. Octavio Paz’s literary adventures in the Orient were more serious, more sustained, and more insightful than those of any other Mexican figure (with the possible exception of José Juan Tablada). Beginning in the 1950s, Paz began a long and fruitful romance with Eastern cultures that Eliot Weinberger has masterfully chronicled in his essay ‘‘Paz in Asia.’’16 In sharp contrast to Lombardo Toledano, who knew very little about China or Chinese culture before embarking on his trip, Paz cultivated an expert knowledge of Asian literature, history, and philosophy. When the poet was in his forties, he published essays on classical Japanese literature, wrote his first haikus (a lifelong passion), and translated Basho’s Roads to Oku; in his fifties, he wrote essays on Taoism and Chinese eroticism (collected in Conjunctions and Disjunctions [1969]), and served as Mexican ambassador to India, an experience that would inspire numerous texts, including The Monkey Grammarian (1970), a hallucinatory prose poem recounting a pilgrimage to Galta in Rajastan. In Light of India (1997), the last major work he published before his death, was a memoir of his life in Delhi and a final meditation on the themes of eroticism and death in Indian culture. These examples mark the extremes between which the pendulum of Mexican orientalism has swung in recent history: on the one side, the positive tendency to identify the Orient with the most fantastic and wonderful possibilities for human existence, as Lombardo Toledano did in his Chinese travel journal; on the other, a negative tendency to associate everything oriental with peril and death, as in the case of the Japanese

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assassins imagined by the worshippers of the Mexican saint San Felipe de Jesús. The latter, negative orientalist tendency is alive today in Mexican popular speech, a language full of orientalizing idioms and expressions. To this day, Mexicans say tortura china, or ‘‘Chinese torture’’ to describe a painful experience, like the punishment that San Felipe allegedly suffered at the hands of the Japanese. Unwittingly, many Mexicans ‘‘orientalize’’ certain maladies: sciatic rheumatism (reuma siática) is often called ‘‘la reuma asiática,’’ as if it were an Asian flu. Mexican children are fond of repeating racist ditties that recall the worst moments of the anti-Chinese movement: ‘‘chino, chino, japonés, come caca y no me dés’’ [Chinaman, Chinaman, Jap, gimme no crap, eat it yourself], a refrain that also demonstrates the typically orientalist phenomenon of collapsing the differences among Asian cultures, like China and Japan, into an imaginary, monolithic Orient. ‘‘La china Hilaria’’ is another expression in which the word ‘‘china’’ has a negative connotation: Like ‘‘la quinta China’’ (which literally means ‘‘the fifth China,’’) this phrase is a euphemism for ‘‘la chingada,’’ the worst insult in Mexican Spanish, which can be loosely translated as ‘‘the raped one.’’ ‘‘La china,’’ or the Chinese woman, thus becomes a euphemism for ‘‘the raped woman.’’ Like the legend of San Felipe, these phrases associate the Orient with a menacing otherness. There is another less violent expression in Mexican Spanish that nevertheless retains the association of the Chinese with extreme alterity: ‘‘está en chino,’’ a phrase that literally means ‘‘it’s in Chinese’’ but which is best translated as ‘‘it’s all Greek to me,’’ thus labeling as Chinese all that is indecipherable and categorically unfathomable. On August 15, 1996 the kidnapping of a Japanese businessman in the city of Tijuana was reported in the tabloid Ovaciones with the headline ‘‘El secuestro del japonés ¡está en chino!’’ [The kidnapping of the Japanese is in Chinese!] This expression embodies a comment regarding the inscrutable nature—to most Mexicans—of Chinese ideograms and, by extension, of many aspects of Asian cultures: ‘‘It’s all Chinese to me,’’ seems to be the Mexican response to everything oriental. In contrast to these numerous associations of China with peril and inscrutability, there are no popular expressions in Mexican Spanish turning on positive association with things Chinese. The Enciclopedia de México tells us that ‘‘¡Chino libre!’’ is used as an expression of relief at finding oneself freed of ‘‘obligations and inconveniences.’’ The apparent upbeat tone of the phrase fades, however, in view of its origin as explained in the encyclopedia, which tells us that ‘‘It is said that the expression originated with a Chinese man who had been unjustly sent to prison and

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upon being released, expressed joy at being a free Chinaman.’’ Despite the apparent jubilation of exclamation, the legend lurking behind it conjures up the darkest moments of the anti-Chinese campaign in Mexico. While Mexican Spanish lacks expressions presenting oriental things in a positive light, the language is full of words that attribute a Chinese origin to Mexican things—an act of linguistic confusion that evokes Columbus’s initial mistaking of America for Asia. In colonial times, certain women of mixed blood who dressed in elegant and colorful costumes came to be known as ‘‘Chinas,’’ a word that also means ‘‘Chinese women.’’ Some sources say that chinas disappeared in the capital but remained living in the city of Puebla for some years, and thus eventually became known as chinas poblanas, or Chinese women from Puebla! Another legend claims that the first china poblana was a woman named Catarina de San Juan, a slave who had arrived in Mexico from the Philippines aboard the Manila Clipper, erroneously known as la nao de China, the China clipper. In any case, it is clear that chinas poblanas had little to do with China.17 ‘‘Chino’’ also means ‘‘curly,’’ as in a person’s hair. In this case, the word is even more paradoxical, since neither the Mexicans nor the Chinese are known for their curly hair. By extension, ‘‘chino’’ also means a ‘‘curler,’’ and a woman who goes out with a kerchief over her head is said to be wearing chinos. However, among all the Sinological expressions that seem to relate neither to Mexico nor China, perhaps the strangest is ‘‘ponerse chinito,’’ a phrase that literally means ‘‘to become Chinese’’ but which can be translated as ‘‘to get goose bumps,’’ as one does when jumping into cold water. This last usage is most perplexing: Why would a shivering person with bumpy skin be described as Chinese? And why does the phrase use the verb ‘‘to become,’’ as if being Chinese were a passing state, like being hot or cold? But what does this long history of episodes in Mexican orientalism tell us about the art of the 1990s? How does the story of San Felipe, the perplexing identification of chinas poblanas as Chinese women, or the anti-Chinese movement help us read the fascination with Eastern cultures in the art of Eduardo Abaroa, Yishai Jusidman, or Rodrigo Aldana? One important characteristic many past Mexican orientalists (with the exception of Paz) share with the artists of the 1990s is their tendency to treat the Orient as a screen on which to project their fantasies—positive and negative—about alterity. Thus, the story of San Felipe becomes an excuse to project fears of danger and death onto Japan; Maoist China becomes the site onto which Lombardo Toledano projects his illusions of an earthly paradise; and artists like Eduardo Abaroa and Pablo Vargas Lugo identify the cultures of India, China, and Japan with the possibility

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of radically new experiences—spiritual as well as aesthetic—that could never be found in Mexico. The treatment of the Orient in these works is strikingly similar to Roland Barthes’s use of Japan in The Empire of Signs (1970). In the opening pages of the book, Barthes makes clear that even though his book takes place in Japan—and takes us through Japanese places, Japanese customs, and even Japanese words—‘‘Japan’’ should be read as a product of the imagination and not as a reference to the actual Asian country. ‘‘If I want to imagine a fictive nation,’’ Barthes writes, I can give it an invented name, treat it declaratively as a novelistic object, create a new Garabagne, so as to compromise no real country by my fantasy (though it is then that fantasy itself I compromise by the signs of literature). I can also—though in no way claiming to represent or to analyze reality itself (these being the major gestures of Western discourse)—isolate somewhere in the world (faraway) a certain number of features (a term employed in linguistics), and out of these features deliberately form a system. It is this system which I call: Japan. Hence Orient and Occident cannot be taken here as ‘‘realities’’ to be compared and contrasted historically, philosophically, culturally, politically. I am not lovingly gazing toward an Oriental essence—to me the Orient is a matter of indifference, merely providing a reserve of features whose manipulation—whose invented interplay—allows me to ‘‘entertain’’ the idea of an unheard-of symbolic system, one altogether detached from our own. What can be addressed, in the consideration of the Orient, are not other symbols, another metaphysics, another wisdom . . . it is the possibility of a difference, of a mutation, of a revolution in the propriety of symbolic systems.18

Edward Said argues that all discourses on the Orient are constructions and, to a certain degree, projections of the writer’s imagination. Barthes makes this process explicit, and from the outset he announces that his ‘‘Japan’’ is an entirely imaginary ‘‘symbolic system,’’ an invention that should not be read as an attempt to describe a real place. The French critic makes explicit—and celebrates—the authorial fantasies that orientalists analyzed by Said would vehemently disavow. Like Barthes’s Japan, the Mexican artists’ Orient is primordially an imaginary space, a ‘‘symbolic system’’ that does not point to the cultures and political realities of Asian countries but to a series of fantasies, to the possibility of imagining—as Barthes put it—‘‘an unheard-of symbolic system.’’ Barthes’s Empire of Signs could well serve as a manifesto for the Mexican orientalists. What fantasies, then, are projected into the Orient represented in these works? Many of these artists share Barthes’s desire to place his own

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thinking in a space of radical alterity, as far away as possible from the conventions of his own culture. For Mexican artists, the Orient represents the obverse, the polar opposite of Mexico. The East, and especially Japan—the favored reference for most orientalist artists—is the structural opposite of Mexico. Not only is Japan on ‘‘the other side of the world,’’ but its cultural values are the exact opposite of Mexico’s. Japan is an island; Mexico is part of the continent. The Japanese drink tea; Mexicans, coffee. Japanese food keeps flavors pure and unmixed; Mexican cuisine mixes all kinds of ingredients—from chilies to chocolate—in moles and other perverse sauces. Japanese aesthetics emphasize emptiness and voids; Mexican art prefers the baroque and colorful. Calligraphy, zen, and the tea ceremony are rituals of silence; fiestas, bullfights, and carnivals are celebrations of noise. Japanese wrappings are opaque, hiding the object behind endless layers, papers, and ribbons, whereas Mexican packaging (peanuts served in paper cones and soft drinks sold in little plastic bags) is transparent. Japan is the land of order; Mexico, the country of chaos.

The Artist as Orientalist Since most of the artists discussed in this chapter developed an interest in the Orient after having some contact with the cultures of the Far East, a cursory overview of each artist’s experience with Asia will shed light on the varieties of orientalist works. The artists examined here can be divided into three groups, according to the degree of interest and direct knowledge in the cultures of the Orient: The artists of the first group—Eduardo Abaroa, Rodrigo Aldana, and Pablo Vargas Lugo—have expressed great personal interest in Eastern philosophy and religions. Rodrigo Aldana has spent several years living as a Buddhist monk at a monastery in Thailand. Pablo Vargas Lugo, motivated by extensive reading on Hinduism and the culture of the subcontinent, has visited India for extended periods of time since 1995. And Eduardo Abaroa has been an avid student of zen Buddhism and Tantric philosophy since his college days. Traces of their interest in oriental culture are discernible in the work of these three artists. Rodrigo Aldana’s paintings and drawings are the most explicit in their expression of the artist’s passion for aspects such as calligraphy, meditation, and Chinese painting. The video Por un México mejor ([Toward a better Mexico], 1998) shows the artist during his residency as a Buddhist monk in a Thai monastery, eating, walking, and

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meditating, wrapped in a saffron-colored tunic. The series of paintings Con título (después de Shi T’ao) ([Titled (after Shitao)], 1997) and Mi pelo está cano ([My hair is white], 1998) are in homage to Shitao, a celebrated Chinese painter who sealed his paintings with the motto: ‘‘My hair is white and I am still illiterate.’’ In Eduardo Abaroa’s work, the references to oriental ideas and concepts turn more cryptic. Vicisitudes iniciáticas ([Initiation vicissitudes], 1996, Figure 3) is a series of paintings of mandalas, Tantric symbols, and mottos in Sanskrit painted on plastic wrappings of mass-produced articles like ‘‘Bic’’ pens or Marinela cupcakes. The juxtaposition of Tantric images and commercial wrappers in these works constitutes a delightful, sarcastic irreverence—a reference to the recent ubiquitous commercialization of oriental mysticism, which today is packaged and sold as a consumer product. Likewise inspired by Asian mysticism, Abaroa’s series of sculptures of sea monkeys Vida instantánea ([Instantaneous life], 1995) includes a curious scene showing a sea monkey seated in the lotus position, meditating, as though in a yoga program on television. Of the three artists who make up this first group, Pablo Vargas Lugo is the one whose work is furthest removed from figurative orientalism. The orientalist content of his work goes through a complex process of abstraction, making it impossible for many of his images to be immediately recognizable as allusions to Eastern themes. Finale (1995) is an inflatable map of Japan (Figure 4), placed at an angle and decorated with a rising sun on one of its ends, but it resembles an enormous marine monster more than the Japanese island. Even more abstract are the collages titled Sati (1995–8), Madona Tsunami (1998), and Rising Sun (1996, Figure 5), compositions that combine the colors of the rising sun with subtle stylistic allusions to Chinese painting. Other pieces—like a crack in the form of a smile—reveal their orientalist thrust only when we learn their titles: Infinita compasión (1998), an allusion to Avalokitesvara, the bodhisattva of infinite compassion. All these works by Pablo Vargas Lugo fit into the category of abstract orientalism. In contrast to this first group, the creations of the second group— which includes Yishai Jusidman and Daniela Rossell—do not spring from a personal interest in Eastern philosophy. These two artists are concerned exclusively with the formal aspects of oriental art, especially the style usually associated with classical Chinese and Japanese painting. Yishai Jusidman began by painting clowns—performers whose exaggerated makeup transforms them into living paintings. From clowns, he moved on to painting geishas, figures that served as a vehicle for an exploration of monochromatic painting (Jusidman painted canvasses that, like the geisha’s makeup, were white on white). The choice was a purely formal one:

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Figure 3: Eduardo Abaroa, Vicisitudes iniciáticas [Initiation vicissitudes] (1996). Image courtesy of the artist.

Like the clown, the geisha is a kind of living picture, a strange incarnation of minimalist painting. We find a similar formal frolic in Daniela Rossell’s Pecados (1996), a series of baroque compositions made from wafer cutouts. These pieces play on orientalist connotations of a product sold at every town square in Mexico: Wafers made of a fine, translucent material reminiscent of the fragility and transparency of tissue paper. Carrying this association to the ultimate, Daniela Rossell produced a series of wafer cutouts shaped like fish painted in the style of classical Chinese painting (Figures 6–7). These intricate works are full of cultural irony, since they defamiliarize the wafers used in Catholic mass by transforming a staple of Mexican cultural life into an orientalist fancy. The third type of Mexican orientalism is best represented in the work of Edgar Orlaineta. While the first two groups of artists are interested in the more classical and traditional aspects of Asian cultures, Edgar Orlaineta focuses his attention on the most recent manifestations of orientalism in Mexico: the Asian cartoons, video games, and toys that have flooded Mexican popular culture in the 1990s. The character of Hello Kitty, reproduced in Hello Kitty (1996), is perhaps the archetypical example of this phenomenon. It can be read as an allusion to the teenage obsession

Figure 4: Pablo Vargas Lugo, Finale (1998). Installation view at El Museo del Barrio, New York. Image courtesy of the artist and Massimo Audiello, New York.

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Figure 5: Pablo Vargas Lugo, Rising Sun (1996). Image courtesy of the artist and Massimo Audiello, New York.

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Figure 6: Daniela Rossell, Pecados (1996). Image courtesy of the artist.

with the pink kitty, which appears as decoration on the pencils, erasers, backpacks, t-shirts, and notebooks carried by thousands of Mexican junior high school girls. My Melody (1998, Figure 8), another installation by Edgar Orlaineta, also alludes to that curiously campy adolescent aesthetic.

A Response to Neo-Mexicanism Despite the variety of personal motivations that impelled these artists to construct an Orient that is as imaginary as that created by Barthes in The Empire of Signs, there is at least one common element shared by their projects. Viewed in the context of the recent history of Mexican art, orientalism can be read as a reaction against a previous artistic movement that had been extremely influential in the 1980s: neo-Mexicanism. The term ‘‘neo-Mexicanism’’ was coined by art historian Teresa del Conde to refer to a group of artists who in the 1980s began making largescale, figurative paintings with distinctly—some would say stereotypically— Mexican themes: There were Mexican flags and Virgins of Guadalupe, charros and chinas poblanas, cacti and tropical fruits.19 Most of these

Figure 7: Daniela Rossell, Pecados (1996). Image courtesy of the artist.

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Figure 8: Edgar Orlaineta, My Melody (1998). Image courtesy of the artist.

works were painted in the bright colors—red, green, and a loud hue of pink known as ‘‘rosa mexicano’’—that can be found in many outdoor markets and that had been embraced by the nationalist artists of the post-revolutionary period. Neo-Mexicanist artists include Julio Galán, who painted cartoon-like versions of the traditional religious paintings known as retablos; Nahúm Zenil, author of countless self-portraits that look like eighties versions of Frida Kahlo paintings; and more than a dozen other painters—including Javier de la Garza, Dulce María Núñez, Rocío Maldonado, and Georgina Quintana—sharing a nationalist visual language.20 For a few years, neo-Mexicanism was a commercial success: the paintings sold like hotcakes in American and European galleries, and soon most artists in Mexico City—including a handful of Americans like Ray Smith and Michael Tracy21—put their paintbrushes at the service of unearthing their Mexican roots. But the frenzy was short-lived: The boom of neoMexicanist painting created a bubble that eventually burst, and the international market for Mexican art—like the stock market, the economy, and so many other excesses of the late eighties—came crashing down. Once the party was over, artists were left with a nasty cultural hangover: Guadalupes and bleeding hearts brought back bad memories and made stomachs turn.

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Enter the orientalists, a generation of artists, for the most part born in the 1960s, who came of age as the neo-Mexicanist project collapsed in the early 1990s. The orientalist turn can be seen as a reaction against the nationalist excesses of eighties neo-Mexicanist painting: The younger artists produced work that can be read as a point-by-point rejection of the aesthetics favored by their predecessors. If painters like Galán and Zenil explored the national, orientalists investigate the foreign; if neo-Mexicanists were obsessed with self-portraiture, orientalists never include themselves in their work; if the former boasted gargantuan canvases, the latter favor miniature sculptures and modest-sized works; if neo-Mexicanists loved bright colors, orientalists prefer pallid monochromes and subtle hues; if eighties paintings exploded in garish excess, nineties works exercise minimalist restraint; if neo-Mexicanists reveled in a return to Catholicism, orientalists are drawn to Buddhism; if neo-Mexicanist canvases were hot commodities, orientalist artworks never met with much commercial success. Above all, the orientalist turn brought about a much-needed renewal to the Mexican art scene at a time when neo-Mexicanism had reached the point of exhaustion. One need only glance to the catalog of an exhibition like Aspects of Contemporary Mexican Painting, held at New York’s Americas Society in 1990, to realize how tired, repetitive, and lifeless the Mexicanist obsession had become: The nine painters included in the show contributed works that are for the most part indistinguishable from one another. By rediscovering the Orient, artists were able, for the first time in many years, to explore a variety of themes that went beyond Mexican culture. Yishai Jusidman, for example, has explained that his Geishas allowed him to investigate a subject that most of the neo-Mexicanists had ignored: the complex relationship between the viewer and the field of painting.22 It was a refreshing change that inspired the most original creations that the country had seen in years: works that were subtle, playful, and more intriguing than the paintings of the previous decade. But despite the numerous differences that seem to place orientalism as the polar opposite of neo-Mexicanism, the two movements have one important element in common: They both employ a visual language made up of cultural stereotypes: virgins, bleeding hearts, and cacti in one case; sumos, geishas, and rising suns in another. The clichés of Mexican culture simply seem to have been replaced by clichés of Asian tradition: Charros have been replaced by sumos, chinas poblanas by geishas, Mexican flags by rising suns, and the symbols of Catholicism by those of Buddhism. The referent has changed, but the strategy has remained the same.

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Here is an example: Consider, on the one hand, Julio Galán’s China poblana (1987, Figure 9), and, on the other, Yishai Jusidman’s Geishas al descubierto (1992, Figure 10). Galán’s painting shows a headless woman (the face has been cut out, inviting the viewer to stand behind the painting and place his or her own head in the hole) dressed in the traditional dress of a china poblana and holding a bouquet of pink roses. As if to underline the geographic misnomer implicit in the attire’s name, the phrase ‘‘CHINA POBLANA’’ appears floating above a classical Chinese landscape, complete with bamboos, a wooden footbridge, and a rock garden; the china is flanked by two ideograms imitating the calligraphic signatures of Chinese masters. Jusidman’s panting, on the other hand, depicts a barely-perceptible geisha—identifiable only by her pallid face and voluminous hairdo—emerging from the unpainted edge of a square, white monochrome. At first sight, the two works seem to be entirely different: Galán’s painting is crowded with ornament, Jusidman’s is a minimalist void; one is painted in garish colors, the other is a sober monochrome; one is flashy, the other restrained. But though their style is entirely different, the use of cultural stereotypes is virtually identical: Both artists depict figures that, despite being national symbols, are far removed from the current reality of the nations they purport to represent. One would be as hard-pressed to find a china poblana on the streets of modern Mexico as to stumble upon a geisha anywhere in Japan. Another similarity between neo-Mexicanism and orientalism lies in their ahistoricity: Despite their apparent obsession with national culture, neo-Mexicanist paintings are entirely devoid of references to the historical context in which they were created. The 1980s were tough years for Mexico, yet nowhere in the art of this decade can we find references—even veiled allusions—to the major events of this period (the peso crisis of 1982, the devastating earthquake of 1985, the assassination of journalist Manuel Buendía under the government of Miguel de la Madrid, and the allegations of fraud following the 1988 presidential election, to name only a few). And if the 1980s were eventful, the 1990s were the most catastrophic years since the Revolution: Presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio was shot to death, the Zapatistas rose up in arms against the government, the country plunged into the worst financial crisis in recent history, and the PRI was defeated after 70 years of solid rule in the 2000 elections. Strikingly, though all the orientalist works we have been discussing were produced in this tumultuous decade, one would be hard pressed to find even a hint that any of the artists were working in times of turmoil.

Figure 9: Julio Galán, China poblana (1987). Image courtesy of Galería Ramis Barquet, New York.

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Figure 10: Yishai Jusidman, Geishas al descubierto [geisha uncovered], (1992). Image courtesy of the artist and Galería OMR, Mexico City.

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Are we then to conclude that orientalism is a form of escapism for Mexican artists? Can their love of monochromatic geishas and Tantric images be explained as a quest for the serenity that is lacking in their chaotic country? These works certainly stem from a desire to escape the painful reality of 1990s Mexico: Their strategy reminds one of a book of short stories edited by Mario Bellatín in 1999 and called Una ciudad mejor que ésta [A city better than this one].23 The premise of the project was simple: Young writers were invited to write stories set elsewhere, in cities from Europe to Mongolia. Life in Mexico City had become too harsh, too chaotic, too painful, and the editors urged writers to use their imagination to flee into a ‘‘a better city.’’ Following a similar strategy, artists like Eduardo Abaroa and Pablo Vargas Lugo escape the painful reality of Mexican life by retreating into an imaginary Orient that promises a ‘‘better world.’’ But not all artists in the 1990s were orientalists, and not all artists used their work to escape into a better world. In the following chapters we will examine a number of radical art projects focusing on the traumatic events of recent history, from political scandals to rampant crime. We can now leave orientalism behind and move on to address what Hal Foster has called ‘‘the return of the real.’’

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For a few months in 2002, the talk of the town in Mexico City was not about pollution, elections, rising crime, or the ailing economy, but about a photographic project by a 29-year-old artist that unleashed a torrent of tabloid-like newspaper articles: Daniela Rossell’s Ricas y famosas [Rich and famous], a collection of photos of Mexican multimillionaires posing in their palatial and overdecorated homes. The subjects are young, mostly blond women who seem to love attention and the experience of being photographed: They are heavily made-up, attired in Versace and other garish outfits, and they adopt revealing, sexy poses as they look at the camera with lascivious eyes. But the scandal was less about the women than about their homes, which appear to have been furnished by a decorator on steroids and an unlimited budget: There are hunting trophies (from lions to alligators), paintings by Mexico’s most famous artists (from the muralists to the neo-Mexicanists), crystal chandeliers, giant mirrors, gold lamé wallpaper, and maids in crisp uniforms (who appear slightly less comfortable than their employers in front of the camera). Even more striking than the photos are the impassioned reactions they set off: Newspapers ran tabloid-like exposés of the subjects’ identities, prompting some of the women photographed by Rossell to give tearyeyed interviews claiming that they were misrepresented and feared for their safety; historians pointed to the women’s bad taste as symptomatic of cultural decline and the ascendancy of the nouveau riche, while other critics wrote of the endemic government corruption portrayed in Rossell’s images and brandished newly published statistics about Mexican poverty as the unspoken counterpart to these photos. But perhaps what was most perplexing about this saga of the rich and famous was that all the parties involved seemed to forget that these were photographs, and that they needed to be read as such: They were not merely a window into the lifestyles of the multimillionaires but compositions featuring careful choices of framing, cropping, editing, and point of

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Figure 11: Daniela Rossell, Untitled, from the series Ricas y famosas (1994–2001). Courtesy of the artist and Greene Naftali Gallery, New York.

view—representational strategies that are as important a part of the photograph as the subject matter they depict. Amid all the attacks and counterattacks, not one person paused to ask the obvious question: How do the photos frame their subjects? What do these images tell us about these women and their relation to the settings in which they were photographed? The most interesting question is not ‘‘what do critics have to say about rich women in gaudy homes?’’ but ‘‘what do the photos themselves have to say about the scenes they document?’’ But before turning to this question, and in order to offer the reader a concise account of the passions unleashed by Daniela Rossell’s work, here is a brief chronology of the Ricas y Famosas controversy. 1994. Daniela Rossell, a 21-year-old drama student, begins taking photographs of relatives and acquaintances. The country is still ruled by the PRI, and her family has close ties to the governing elite, a connection that opens the doors to some of the most exuberant homes in the city. She photographs the houses of her father, her grandparents, various aunts and uncles, and exhibits the snapshot-size prints at Temístocles, an artistrun center.

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1994–2001. The artist continues to photograph rich women. She expands her base of operations to include other cities, including Monterrey (home to the country’s powerful industrial elite) and New York. Some of Rossell’s photos are included in group shows in Mexico, the United States, and Europe. In 2000, she has her first solo exhibition in New York at Greene Naftali Gallery. Art critics review the work, but they show no more than a tepid interest in the subject matter. One critic calls the photographs ‘‘repugnant yet alluring’’ depictions of ‘‘nouveaux riches.’’1 Teresa del Conde, Mexico’s most prominent art historian, suggests that Rossell’s portraits of rich girls are less interesting than the Australian Tracey Moffat’s portraits of cruel mothers.2 April, 2002. Rossell has her second solo exhibition at Greene Naftali in New York. The New York Times calls the work ‘‘an exercise in cultural anthropology’’ and writes that ‘‘most of her sitters come across as so revolting that you can’t help wondering why popular uprisings aren’t happening every day [in Mexico].’’3 May. Turner, the Madrid publishing house, launches the Spanish edition of Ricas y famosas, an art book compiling Rossell’s photographs taken since 1994 in Mexico City, Guadalajara, Monterrey, Acapulco, and New York. The book opens with a succinct statement by the artist: ‘‘The following images depict actual settings. The photographic subjects are representing themselves. Any resemblance with real events is not coincidental,’’ and closes with a fragment of a review of one of the gallery shows by the New York critic Barry Schwabsky. The rest of the book consists of full-page, color photographs unaccompanied by captions, titles, or even page numbers.4 June 9. The writer Juan Villoro publishes a scathing commentary of the world depicted by Rossell’s photographs in El país semanal. The series, he writes, reads like ‘‘a fairy tale drenched in lysergic acid.’’ He calls these interiors the ‘‘apotheosis of bad taste’’ and points out that ‘‘no one wears make up like that outside of kabuki theater.’’ Villoro is the first critic to observe that many of the women photographed by Rossell are the wives and daughters of powerful PRI officials, and that their exuberant displays of wealth reveal the cynicism with which government officials amassed vast fortunes during the 71 years of one-party rule. Villoro recalls the favorite saying of Carlos Hank González, one of the most notorious—and richest— PRI officials: ‘‘a poor politician is a bad politician.’’ ‘‘Ricas y famosas,’’ writes Villoro, ‘‘is the family portrait of the great revolutionary family, the

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oligarchy that turned the country into a corporation while mouthing social-hypocritical slogans.’’ Villoro’s article includes reproductions of a dozen photos, without titles. A caption announces that the artist has refused to specify the names of the women in the photos in order not to ‘‘endanger their lives or their belongings.’’ (One wonders who or what could endanger their belongings: Thieves? The Mexican police? Prosecutors? The International Court of Justice?)5 June 13. Lorenzo Meyer, a political analyst, devotes his column in the Mexico City daily Reforma to the link between two hot topics: newly released statistics showing that over 50 percent of Mexicans live in poverty and Daniela Rossell’s photographs. The photo series, he writes, ‘‘is one of the most eloquent accounts of the rich Mexicans’ irresponsible and irrelevant behavior towards their nation,’’ and follows through with a torrent of statistics: 40 percent of the poorest households in Mexico earn 12 percent of the country’s income while 10 percent of the richest homes earn 40 percent; 43 percent of the total population lives under the poverty level ‘‘but sustains the lifestyles of excessive consumption enjoyed by the women photographed by Rossell.’’ Meyer is outraged that women could display such luxury while campesinos are being murdered in Oaxaca, and he closes his article by wondering how a country like the one photographed by Daniela Rossell could ever become a democracy.6 For all (or perhaps because of) his moral outrage, the author has nothing to say about the photographs or the photographer. July. The P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in New York includes a selection of Ricas y famosas in an exhibition about young artists in Mexico City bearing the inordinately long title Mexico City: An Exhibition about the Exchange Rates of Bodies and Values. Klaus Biesenbach, the curator, writes in the catalog that the type of woman photographed by Daniela Rossell is ‘‘an object of desire that dangerously verges on the uncanny incarnation of a Barbie stereotype—her sexuality reduced to nothing but an expensive commodity, or worse, to a cheap decoration.’’7 In his characteristically baroque language, Biesenbach basically called Rossell’s models high-class whores. Surprisingly the text, though written by an art professional, has nothing to say about photographic strategies or techniques of representation (though it includes plenty of moralizing about the lifestyles of the subjects). July 28. Reforma publishes an interview with Daniela Rossell about the photographs included in the P.S.1 show. The artist spends much of the

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conversation distancing herself from the increasingly critical attacks against the frivolity of the rich and famous portrayed in her series (‘‘I am not passing judgment,’’ she insists), and reassuring her sitters about her good intentions. She presents her work as an entirely objective record of reality (‘‘My intention was not to manipulate the space or insert my own vision . . . I have never tried to distort reality’’) and tells the reporter that her project ‘‘is about documenting what I find inside [their] homes . . . I enter these houses with an open mind and feeling much gratitude towards the people who are letting me into their homes.’’ When asked about Biesenbach’s suggestion that her models were part of an exchange system of ‘‘bodies and values,’’ she retorts: ‘‘I do not see these women as having a price tag; I see them as having freedom.’’8 Surprisingly, Rossell does not stir the discussion toward photographic techniques or strategies of representation; much of the conversation reads like a defense (she is defending herself against moralizing critics, offended sitters, and curious journalists—all at once!), and the photographer comes across as terrified of the creation she has unleashed on the world. On the same day, Reforma publishes two more articles on Ricas y famosas with tabloid-quality titles: ‘‘Exhibition of Mexican Women and Their Luxury Goods’’ and ‘‘New York Gallery Shows Rich and Famous Mexicans.’’9 August 22. Lorenzo Meyer devotes another column in Reforma to the women portrayed in Ricas y famosas, this time focusing on the book, which has just been released in Mexico. As in his first article, he offers a torrent of statistics—there might be as many as 73 million poor Mexicans, while a tiny minority live in ‘‘an island of obscene abundance’’—and takes the readers through a lengthy overview of twentieth-century economic policies before finally arriving at his diagnosis of the photo book: Conscientious Mexicans will welcome Daniela Rossell’s book ‘‘like an oncologist accepts the usefulness of a clear image of a cancerous tumor, even though it is repugnant.’’ Meyer closes by blaming Mexico’s wealthy—and especially the families photographed by Rossell—for the poverty that afflicts the nation: These millionaires are fed ‘‘by the sea of Mexican poverty’’ and they ‘‘are not a ruling class but a class of parasites.’’10 The title of Meyer’s column comes as no surprise: ‘‘Scandal!’’ August 29. Turner organizes a private book launch party for Ricas y famosas at the Polanco condo towers designed by Cesar Pelli (whose interiors appear in several photos included in the book). As is customary in

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Mexico, the event begins with a panel of presenters reading brief endorsements of the book. The speakers are an eclectic bunch, including Antonio Alatorre, a professor at El Colegio de México and an authority on colonial literature; Gaby Vargas, an advice columnist and author of self-help books, and Eduardo Abaroa, one of the artists discussed in chapter one. Carlos Monsiváis, Mexico’s foremost cultural critic, was listed as a speaker but did not show up. For mysterious reasons (she tells reporters she has received threats and angry messages on her answering machine), Daniela Rossell makes a most unusual move: She does not join the presenters on stage; instead, she sends a double to impersonate her and to read a prepared statement vindicating ‘‘artistic freedom’’ and distancing herself from the criticism voiced in the press. Journalists and photographers swarm the double, while Rossell sits in the audience watching the spectacle.11 ‘‘I have a right,’’ declares the stand-in, ‘‘to the ambiguities I present in this body of work.’’12 (The mysterious double, Wendy de Los Cobos, is the girlfriend of the photographer’s father and one of the women in the book). In her presentation, Gaby Vargas, the advice columnist, tells the audience that Rossell’s photographs are not about wealth but about poverty (!): ‘‘Daniela’s book portrays a different form of poverty, a less obvious type of poverty: that of the soul. A spiritual poverty that comes from loneliness, boredom and an existential nothingness that becomes manifest in the offensive displays of wealth that these characters pretend to inhabit. They are perfect and doll-like, and though they have it all, they seem to have nothing at all.’’ In a coda that recalls the vacuous speeches of PRI officials, she praises the artist and sounds an optimistic note about the future: ‘‘This young photographer will continue her valorous quest to turn her sharp and critical gaze to a reality that escapes many of us . . . She will go far.’’13 That same day, Reforma publishes an interview with one of the women photographed in Ricas y famosas. Itati Cantoral—pop icon, soap opera actress, daughter of composer Roberto Cantoral, and owner of a gilded mansion documented by Rossell’s camera (Figure 12)—tells the newspaper she is proud to be part of Ricas y famosas (though she makes clear that she ‘‘is not amongst the richest in Mexico’’) and would love to travel to New York to see her likeness on the walls of P.S.1.14 August 30. Another of Rossell’s photographic subjects speaks out: Paulina Díaz Ordaz—granddaughter of Gustavo Díaz Ordaz (the president responsible for the 1968 student massacre at Tlatelolco) stepdaughter of Raúl Salinas, and protagonist of the Rossell photo showing a blond

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Figure 12: Daniela Rossell, Untitled, from the series Ricas y famosas (1994–2001). Image courtesy of the artist and Greene Naftali Gallery, New York.

woman posing with stuffed lion (Figure 13)—tells reporters she never authorized Rossell to publish her photographs. In tears, she calls the book offensive (‘‘it’s an insult, because we’re not the richest or the most famous in Mexico’’) and a great danger, since she now fears being kidnapped. ‘‘I’m incensed,’’ she tells Reforma, ‘‘how will I ever ask anyone for a job now: ‘Hi, I’m Paulina, I’m in Rich and Famous’? It’s a disaster for my reputation.’’15 September 3. In a letter to Reforma, Daniela Rossell responds to Paulina Díaz Ordaz’s accusations and rebukes her for coming out to the press: ‘‘[I]n my book Miss Díaz Ordaz appears anonymously, but by speaking to the press she identifies herself in public, which I think is least desirable.’’ She closes by reassuring her that ‘‘this will soon pass and in a few weeks no one will even remember the book.’’16 September 8. Proceso, a weekly magazine that has been a bastion of opposition to the PRI since the 1970s, publishes an exposé on Ricas y famosas. The article presents the photos as testimony of the rampant corruption that characterized the party’s 71-year rule. The article focuses

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Figure 13: Daniela Rossell, Untitled [Paulina Díaz Ordaz], from the series Ricas y famosas (1994–2001). Image courtesy of the artist and Greene Naftali Gallery, New York.

not on the women in the photos (though captions identify the sitters by name) but on the photographer herself, providing a detailed account of Daniela Rosell’s family connections to the PRI: Her paternal grandfather, Guillermo Rossell de la Lama, a close friend of former president José López Portillo, had a long political career that included stints as senator, minister of tourism, and governor of the state of Hidalgo; her maternal grandfather, Leandro Rovirosa Wade, was governor of the oil-rich state of Tabasco and a close friend of Carlos Salinas, the disgraced ex-president (thus the photographer’s easy access to the various members of the Salinas family depicted in the book, including the ex-president’s son, who appears holding a wooden rosary in his hands). The reporter calls the book ‘‘a scandal because of its rude display of a social class that has PRI written all over it.’’17 Despite the sensationalistic tone, the article reveals nothing new: Daniela Rossell has never concealed her family ties to the PRI, and in fact the author’s photograph on the book jacket shows her posing in front of a dilapidated PRI logo. September 10. Guadalupe Loaeza, who has made a career of writing in the voice of Mexico’s rich and famous in books like Compro, luego existo

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and Las niñas bien, devotes her weekly column to Ricas y famosas.18 The text is an imaginary monologue by one of Rossell’s models: ‘‘This is what happened: Daniela called me and was really sweet and said: ‘so how about a photo shoot? Emiliano Salinas, Lizzie Barrera, Alicia Santos, Jana Jaffe, her husband, and Mauricio Fernández Garza have all said yes.’ So I said, ‘Sure, Daniela, why not?’ . . . Now, if she had come to me and asked, ‘Can I take some photos of your maids in their rooms?’ then I would have thought it was really weird. I would have said, ‘Dani, what’s wrong with you? What do you mean you want to photograph my maids?’ But taking pictures of her old friends at home—what’s wrong with that?’’19 September 11. Cuauhtémoc Medina, the art critic, reviews the book for Reforma. ‘‘Rossell’s,’’ he writes, ‘‘is an art of provocation. It provokes a torrent of comments.’’20 September 12–26. Word of the Ricas y famosas affair hits the foreign press. The British Observer, the Houston Chronicle, the Associated Press, CNN, and the New York Times all run articles on the book and the storm that followed it. Most articles quote Guadalupe Loeza’s reactions to the book: ‘‘It’s so kitsch, so ugly and common, so lamentable in a country like Mexico where there is so much (artistic) wealth and history’’;21 these are ‘‘people without education, without culture, without tradition, without points of reference.’’22 A few days later, Loaeza uses her own column to decry the pest of foreign journalists asking her to comment on Ricas y famosas: ‘‘This was the sixth telephone call I received from abroad asking me the exact same question,’’ she complains. Loaeza laments the lessthan-flattering image of Mexico Rossell’s book presents to foreign readers: ‘‘How can they still be talking about a publication which, far from exalting Mexico . . . debases it? How can they call me from newspapers from Washington, New York, and San Antonio to ask even more questions about a book that does not represent us as a people and that I personally consider to be pathetic?’’23 Historian Guillermo Tovar y de Teresa, author of The City of Palaces: Chronicle of a Lost Heritage, also worries about the image of Mexico exported by the book. He lambasts the ‘‘poor taste’’ of the ‘‘new rich’’ in what reads like a classist appeal for a return to the times of Porfirio Díaz: ‘‘The old rich enjoyed themselves. The new rich consume. They are rich, but rich in garbage. Everything they touch turns vulgar.’’24 Meanwhile Rossell, in tears (more tears; the story begins to read like an episode of the 1970s soap opera Los ricos también lloran) tells the New York Times she feels harassed: ‘‘the women in the book are calling me at

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home, threatening me every night. I am feeling like I cannot speak freely.’’25 November 10. A select group of PRI dinosaurs—including former president López Portillo—stage an elaborate homage to Guillermo Rossell de la Lama, the photographer’s grandfather, at the Polyforum Siqueiros. In his speech, Guillermo Rossell praises his granddaughter (who was not in attendance) for inheriting ‘‘his cultural sensibility’’ and spreading the fame of Mexican art abroad. Rossell closes his speech by calling on his fellow party-members to continue the struggle for a future in which ‘‘hunger and extreme poverty’’ will be soon be eradicated.26 December. By the end of the year, the press has left the Ricas y famosas affair behind and has moved on to other scandals—a multimillion-dollar contract awarded by city officials to Rudolph Giuliani, former mayor of New York City, for consulting on how to improve the quality of life and make Mexico City more like Gotham; the upcoming congressional elections—that have nothing to do with photography. It took a bit longer than she predicted, but Daniela Rossell was right in assuming that in a few weeks, no one would remember the entire affair. What is most striking about this catalog of impassioned reactions to Ricas y famosas—denunciations of corruptions, fears of the national image, apprehensions about kidnappers, diatribes about ‘‘poor taste’’—is that none of the commentators involved say much about the photographs themselves. All the characters involved, including the photographer, get so distracted by the scandal that they forget the main issue is about representation and mediation. What do these works—through their selection, cropping, and other photographic techniques—tell us about the scenes they represent? Rossell’s works are very different from those by other photographers who depict ordinary Mexicans. In the photographs of Manuel Álvarez Bravo and Henri Cartier Bresson, for example, every image tells a selfcontained story and the viewer does not need to know any extraphotographic details—like the identity of the subjects, or the time and location at which the shot was taken—to read the image. In contrast, Rossell’s individual images tell only part of the story, and we need quite a bit of external information to piece together the narrative. In this sense, Rossell’s work is closer to that of photographers like Larry Clark and Nan Goldin, whose series document the lifestyles of American subcultures—sexy teenagers for Clark, older druggies for Goldin—that require the viewer to possess a

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minimum of extradiegetic knowledge (one has, for example, to be slightly familiar with drug paraphernalia and the history of the 1960s in order to fully appreciate these works).27 But Rossell’s work is perhaps closest to that of another photographer who, like Clark and Goldin, has documented the lifestyle of an American subculture: Tina Barney, the photographer of wealthy New Englanders. There are many striking similarities between Ricas y famosas and Barney’s project. Barney has made a career out of photographing her country’s elite—in her case, New England WASPs—and Rossell has done the same with the Mexican oligarchy. Both Barney and Rossell photograph wealthy people in their homes, paying especial attention to furnishings and decoration, and both have used the same cast of characters over the years. In the work of both photographers, something in the compositions suggests that conflicted inner lives might lurk behind the picture-perfect scenes. Both photographers carefully stage their photos by matching subjects, clothing, and the décor of their homes. And both artists grew up in the privileged world they document, thus offering an insider’s perspective into the world they photograph. The photographic aesthetics of both artists are so similar that one of Barney’s most famous images, The Watch (1985), would be entirely at home in the pages of Ricas y famosas. Like most of the scenes in Rossell’s book, Barney’s photo depicts a wealthy young couple, dressed up (he wears a pin-stripe suit; she a sequined gown) and posing in front of an impressionist painting and wood-paneled walls. Like Rossell’s subjects, these two are ‘‘rich and famous’’ and proud of it. But there are important differences between the two photographers: Barney’s work depicts a genteel world of WASP restraint, Rossell’s one of gaudy excess and Catholicism run amok (one of Rossell’s photos shows a crowd of young women gorging on communion wafers, Figure 18) Barney’s photos focus on family life—there are couples with children, mothers and sons, grandparents and family dinners—whereas Rossell’s images depict the plight of alienated individuals: Most of her subjects are alone, and even those who aren’t seem to live in an emotional bubble. Rossell’s photos were met with a torrent of criticism; Barney’s provoked little else beyond a few raised eyebrows, and the occasional snicker (‘‘So much more enticing than Barney’s friends and relatives,’’ wrote one critic, ‘‘is their stuff’’).28 And if Rossell has repeatedly refused to clarify her position vis-à-vis her subjects (often insisting, as she did during the book presentation, on her right to ‘‘artistic ambiguity’’), Barney has never had any qualms about associating herself with her subjects and their world: ‘‘I care very much about the subjects,’’ she declares in the preface to Friends and Relations,

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her first book, ‘‘and [I] know the environment, the surroundings and the lifestyle because it’s my life . . . I worry that this extraordinary way of life might end or change.’’29 And even if many viewers and critics think that Barney’s comments make her sound like an unenlightened socialite (‘‘I suspect,’’ writes one critic, ‘‘that when Barney talks about quality, she means something very different from Ralph Lauren on behalf of his sheets’’30), at least her position has the merits of frankness and consistency— two attributes that are sorely lacking in Rossell’s statements about her own work. But why did Ricas y famosas unleash such a scandal, while Barney’s photos and books caused no such controversy in the United States? There is one crucial difference between Rossell’s and Barney’s work, and one that explains the vastly different reactions the two artists have provoked: The degree to which their photographs relate to history. Barney’s bourgeois scenes are entirely cut off from history: Her subjects live in a bubble of privileged domesticity, and the real world—with its wars, political scandals, and economic crises—never enters these photographs. Looking through the recently published Theater of Manners, a compilation of Barney’s work since the 1970s, the viewer is surprised by the subjects’ imperviousness to the outside world: Barney has been photographing the same people for over 30 years, yet they always appear untouched by the historical events that unfolded during this time—the Vietnam War, the eighties’ bonanza, the nineties crash, the current recession . . . Nothing in their comfortable living rooms and cozy kitchens suggests even a remote intrusion of the outside world. Rossell’s photos, on the other hand, teem with references to Mexican history. The lush interiors she documents are littered with paintings, sculptures, books, and other objects alluding to the most important national episodes of the twentieth century: the Mexican Revolution, the PRI and its seven-decade rule, the Salinas scandal, the defeat of the PRI in 2000, and the ascendancy of the PAN. Rossell’s series is much more than a document of the rich and famous: It is a compelling narrative of Mexican history from the Revolution to the present. And there is a good reason why Rossell’s work is historical while Barney’s is not: Barney’s subjects are merely wealthy—the viewer would gain nothing by knowing more about their lives; they are probably entirely unremarkable doctors, lawyers, and bankers—but Rossell’s sitters are the wives and daughters of extremely powerful men who altered the course of Mexican history: governors, politicians, and businessmen who, for better or worse, had a hand in making Mexico what it is today. Take, for example, Untitled (Paulina Díaz Ordaz, Figure 13). The photograph shows an attractive young woman wearing a tight tee shirt

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Figure 14: Daniela Rossell, Untitled [Paulina Díaz Ordaz with Salinas painting], from the series Ricas y famosas (1994–2001). Image courtesy of the artist and Greene Naftali Gallery, New York.

(‘‘Peep show $1.00’’) and posing for the camera in a garish room decorated with Persian rugs, empire furniture, family portraits and a stuffed lion, presumably a hunting trophy. But this is not just any young woman: She is Paulina Díaz Ordaz, the granddaughter of ex-president Gustavo Díaz Ordaz—the man responsible for the worst episode of political violence since the Revolution, the stepdaughter of Raúl Salinas, a brother of the ex-president and an inmate in Mexico’s highest security prison since 1995 (he was accused of money laundering and of masterminding a political assassination), and the daughter of Paulina Castañón, who was arrested in Switzerland in 1995 as she tried to withdraw funds from an account holding 84 million dollars using a fake passport.31 Paulina Díaz Ordaz appears in another of Rossell’s photographs, jumping in front of a painting made in prison by Raúl Salinas: a portrait of Paulina, her sister, and her mother, signed, ‘‘con mucho cariño, Raúl’’ [‘‘with love, Raúl’’], and dated 1997 (Figure 14). It is amazing how much history is packed into these two photographs: They are full of allusions to the 1968 student massacre, to the violent presidency of Díaz Ordaz (a man who could be described as the Mexican

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Figure 15: Daniela Rossell, Untitled [Wendy and Zapata], from the series Ricas y famosas (1994–2001). Image courtesy of the artist and Greene Naftali Gallery, New York.

Pinochet), and to the corrupt business practices of the Salinas family— dirty money that paid for the lion hunting expeditions, Persian rugs, and empire furniture seen in the photos. But perhaps what is most striking in these photos is the subject’s nonchalance: Paulina Díaz Ordaz holds a tennis racket, bounces up and down through her house, and poses for Rossell’s camera, but nothing in the photos indicates an awareness of the dark history that envelops her name and her family history. In another of Rossell’s portraits of Paulina, a picture of ex-president Díaz Ordaz hangs from a wall in her room, but . . . has she even heard of the 1968 student massacre? Is she aware of the reasons why her stepfather was sent to prison? No and no, Rossell’s photographs suggest: The model lives in blissful ignorance, even as she inhabits a space littered with the debris left behind by a shipwrecked nation. (The photographer, on the other hand, seems keenly aware of the historical references; all the portraits of Paulina Díaz Ordaz included in the book play with the contrast between the sitter’s nonchalance and the momentous historical referents that surround her). Another Rossell photo shows a son of Carlos Salinas, Emiliano Salinas, whom the ex-president named after Emiliano Zapata, the Revolutionary hero from the state of Morelos who fought for the campesinos’ right to land and freedom. In Rossell’s photo, Emiliano

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Figure 16: Daniela Rossell, Untitled [Banuet and Zapata], from the series Ricas y famosas (1994–2001). Image courtesy of the artist and Greene Naftali Gallery, New York.

Salinas stands clutching a rosary in front of a bay window adorned with a Mexican flag in stained glass. The image can be read as an ironic comment on the fate of the nationalist discourse (symbolized by the flag) that was a staple of Mexican politics during the PRI’s hold on power: Cynical politicians have turned the flag and other emblems of nationalism into kitschy decorations, destined—along with the hunting trophies and Persian rugs—to embellish mansions acquired with ill-gotten wealth. Standing under the flag, Emiliano Salinas clutches a wooden rosary—an odd juxtaposition that reminds the viewer that in post-revolutionary Mexico, it was not religion but nationalism that became the opium of the masses. Portraits of Zapata appear in several of Rossell’s photographs: In one image (Figure 15), the revolutionary hero hangs on the wood-paneled library of a house owned by Guillermo Rossell, the photographer’s father. A blond woman (Wendy de los Cobos, the relative who impersonated the photographer at the book presentation) strikes a sexy pose while a maid in uniform dusts the books, her back against the camera. Zapata—the only revolutionary fighter who, unlike Villa or Carranza, never betrayed his ideals of social justice—struggled until his death to

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Figure 17: Daniela Rossell, Untitled [Siqueiros], from the series Ricas y famosas (1994–2001). Image courtesy of the artist and Greene Naftali Gallery, New York.

liberate poor Mexicans from the tyranny of wealthy landowners. And it is a great irony that his portrait wound up as an ornament in the homes of the very class he fought against, and that Zapata and other revolutionaries have been reduced to bourgeois decorations after seven decades of rhetorical abuse by shameless PRI politicians like those photographed by Rossell. As in the portraits of Paulina Díaz Ordaz, this image is one of blissful ignorance: Does this woman know who Zapata was? Does she realize that he fought so that people like her maid would not live lives of servitude? The ironies of Mexican history, the photograph suggests, are entirely lost upon this model. (And, as in the Díaz Ordaz photos, the photographer has carefully staged the photograph in order to highlight these dissonances). In another photo (Figure 16), Zapata’s portrait hangs from the wall of an office dominated by a young woman wearing a Texan hat, hot pants, and sitting on a riding chair perched on a desk. Various documents and picture frames—including a campaign brochure—scattered throughout the room reveal that this is the office of a prominent PRI politician named Beto Banuet (in one picture, he stands next to an image of Pancho Villa, another revolutionary caudillo). The woman in hot pants—the candi-

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date’s daughter and Rossell’s cousin—flicks her cigarette’s ashes on Villa’s portrait, as if symbolically burying the ideals represented by the Mexican Revolution. But Ricas y famosas is not, as Villoro suggested, merely an indictment of the PRI’s penchant for corruption and cynicism: Many of Rossell’s subjects are unaffiliated with the PRI, and at least one—Mauricio Fernández Garza, shown standing in front of a giant wall mural of his family tree—is a high-ranking member of another party: He was the PAN’s candidate for the governorship of Nuevo León in 2002 but lost the election. Rossell’s photos of Fernández’s Monterrey house, filled with exotic animal skins and hunting trophies, demonstrate that the PRI does not have a monopoly on either millionaire politicians or bad taste, and they suggest a grim prognosis: Even after the PRI lost the presidency in 2000, many of the problems long associated with the party—from corruption to nepotism—are engrained in the country’s political culture and will continue to plague Mexico for the foreseeable future. A 2004 article in the New York Times noted that many of the democratic reforms that were designed to eliminate the PRI’s monopoly on power have actually spread its corrupt strategies to other political parties, including the PAN and the Ecological Green Party. ‘‘Since 1996,’’ writes Ginger Thompson, ‘‘Mexico has introduced numerous electoral reforms that were aimed at leveling a one-party political playing field . . . Not many people expected utopia when the reforms were enacted. But in recent weeks, hidden cameras have exposed evidence that they have helped spread corruption through the political system on a scale even jaded Mexicans find breathtaking . . . small parties have become big businesses too.’’32 Yet other photos reveal the degree to which the recent history of Mexico has been shaped by a few powerful families, including the photographer’s own. One image shows Marien Lankenau, a teenage girl in a red top lounging by a colorful abstract painting (Figure 17): a late painting by the muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros dedicated in the artist’s handwriting to ‘‘Don Manuel Suárez.’’33 Suárez was a wealthy Spanishborn businessman who financed the construction of the Polyforum Siqueiros in Mexico City (Suárez was so devoted to Siqueiros that he ordered two tombs, one for the artist and another for himself, built into the Polyforum). The Polyforum was part of a larger project that was to include the largest and most modern hotel in Mexico. In the 1970s, Suárez commissioned architect Guillermo Rossell de la Lama (the photographer’s grandfather) to design the Hotel de México, which was to be the tallest skyscraper in the city. The project was to be built over Parque de la Lama, a park that had been given to the city years earlier by one of

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Guillermo—and Daniela—Rossell’s ancestors. The Polyforum was completed, but the hotel went over budget and remained—like many of the PRI’s modernizing projects—unfinished for almost two decades, a vast and skeletal white elephant towering over Mexico City. The writer Fabrizio Mejía Madrid has described the insane proportions of this failed project: According to the brochures, Hotel de México would boast: 51 stories, lodging for 3,100 guests in 1,508 hexagonal rooms including 1,188 bedrooms, 132 executive suites, four diplomatic suites, three ministerial suites, and two presidential suites; four cafeterias holding 800, six restaurants holding 1,240, a revolving restaurant on the top floor, 14 private dining rooms for 850, a panoramic elevator for 100 tourists and 19 additional elevators for ordinary passengers and freight, one covered and two open-air panoramic terraces that between them could process 1,000 people per hour; five reception halls for 6,000 partygoers, one cabaret, 13 bars for 2,000 boozers, one convention room for 3,000 guests and services for up to 9,000 conference participants, parking for 2,000 cars, a customshouse-equipped heliport equal in size to that built by Manuel Suárez at Casino de la Selva in Cuernavaca, permitting the conveyance of 40 guests in two Sikorsky helicopters—plus a monorail for whisking clients to the aforementioned Casino in less than an hour—a health club, a spiral-shaped shopping mall of 21,500 square feet containing craft stores, banks, hair stylists and jewelry outlets, the Siqueiros Cultural Polyforum with 50,00 square feet of mural paintings, a theater for 2,000 spectators, a museum that could hold 1,100 people at once and a hotel annex for chauffeurs, secretaries and personal maids. The daily El Universal worked it out: ‘‘One thousand people entering the complex every 15 minutes.’’34

Fast-forward to the year 2000. Manuel Suárez is dead, Rossell de la Lama has retired from both politics and architecture, and the Hotel de México was never finished (the shell was eventually transformed into an office building bearing the inauspicious English name World Trade Center). Few people remember Suárez and even fewer know about his grandiose but failed project. When Daniela Rossell photographed the teenage girl next to the Siqueiros painting, she also captured a portrait of two families—the Suárezes and the Rossells—whose financial scandals and power struggles are inscribed in the urban geography of Mexico City. Decades after Manuel Suárez and Guillermo Rossell de la Lama collaborated to build a skyscraper, their descendants meet to collaborate on an art project. But, like the previous photos, these are portraits of oblivion: Does the teenager know the story of the Hotel de México? Does she know about the business

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deals between the photographer’s grandfather and her own family? Does she know the history behind the Siqueiros painting hanging on her wall? Apparently not, suggests the photograph. The world photographed by Rossell also reads like a dustbin of Mexican art: There are baroque altars, mountain landscapes by Velasco, muralist paintings, abstract compositions, neo-Mexicanist sculptures, and even recent works by the photographer’s contemporaries—works that share wall space with hunting trophies, family portraits, and framed diplomas. One photo shows a young woman standing in front of a primitivist wooden sculpture, about to bite into a giant piece of chicharrón, the porkrind snack sold in most Mexican markets. The model, Sandy López Rocha, is the daughter of Eugenio López Rocha, a Guadalajara industrialist who became the most important collector of young Mexican art until his shoe business, Calzado Canadá, went bankrupt in the early years of NAFTA. The wooden sculpture is by Germán Venegas, and its vast scale and accumulation of naked bodies are typical of much neo-Mexicanist work of the 1980s. And what looks like pork rind is actually a trompe l’œil ceramic sculpture by Gabriel Kuri, one of the young artists included, along with Daniela Rossell, in the P.S.1 exhibition in New York. The work, titled Doy Fe (1998), is representative of the cryptic projects favored by Gabriel Orozco’s protégés (of which Gabriel Kuri is one of the most successful). As if to take the artist’s intention of making high art emulate street culture a step further, Sandy López Rocha has poured chili sauce over the ceramic chicharrón (we can see the sauce drips forming a red puddle the floor) and looks ready to dig her teeth into the rind. Rossell’s photo reads like a sarcastic comment on the practices of Mexican collectors: Despite the wide ideological differences between Venegas and Kuri, between the neo-Mexicanism of the 1980s and the neo-conceptualism of the 1990s, their two works share a common destiny: to become the toys of collectors who do not show much concern for the preservation of their artwork but who are blessed with ravenous appetites for both money and art. Rossell’s photos focus not on the culture of corruption that characterizes Mexican politics—as most critics have suggested—but on the historical amnesia of younger generations. Even though these young women inhabit spaces that are chock-full of references to the last hundred years of Mexican history, politics, and art, they appear entirely oblivious of the evidence that surrounds them, blissfully ignorant of the degree to which their own families have been responsible for the political, economic, and perhaps even artistic disasters that have plagued the country in the last century.

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Rossell’s own attitude towards her subjects’ historical amnesia is ambiguous at best. On the one hand, her stage directions highlight her models’ links to Mexican politics, thus her decision to photograph Paulina Díaz Ordaz next to Raúl Salinas’s painting, Emiliano Salinas by a Mexican flag, or the uniformed maid under a portrait of Zapata. But at the same time, the photographer seems to have done everything in her power to obscure the historical context—and the political significance—of her images: She has insisted on publishing and exhibiting her photographs as untitled works, and she has persistently refused to identify the subjects portrayed in her series. Before Proceso and Reforma revealed the models’ identities, most viewers had no idea of the extent to which Ricas y famosas portrayed the families that have run the country for the last decades. Even more surprising is the format Rossell chose for the book version of Ricas y famosas. Full-page photographs follow one another without any text, dates, or even page numbers. And the selection and organization of the photos is haphazard at best: Though most were taken in Mexico, a few were shot in New York; most depict women, but there are also a few men; the majority of the models are somehow related to Mexican politics, but there are also one or two television stars. Conceptually, the book would have been much stronger had it focused exclusively on Mexico, and if it were divided into thematically coherent sections (a section on PRI politicians, for example, followed by one on PAN sympathizers, or a chapter on Mexico City followed by one on Monterrey). Then there is the absence of text. In a project as charged as this one, the photos should have been accompanied by captions explaining, at the very least, the identity of the subjects and the date and place of the shoot. Rossell clearly chose her subjects because they are the relatives of powerful Mexican politicians; to conceal their identity from the reader is an act of bad faith. Writing in the 1930s, Walter Benjamin argued for the necessity of captions in photography. The German critic saw photography as a paradoxical medium: On the one hand, it had the potential to capture reality with unprecedented detail and accuracy; but photos were also prone to dangerous political misreadings if viewers lacked the historical and political background to put the image in context (many unsophisticated viewers, for example, were seduced by Nazi photographs portraying Hitler as a powerful leader). The German critic argued that photographers had the responsibility to provide ‘‘signposts’’ and ‘‘directives’’ for the viewer: brief texts that would provide the necessary contextual information for reading the image.35 ‘‘For the first time,’’ wrote Benjamin, ‘‘captions become obligatory. And it is clear that they have a character altogether different from the titles of paintings.’’36 Images needed to be

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Figure 18: Daniela Rossell, Untitled [Empache cristiano / Christian gorging], from the series Ricas y famosas (1994–2001). Image courtesy of the artist and Greene Naftali Gallery, New York.

accompanied by texts, and for him the textual element took precedent over the visual component: ‘‘Will not the caption,’’ he asked his readers, ‘‘become the most important part of the photograph?’’37 Rossell’s book, in contrast, lacks not only captions but even an introductory essay: There are no ‘‘signposts’’ to guide the reader. As an afterword, the photographer selected three thin paragraphs by Barry Schwabsky, a New York art critic unfamiliar with the political saga that lurks behind these photographs. Text plays such an insignificant role in the book that most journalists—including the New York Times’s Ginger Thompson—have referred to Ricas y famosas as a ‘‘coffee-table book.’’ Sadly, all of these decisions contribute to advancing the type of historical amnesia that Rossell’s work so eloquently documents. But why would an artist who spent so many years selecting her models from among the country’s political elite ultimately decide to present her work in such an ahistorical manner? It seems that many of Rossell’s decisions—especially her insistence on maintaining the anonymity of the models—were motivated by fear: She has repeatedly told journalists that she is afraid of lawsuits, afraid of angering the models, afraid that her

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intentions would be misinterpreted. In the end, Rossell comes across like a modern-day Dr. Frankenstein: She has become terrified of her own creation, an ugly art-world monster that has gone out of control. To this critic, however, Rossell’s work comes across less as a monstrosity than as a tragically missed opportunity. If the photographs in Ricas y famosas had been carefully organized into thematic sections, if they had been accompanied by texts identifying the models and their links to Mexican history, if the artist had been more forthcoming about the goals of her project, and if she had chosen a more enlightened title—in short, if she had produced an artist’s book and not a coffee-table book—the project could have become one of the most important works of political art in Mexican history. With the photographic material at hand and a few explanatory texts, Rossell could have created a Mexican equivalent of Hans Haacke’s conceptual investigations of the connections between artistic institutions, wealthy individuals, and shady business practices. Her portraits of Mexico’s ruling families had the potential to rise to the level of Haacke’s Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings; A Real Time Social System, as of May, 1971 (1971), which documented the elaborate financial web through which a single family secured ownership of hundreds of tenements in New York City, or Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Board of Trustees (1974), which exposed the connections among the Guggenheim’s trustees and transnational corporations like the Kennecott Copper Corporation that engaged in dubious business practices.38 Had she chosen this more serious approach to her photographs, Rossell would have created a masterpiece that would go down in history as the most eloquent exposé of the tangled web linking art, wealth, and corruption in the Mexican political system. It is a tragedy that instead her editorial decisions turned Ricas y famosas into a book version of Hello! magazine. Many of the scenes in Ricas y famosas remind the viewer of an episode in Carlos Fuentes’s La región más transparente (1958), a novel that traces the fate of various families in post-revolutionary Mexico. The novel’s cast of characters includes shrewd peasants who become political tycoons, aristocrats who loose their fortunes but retain their snobbery, and savvy businessmen who profit from every national tragedy. In the midst of this historical narrative, Fuentes includes a chapter titled ‘‘Bobó’s Party,’’ in which the sons and daughters of the PRI officials and tycoons who rule the country lounge around in a penthouse, acting bored, drinking gin and tonics, wearing imported fashions, and listening to rock music. While their parents—politicians, industrialists, and intellectuals—treat the country as

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if it were a game of monopoly, making and unmaking fortunes and people’s lives, the kids play, impervious to the corruption and cynicism unfolding around them. Rossell’s photos (see, for example, Figure 18) remind us of how little things have changed since the 1950s: Presidents have come and gone, the PRI lost the presidency, but Bobó’s party, after 50 years, is still going.39

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The previous two chapters were devoted to the work of artists who were initially associated with Temístocles and have gone on to exhibit their work in international museums and galleries. This chapter will examine the work of Taniel Morales, an artist with a very different background. Morales, who works primarily with sound, has always kept a low profile and a relatively marginal position in the Mexico City art scene: He does not work with a commercial gallery, either in Mexico or abroad, and his work has never been featured in the blockbuster exhibitions of Mexican art that have been shown in museums from New York to Berlin. Since 2003, Morales has taught various art, performance, and sound workshops at El Faro de Oriente—a public art school located in Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl, one of the poorest districts in Mexico City—to an eclectic audience that includes punks, hard rockers, gang members, and even the occasional vagabond. Out of all the technological media introduced in the twentieth century, radio has inspired some of the most unusual representations of Mexico City. Even in the age of satellite television, broadband Internet, and digital video, radio continues to be one of the most popular sources of music, news, political commentary, and celebrity gossip for the inhabitants of the capital. There are hundreds of radio stations in Mexico City, and more go on the air every year. There are stations devoted to every imaginable type of music: from cumbia to classical, from norteño to rap, from techno to danzón. There are commercial stations owned by media giants, not-for-profit ones maintained by the university, and rickety ones run by artists and activists. Some stations broadcast programs to a target audience of construction workers; others broadcast for maids; yet others for housewives. And then there are the pirate stations, with their erratic

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broadcast schedules and a taste for airing programs about UFOs and headless women. Radio is one of the most democratic media in Mexico. Only celebrities can appear on television, and only intellectuals can publish in newspapers, but everyone in the city—rich or poor, literate or illiterate, young or old— can aspire to hear his or her voice broadcast over the air waves, thanks to the hundreds of talk shows that make up the bulk of the stations’ programming. There are serious talk shows about politics, flaky ones about astrology, tearful ones about love (including La hora de los corazones rotos, in which heartbroken callers have the host phone their lovers and mediate their disputes—all on the air), and quack ones about health issues, but they all share a similar structure: The host introduces the program, then announces the telephone number that listeners can call to express their views, voice their complaints, or simply say hello to their friends and family. And how they call! The numbers are always busy, as hundreds— perhaps thousands—of eager listeners dream of having their comments, requests, and sweet nothings broadcast over the airwaves gracing the skies of the Valley of Mexico. There is another reason for radio’s immense popularity: In a city where a good number of the 20 million inhabitants spend several hours a day commuting (it can take up to two hours to traverse the city from north to south), radio functions as a palliative for the headaches of daily transport. In minibuses and taxis, the radio is always on, always tuned to a talk show, and upon boarding, passengers often engage the driver in a discussion about politics or love that becomes an extension of the program. The radio accompanies every type of public transportation in the city (except for the metro, an underground space impervious to its waves): private cars cruising down the Periférico, trailer trucks traversing the Viaducto, and delivery vans inching though the Centro’s streets all tune in the minute they start their engines, perhaps wishing that their vehicles could zip through the city at the speed of radio waves. But Mexico City’s denizens tune in even when they are not moving about. One of the most salient features of the capital’s changarros (the mom-and-pop shops that survive even in the age of transnational corporations and offer every conceivable service from shoe repair to computer programming) is the presence of a loud radio. The radio is always on at the shoemaker’s, at the locksmith’s, at the taco vendor’s. There are even radios—miniature ones—on the desks of security guards who control access to government buildings. If, as Octavio Paz suggested, Mexicans live in a ‘‘labyrinth of solitude,’’ then perhaps radio is their Ariande, an electronic signal that points the way out. Feeling lonely? Tune in any time of day or night and you will instantly have the company

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of radio hosts and their avid callers. After the invention of radio, no one has to be alone again. Though radios seem to be everywhere in Mexico City, few writers or artists have explored the medium and its centrality to city life. There are no novels or films about Mexican radio, no local versions of Vargas Llosa’s Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (1977)—a literary homage to radio—or Woody Allen’s Radio Days (1987). There are no plays or films, paintings or photographs about broadcasting (perhaps because it is a ‘‘blind’’ medium that replaces sight with sound). The notable exception is the work of Taniel Morales, an artist who has run several pirate radio stations around Mexico City (including ‘‘Radio Pirata XCH—Sin Permiso’’),1 and whose entire oeuvre is an exploration of radio and its potential as a medium of artistic expression.2 Since 1995 Morales has put together various radio programs that play with the conventions of regular talk shows but are devoted to entirely unconventional subject matter: one post-modern, science-fiction program narrates the arrival of UFOs (they enter Mexico City through a hole in the ozone layer) and includes an interview with an alien; another sets the words of E. M. Cioran’s poems to cumbias and mambos; yet another— produced on the eve of the year 2000—muses on the political apocalypse threatening to unravel at the turn of the millennium. Out of the dozen or so programs Morales has produced, there is one that deals explicitly with the role of radio in Mexico City: Sin cabeza— Necropsia (1999), a gory collage of music and texts about severed body organs that the artist designed to be broadcast aboard a crowded minibus serving Avenida Revolución, a crowded boulevard traversing the city from north to south. The program was actually a trompe l’oreille: though it sounded like a live radio broadcast (it included station announcements, advertisements, and familiar jingles lifted from the Mexico City airwaves), it was in fact a tape prepared by Morales beforehand and played, with the driver’s cooperation, through the bus’s sound system. As the program got increasingly outlandish—at one point a headless woman calls a talk show host to alert the audience about organ trafficking— passengers laughed, made faces, or looked surprised, but no one complained or asked for an explanation. Sin cabeza is an experiment in creative broadcasting. Sin cabeza opens with a two-second station announcement recorded from ‘‘Radio Uno,’’ a real radio station in Mexico City, and immediately cuts to a string of short musical fragments: a clip of a song by Los Tigres

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del Norte, a snippet of a tune by Los Temerarios. A voice (also lifted from a legitimate program) then announces that we are about to hear ‘‘In ilo tempore,’’ a program about ancient music, but the music that follows is far from ancient: we hear a few lines from Beatles song (‘‘She loves you yeah yeah yeah’’) sung with a strong Mexican accent. After a station announcement for ‘‘La KE Buena,’’ (another real radio station), a new host urges listeners to phone in for a chance to win one thousand pesos. At this point, the broadcast still sounds like a legitimate talk show. The phone rings, the host answers, and the following dialogue ensues: Host: Who is speaking? Caller: It’s Estella Moon H: Where are you calling from? C: I’m in Cabeza de Juárez [a Mexico City metro station named after a sculpture of Juárez’s head]. My head’s missing. It was stolen. H: How convenient . . . Why are you calling? C: I’m calling to raise awareness about organ trafficking. H: What song would you like to hear?3

A song—presumably the one requested by the headless woman—comes on the air: Pérez Prado’s ‘‘Mi cerebro,’’ a mambo about the brain (!) that includes the following lyrics: ‘‘Mi cerebro. Con tu cara. Con tu hombro. Con tu risa. Con tu cuerpo. Y tu cuerpo. La quiero. Ya, la quiere. La quiere’’ [My brain. With your face. With your shoulder. With your laughter. And your body. I want it. Now, I want it.] Morales’s program continues for 30 minutes, taking listeners through an auditory odyssey that includes the following acoustic smorgasbord: a voice reading detailed instructions on how to dissect and extract organs from a corpse, an interview with Dr. Mercado, a medicine professor at UNAM who explains the human body through sociopolitical analogies (‘‘In an act of terrorism,’’ he explains, ‘‘the virus invades the cell and wreaks havoc’’); a voice narrating a crazed journey through the entire Mexico City subway system (‘‘Run, jump in, jump in again, Universidad, Copilco, Miguel Angel de Quevedo, walk, walk, keep walking, Viveros, Coyoacan, Zapata . . . ’’); a lengthy exposition of the earth’s sexual movements taken from a new-age text; conversations taped from old TV reruns; random sound bytes; and, as a grand finale, a reading of the last section from Artaud’s To Have Done with the Judgment of God, the 1947 radio play urging listeners to place man on a dissection table and strip him from his organs (‘‘there is nothing more useless than an organ,’’ Artaud tells his listeners in a deranged voice.)4

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Interspersed throughout the program are bits of pop songs from the sixties to the present, an acoustic snapshot of the last 40 years of Mexican music: Sonia López, the Sonora Santanera’s vocalist, sings a song about Batman in which the comic-book hero and his language are tropicalized. The song is a good example of how popular culture in Mexico transforms American imports into local creations: Ahora hay batimóvil, baticueva y batisoga, y para que reposes tu usarás el batiyoga. Yo tengo baticasa baticoche y batichico y es batiamoroso, batibueno y batirico. [We have bat-mobiles, bat-caves and bat-ropes, and to relax you can do some bat-yoga. I’ve got a bat-house, a bat-car, and a bat-stud who’s batlovely, bat-hung and bat-rich]5

Another segment features ‘‘Aventuras en Revolución’’ by Rockdrigo González, a rock singer known for his violently realistic lyrics. This song narrates a violent assault against passengers who, like Sin cabeza’s original audience, were riding a bus cruising down Revolución: La otra vez tomé un camión que jugaba las carreras allá en Revolución. Estaba lleno de ratas que sacaban la cartera y las armas de volón. El camión mataba gente; les tronaba la cabeza . . . El chofer era un chacal que comía la masa gris de los muertos en cuestión . . . [The other day I took a bus racing down Revolución. It was full of thugs who’d filch your wallet and draw their guns. The bus ran over people: it smashed their heads . . . The driver was a jackal, he ate the brains off the dead bodies . . . ]6

There is another song about the torture of waiting for hours for a bus on the Periférico; a sappy love song by Adriana Molina titled ‘‘Eres tú’’; and a tune from the 1967 musical ‘‘Las fascinadoras’’ urging listeners to leave behind their kitchen chores and engage in social work (‘‘Deja el metate y usa tu cabeza’’). This dizzying sampling of Mexican pop closes with a cumbia celebrating sublime love in tropical beats: Amor. Quiero amor romántico. Quiero amor sublime. Quiero amor de cumbia. Soñar un sueño profundo, donde mire al mundo con amor de cumbia. [Love. I want romantic love. I want sublime love. I want Cumbia love. I want to have a powerful dream in which I see the world through Cumbia love.]7

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Heterogeneity —Por favor dígale al respetable de qué se alimenta. —Pos de gansitos, coca cola y . . . coca cola . . . y también me dan mi torta de pierna y a veces también con aguacate.8 —Taniel Morales, Sin cabeza, track 13 Though Sin cabeza might sound like a psychotic accumulation of random fragments, there is in fact method to this madness. The program is actually an experiment in acoustic realism, since most of its sounds have been lifted from legitimate radio broadcasts and real-life occurrences (like Dr. Mercado’s rambling speeches, taken from his lectures at the university). If a radio enthusiast were to surf through the dozens of radio stations in the city, listening to each for a few seconds, the result would be a wacky collage similar to Sin cabeza. Taniel Morales’s program draws the listener’s attention to the wild heterogeneity that characterizes Mexican radio—an anarchic medium where opera singers, fortune-tellers, political commentators, tropical bands, and pop singers vie for space on the airwaves. But the acoustic heterogeneity so eloquently sampled in Sin cabeza is not exclusive to Mexican radio—it is one of the most salient characteristics of radio as a medium, and one that has fascinated critics since the early days of broadcasting. When regular radio transmissions began in the 1920s, conservative critics were horrified at the medium’s indiscriminate airing of everything from opera to pop music, from newscasts to comedy shows. Rudolf Arnheim, one of the first theorists of radio who was otherwise optimistic about the new medium’s potential, worried that listeners might get lost in the mishmash of radio programming: ‘‘The wireless listener,’’ he wrote, ‘‘bobs like a cork on the waves, hears one after another an endless succession of totally unconnected things, and so entirely without a breathing space that he does not manage subsequently to ponder and consider what he has heard . . . ’’9 The French writer Georges Duhamel was even more critical: His 1932 Defense of Letters (letters had to be defended against the pernicious influence of radio) warned that the anarchy of radio would lead to the collapse of culture. ‘‘The real radio lovers,’’ he wrote, those simple people who really need education, are beginning to prefer noise to books . . . they absorb everything pell-mell: Wagner, jazz, politics, advertising, the time signal, music hall, and the howling of secondary waves . . . We are in utter confusion . . . today the man in the street is fed,

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morally as well as physically, on a mass of debris which has no resemblance to a nourishing diet. There is no method in this madness, which is the very negation of culture.10

Duhamel’s one-track mind could not handle radio’s multi-channel polyphony. If he saw radio programming of the 1930s as a ‘‘mass of debris which has no resemblance to a nourishing diet,’’ we can only imagine how horrified he would be at Morales’s Sin cabeza, a program serving monster helpings of acoustic junk food (including, in one track, a man itemizing his daily diet of Twinkies, coca cola, and avocado sandwiches) and a musical smorgasbord that makes the lineup of ‘‘Wagner, jazz, politics, advertising’’ sound like a wholesome menu. But not all critics shared Duhamel’s profound dislike of radio’s heterogeneity. Many avant-garde poets found a new source of inspiration in the medium’s fragmentary and jumbled character. Marinetti celebrated the ‘‘wireless imagination’’ (imaginazione senza fili, a pun on the Italian term for radio broadcast, telegrafia senza fili) as a poetic model, and Guillaume Apollinaire turned bits of radiotelegraphic messages sent by his brother from Mexico into the elaborate calligram ‘‘Lettre-Océan.’’11 Among avant-garde figures, Mexican poets were the most enthusiastic fans of the medium’s heterogeneity. In 1924, Salvador Novo broadcast a ‘‘Radiolecture on Radio’’ that opened by imagining the acoustic miscellany that could have preceded his talk: Acabáis de escuchar el sexteto All Nuts Jazz Band y ahora oís mis palabras; dentro de diez minutos oiréis Il Bacio [sic], [d]e Arditi, o Guadalupe la Chinaca, de Nervo, o Manon, de Massenet, y podéis estar en la postura que mejor os plazca, con el traje de acostaros, con pantuflas, cosa que no solía hacerse en la ópera, fumando vuestra segunda pipa o dormitando . . . [You have just listened to the All Nuts Jazz Band sextet, and now you’re hearing my words. In ten minutes you might hear Arditi’s Il Baccio, or Nervo’s Guadalupe la Chinaca, or Massenet’s Manon, and you might sit comfortably in your favorite position, in your nightdress, wearing slippers, smoking your second pipe or even napping]12

Novo, who had more of a sense of adventure (and a healthier sense of humor) than Duhamel, considers the medley of radio programming to be great fun. Where else could one hear a sequence of jazz music, followed by an Italian waltz song, Amado Nervo’s corny ode to a patriotic peasant woman (‘‘Con su escolta de rancheros, / diez fornidos guerrilleros y en su cuaco retozón / que la rienda mal aplaca, / Guadalupe la chinaca va a buscar a Pantaleón’’13), and Jules Massenet’s operatic love story about a

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femme fatale? Novo saw radio as a wacky medium bringing together disparate elements whose chance encounter was as poetic, unexpected, and suggestive as that between an umbrella and a sewing machine on a dissecting table. Novo’s ‘‘Radioconferencia’’ seems to describe an early twentieth-century equivalent of Sin cabeza—the medley of jazz, waltzes, poetry, and opera offers a sampling of 1930s acoustic culture in the same way that Morales’s mix of cumbias, Beatles’ songs, autopsy instructions, and Artaud captures the soundscape of the 1990s. But Morales’s radio experiments have even more in common with the work of another Mexican avant-garde poet: Kyn Taniya, a member of the Futurist-inspired Estridentista movement who in 1924 published Radio: poema inalámbrico en trece mensajes. The book includes a poem that is one of the most original depictions of radio’s mind-boggling heterogeneity. The poem, titled ‘‘ . . . IU IIIUUU IU . . .’’ is an imaginary collage of the random bits of programming that a radio enthusiast would hear by surfing through all the existing radio stations (the title is an onomatopoeia mimicking the high-pitched noises produced when tuning a radio): . . . IU IIIUUU IU . . . ÚLTIMOS SUSPIROS DE MARRANOS DEGOLLADOS EN CHICAGO ILLINOIS ESTRUDENDO DE LAS CAÍDAS DEL NIÁGARA EN LA FRONTERA DE CANADÁ KREISLER REISLER D’ANNUNZIO FRANCE ETCÉTERA Y LOS JAZZ BANDS DE VIRGINIA Y TENESÍ LA ERUPCIÓN DEL POPOCATÉPETL SOBRE EL VALLE DE AMECAMECA ASÍ COMO LA ENTRADA DE LOS ACORAZADOS INGLESES A LOS DARDANELOS EL GEMIDO NOCTURNO DE LA ESFINGE EGIPCIA LLOYD GEORGE WILSON Y LENIN LOS BRAMIDOS DEL PLESIOSAURIO DIPLODOCUS QUE SE BAÑA TODAS LAS TARDES EN LOS PANTANOS PESTILENTES DE PATAGONIA LAS IMPRECACIONES DE GANDHI EN EL BAGDAD LA CACOFONÍA DE LOS CAMPOS DE BATALLA O DE LAS ASOLEADAS ARENAS DE SEVILLA QUE SE HARTAN DE TRIPAS Y DE SANGRE DE LAS BESTIAS Y DEL HOMBRE BABE RUTH JACK DEMPSEY Y LOS ALARIDOS DOLOROSOS DE LOS VALIENTES JUGADORES DE FÚTBOL QUE SE MATAN A PUNTAPIÉS POR UNA PELOTA Todo esto no cuesta ya más que un dólar Por cien centavos tendréis orejas eléctricas y podréis pescar los sonidos que se mecen en la hamaca kilométrica de las ondas . . . IU IIIUUU IU . . . [ . . . IU IIIIUUUU IU . . . DYING SQUEALS OF HOGS SLAUGHTERED IN CHICAGO ILLINOIS ROAR OF NIAGARA FALLS ON THE CANADIAN BORDER KREISLER REISLER D’ANNUNZIO FRANCE ETCETERA JAZZ

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BANDS FROM VIRGINIA AND TENNESSEE ERUPTION OF POPOCATEPETL OVER VALLEY OF AMECAMECA AND BRITISH BATTLESHIPS ENTERING THE DARDANELLES NOCTURNAL MOAN OF THE EGYPTIAN SPHYNX LLOYD GEORGE WILSON AND LENIN BELLOWS OF THE PLESIOSAUR DIPLODICUS AS IT BATHES EACH AFTERNOON IN THE PESTILENT SWAMPS OF PATAGONIA GANDHI’S IMPRECATIONS IN BAGHDAD CACOPHONY OF BATTLEFIELDS AND OF SEVILLE’S SUN DRENCHED BULLRINGS GORGING ON THE GUTS AND BLOOD OF MAN AND BEAST BABE RUTH JACK DEMPSEY AND AGONIZED CRIES OF VALIENT SOCCER PLAYERS KICKING EACH OTHER TO DEATH FOR THE SAKE OF A BALL All that is now just a dollar. One hundred cents will buy you a pair of electric ears And you can go fishing for sounds that rock on the radio waves’ kilometric hammock. . . . IU IIIUUU IU . . . ]14

Kyn Taniya’s poem gives a detailed (though fragmented) inventory of the programs that a listener was likely to receive from the radio waves in the 1920s: There is not only jazz, waltz, and opera, there are also bits and pieces of newscasts, sports programs, weather reports, and general interest broadcasts, as well as the noise of pigs squealing, waterfalls roaring, volcanoes erupting, Gandhi preaching, and soccer players bawling. The similarities between Kyn Taniya’s poem and Sin cabeza are striking: both works collage sounds taken from the airwaves; both surprise the reader (or listener) with surreal juxtapositions of unrelated images, like Gandhi and plesiosaurs or ancient music and Beatles songs (these unexpected couplings generate the ‘‘poetic spark’’ that André Breton attributed to surrealist images); and both highlight the anarchic, fragmentary nature of radio. And if Kyn Taniya’s poem presents a snapshot of the world in 1924 (the year Lenin died, the British invaded the Dardanelles and Gandhi was released from prison), Sin cabeza gives us an acoustic snapshot of Mexico City in the 1990s (a place dominated by violence, anarchy, and trashy pop songs blasting from ubiquitous radios). But there is one important difference between ‘‘ . . . IU IIIUUU IU . . .’’ and Sin cabeza: Kyn Taniya created a textual representation of radio, while Morales opted for an aural one. Kyn Taniya had to translate radio, an aural medium, into poetry, a textual one; and, as we know, much gets lost in any act of translation. We can guess what a bellowing plesiosaur sounds like, but we will never be able to hear the same sound that the poet heard (or at least had in mind). Morales, on the other hand, uses an aural

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medium—sound recording—capable of faithfully reproducing everything he hears. Listening to Sin cabeza, we hear exactly what the artist heard: His strategy is one of acoustic citation, not transmediatic translation.

Space Travel —¿Es cierto que Zapata era extraterrestre y por eso decía que la tierra es de quien la trabaja? —Quería [llevarse] la tierra al espacio interestelar. —Taniel Morales, OVNIS15 There is another characteristic of radio that figures prominently in both ‘‘ . . . IU IIIUUU IU . . .’’ and Sin cabeza: radio’s ability to travel great distances and reach listeners scattered across different regions. In Kyn Taniya’s poem—written in an era that lacked television, satellites, and Internet—the entire world comes to Mexico City’s listeners through the radio waves: news from Chicago, roars from Niagara Falls, music from France, and reports from Britain, the Soviet Union, Patagonia, Tennessee, and Seville. All of this global information is delivered to the earphones of the radio listener in Mexico City, who can sit comfortably as the five continents come to his or her living room. Early radio theorists were extremely optimistic about the radio’s capability for crossing boundaries and creating transnational links. Arnheim, for instance, believed that radio would foster world peace and understanding among nations by allowing individual listeners access to the broadcasts of other countries. Radio, he wrote, ‘‘serves everything that implies dissemination and community of feeling and works against separateness and isolation.’’16 The Russian Futurist poet Velimir Khlebnikov went even further: he imagined a ‘‘radio of the future’’ capable of broadcasting not only sounds but also smells and tactile sensations across the world—an invention that would end the misery of winter in northern regions like Siberia by allowing Russians to receive warm, summery sensations broadcast from the tropics: ‘‘In the middle of winter,’’ he wrote fancifully, ‘‘the honeyed smell of lime, mixed with the smell of snow, will be the Radio’s real gift to the country.’’17 Fast-forward to the present: Though radio no longer connects Mexicans to the rest of the world (that role now belongs to satellite television and the world wide web), it is now one of the few remaining bonds connecting the inhabitants of Mexico City to one another. The city is one

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of the most fragmented megalopolises in the world, and its inhabitants live in neighborhoods that function as self-enclosed worlds that rarely—if ever—intersect. The city is spread out over an area of 1,500 square kilometers, and many residents have never set foot in the city’s more distant neighborhoods. Sin cabeza alludes to the city’s fragmented nature by narrating the numerous obstacles encountered in simply getting from one place to another. Several segments itemize the nightmares of urban transport: There is a rock song about a ‘‘killer bus’’ speeding down Revolución as its passengers are mugged and raped, another song about waiting for a Peribus that never comes, and Morales’s own monologue about the vicissitudes of traveling through the city’s subway system. In a hurried, sped-up voice set to mambo and lounge beats, the artist narrates a nightmarish journey through the Mexico City metro: Corro, me subo, me sigo subiendo, Universidad, Copilco, Miguel Ángel de Quevedo, camino, camino, sigo caminando, Viveros, Coyoacán, Zapata, me tropiezo, División del Norte, Eugenia, Etiopía, me paro, Centro Medico, trasbordo, Lázaro Cárdenas, Chabacano, Jamaica, Mixuca, Unidad deportiva, Puebla, Pantitlán, . . . trasbordo, me subo, corro, vuelo, me acelero, me sigue en camino, Rosario, Aquiles Serdán, Camarones, Tacuba, me duermo, sueño, San Joaquín, Polanco, Auditorio, Constituyentes, Tacubaya, San Pedro de los Pinos, San Antonio, Mixcoac, Barranca del Muerto, me despiertan, me bajo, tomo un camión, va atascado, Taxqueña, General Anaya, Ermita, Portales, Natitivitas, Villa de Cortés, Xola, Viaducto, Chabacano, San Antonio Abad, Pino Suárez, me empujan, háganme lugar, me apachurran . . . Obervatorio, Tacubaya, Juanacatlán, Chapultepec, Sevilla, Cuauhtémoc, Balderas, Salto del Agua, Isabel la Católica, Pino Suárez, La Candelaria, San Lázaro, Moctezuma, Balbuena, Aeropuerto, Gómez Farias, Zaragoza, Pantitlán, trasbordo, me bajo, grito, me subo, grito: ‘‘AAAAAAAHHHHH’’ Me bajo y me voy en taxi.18

This is the narrative of a frustrated journey. The narrator walks, runs, jumps in, jumps out, transfers, and flips out as he ventures through a maze of subway stations whose very names represent the chaotic, jumbled character of the city above ground: There are pre-Columbian names like ‘‘Popotla’’ and ‘‘Cuauhtémoc’’; historical figures like ‘‘Pino Suárez,’’ ‘‘Gómez Farías,’’ and ‘‘Miguel Angel’’; and others that are entirely random, like ‘‘Chabacano,’’ named after the Mexican word for ‘‘apricot.’’ In the end the subway does not take him where he needs to go: Fed up, he screams (‘‘AAAAAAAAHHHHH’’), gives up, and opts to take a taxi. As anyone who has tried to get across Mexico City during rush hour will know, the travails presented in Sin cabeza are not exaggerated. Going

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from one end of the city to another takes one through a series of horrors that make the tortures of Dante’s Inferno seem like child’s play. Every week there are parades, demonstrations, street protests, and police checkpoints that bring traffic to a halt; during the rainy season streets and underpasses flood, making the city look like a Venice of the New World, but keeping all but the most adventurous of denizens from even venturing across the street; and though the subway system carries over five million passengers a day, it is not immune to the demons of transportation that torment the city—its trains are often delayed, overcrowded, and at times immobilized by frustrated passengers who not infrequently get so fed up that they commit suicide by jumping on the subway tracks. In contrast to the countless obstacles that residents must surpass to get from one place to another, radio waves travel unimpeded throughout the city. Hertzian waves can traverse the entire metropolitan region faster than helicopters or airplanes. (‘‘Wireless,’’ wrote Arnheim in the early days of radio, ‘‘passes all customs officers, needs no cable, penetrates all walls and even in house raids it is very difficult to catch.’’)19 It is one of the great ironies of life in Mexico City that its residents listen to radio—that freemoving medium—precisely when their capacity to move freely has been curtailed, when they are stuck in traffic or trapped in a stalled bus: Perhaps tuning in makes them dream of moving through the city at the speed of Hertzian waves. And it is this irony that Morales underscores in Sin cabeza, a program that uses radio’s free-flowing airwaves to broadcast a program about the impossibility of moving through Mexico City. Radio becomes an antidote to one of the major inconveniences of city life: If ineffective transport divides the city, broadcasting reconnects it.

Violence Practique una incisión profunda en el lado izquierdo del pecho. Introduzca su mano dentro de la hendidura. Sin titubear, destroce la caja toráxica. Extraiga el corazón muerto, obsérvelo. Lámalo. Huélalo. Apriete entre sus dedos el nódulo sinovicular.20 —Taniel Morales, Sin cabeza, track 14 Sin cabeza is a gory radio program: It features drive-by shootings, pedestrians crushed by runaway buses, headless women, maimed bodies, and detailed instructions on how to cut open corpses and extract their organs. And these images capture one of the most striking features of Mexico City in the 1990s—the continuous threat of violence.

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After the devaluation of 1994, the city became one of the most dangerous places in the world: There was a torrent of armed robberies, rapes, kidnappings, and secuestros express (in which a victim is taken at gunpoint to an ATM and forced to withdraw money to pay the ransom— an ‘‘express’’ crime taking at the most a few hours). Mexico City now has the highest rate of kidnappings in the world after Colombia, and wealthy Mexicans move about the city protected by a small army of private bodyguards. Driving through the city’s clogged streets, it is not uncommon to be cut off by a speeding, bulletproof Mercedes trailed by several compact cars filled with machinegun-wielding guaruras, as personal bodyguards are known. With that much firepower, a fender-bender could have fatal consequences for distracted, guarura-less drivers. Guns—scary, automatic weapons that most countries restrict to military usage—are everywhere. There are armed guards stationed outside (and often inside) office buildings, residential buildings, banks, restaurants, department stores, grocery stores, car dealers, bars, discos, and pastry shops (to fend off criminals with a sweet tooth). These security agents wear bulletproof vests, look bored, and chat with passersby but keep their finger on the trigger of their AK-47 machine guns (known in Mexico as cuernos de chivo or goat horns), ready to greet troublemakers with a shower of bullets. The artist Francis Alÿs called attention to this trend in his performance Re-enactments (2000): He wandered through Mexico City’s downtown streets carrying a loaded gun for all to see. The sight was so familiar that no one screamed, ran for cover, or called for help. It took 20 minutes for a police car to spot him. He was detained briefly and let go when he explained he was doing a performance (more about this piece and the culture of violence in the next chapter). What is most striking about the violence that permeates life in Mexico City is the degree to which it has become engrained in daily life. One would expect a city crowded with so many guards and weapons to feel like a town in a state of siege, but most people in the city go about their business ignoring the ubiquitous signs of danger: In fancy shopping districts, Chanel-clad women walk past guards armed to the teeth without so much as raising an eyebrow; outside hip dance clubs, tattooed, pierced teenagers chat up rich kids’ bodyguards (who must wait outside until their charges finish partying in the wee hours of the morning). Violence has become one more nuisance—like pollution, overcrowding, traffic jams, and summer floods—that Mexicans have learned to ignore as they go about their daily routine. The city has developed an extremely casual approach to the threat of violence—a tendency that Sin cabeza evokes by the scoring of gory

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narratives to up-beat melodies. In ‘‘Aventuras en Revolución,’’ for instance, the singer Rockdrigo recounts bloody tales that would instill fear in any law-abiding citizen: A bus zooms down Revolución; armed muggers assault the passengers while the driver kills innocent pedestrians; three nymphomaniacs rape the narrator, a gang breaks in . . . But despite this song’s hair-raising lyrics, the rock beat is energetic and lively. Curiously, the song leaves the listener feeling a slight rush: We are left with the impression of a wild, chaotic city where people live on the edge and every moment is intense. (‘‘Mexicans,’’ announces a random voice in another segment of Sin cabeza, ‘‘act as if they had no fear of death.’’)21 There are many other examples of this casual approach to violence throughout Sin cabeza. A sexy voice reads instructions on how to cut open a dead body to the trumpets of Pérez Prado’s mambos; a doctor’s description of a malignant tumor is followed by marching band music and soap-opera dialogues; an account of pre-Columbian war rituals is sung to cumbia music. Radio is a fitting medium to represent these bloody events, since it too contains its share of violence. Radio is intrusive: Its sounds enter our ears whether we want to listen to them or not. As Kant observed in his Critique of Judgment, one can elect to see or not to see a painting, to touch or not to touch a sculpture, but no such choice is possible when it comes to sound: Our ears cannot block out unwanted noise. Kant, who prized silence, complained that ‘‘music has a certain lack of urbanity about it. For . . . it extends its influence (on the neighborhood) farther than people wish, and so, as it were, imposes itself on others and hence impairs the freedom of those outside the musical party.’’ Musical sounds spread like smells, imposing themselves on all those within earshot.22 Kant’s musings offer a perfect description of the constant spread of sounds in Mexico City, where radios blast every conceivable kind of musical program to create the most inharmonious and cacophonic scenarios: Standing on a street corner, a pedestrian might be subjected, all at once, to a tropical radio station in a nearby shop, a rock song blasting from a passing car, and the voice of a garrulous talk show host coming from a street vendor’s portable receiver. Life in the city is polyphonically perverse, and one is constantly bombarded with all kinds of sounds—an experience that Sin cabeza faithfully replicates. Radio is the most totalitarian of all media: It penetrates our ears without our consent. Perhaps this is one reason why dictators from Hitler to Stalin have been drawn to radio: ‘‘Der Rundfunk gehört uns,’’ Josef Goebbels famously declared in 1933 as he seized stations throughout the country and turned them into a key component of his propaganda campaign— ‘‘radio belongs to us.’’23 (Think also of the U.S. government’s efforts to

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propagate democracy by the undemocratic approach of beaming propaganda-filled radio programs to countries from Cuba to Iraq.) Broadcasting imposes itself over individual free will: If there is a radio around, one is forced to listen. In Mexico, during the 70-year rule of the PRI, politicians expropriated the entire country’s airtime once a week to broadcast propaganda that no citizen could escape: Every Sunday night, the ‘‘hora nacional’’ or ‘‘national hour’’ seized the frequencies of every single radio station in the country, and anyone within earshot of a radio was obligated to listen to 60 minutes of self-congratulatory political speeches. Sin cabeza includes a fragment lifted from one of these dreaded programs: The segment describing how to cut open an intestine (‘‘as if you were using a pair of tailor’s scissors to open the legs of a pair of pants’’) begins with a bizarre announcement by a female voice: ‘‘This program does not have the support of the industrialists, workers, or campesinos,’’ a disclaimer taken from an official broadcast discussing an unpopular government project. Through an elaborate euphemism, officials announce that the plan, lacking the support of the general public, will be shoved down their throats in the same way that radio sounds are shoved down their ears. Radio, like the criminals who terrorize Mexico City, is an intruder. But no police force, bodyguard, or acoustic guarura can keep it from entering our ears. Sin cabeza’s transmission strategy emphasizes the violence with which radio sound penetrates the body: When Morales boarded the Revolución bus to play the program, he hijacked the ears of all the passengers and thus secured the ultimate captive audience for his broadcast. And, since city buses do not move at the speed of sound, this acoustic kidnapping was far from express.

The Body without Organs —You are expressing here, Monsieur Artaud, some very bizarre things. —Yes, I am saying something bizarre. —Antonin Artaud, To Have Done with the Judgment of God (1947) The most enigmatic section of Sin cabeza features a poem by Antonin Artaud sandwiched between a text about machos in pre-Columbian times and a song about ‘‘Cumbia love.’’ The text is taken from the last section of Artaud’s To Have Done with the Judgment of god, the radio program that the French poet composed in 1947, a few months before his death (the program was deemed obscene by the censors and was never aired). To

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Have Done was a half-hour arrangement of Artaud’s texts (on the Tarahumara Indians, American capitalism, artificial insemination, and coprophagia) read by Maria Casares, Roger Blin, and the poet himself, who also played the drums and performed a series of ear-splitting shrieks. Sin cabeza quotes the following passage—read by Morales in a crazed voice mimicking the French poet’s borderline intonation—from the conclusion of Artaud’s radio program:

And it is man that we now make up our minds to emasculate . . . By placing him again, for the last time, on the autopsy table to remake his anatomy. Man is sick because he is badly constructed. We must make up our minds to strip him bare in order to scrape off that animalcule that itches him mortally, god, and with god, his organs. For you can tie me up if you wish, but there is nothing more useless than an organ. When you will have made him a body without organs, then you will have delivered him from all his automatic reactions and restored him to his true freedom. Then you will teach him again to dance wrong side out as in the frenzy of dance halls and this wrong side out will be his real place.24

This is one of Artaud’s most difficult passages, and the source for a key concept used by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their Anti-Œdipus: the ‘‘body without organs’’ (a term which, the French critics explain, ‘‘has nothing whatsoever to do with the body itself, or with an image of the body. It is the body without an image.’’)25 But what is the body without organs, and what does it have to do with radio and Mexico City? Artaud gives us a clue in the series of oppositions that structure his text: American culture is pitted against Tarahumara traditions, science against ritual, reason against magic. The poet despises American-style rationalism, which he associates with militarism and artificial insemination; in contrast, he celebrates Tarahumara rituals, including the hallucinations induced by peyote. Since Artaud associates organs with the ‘‘sickness’’ of scientific reason, ‘‘the body without organs’’ is a metaphor for irrationality—for the type of mad energy that guided the Tarahumara’s visions. Sin cabeza offers a highly original reading of the body without organs: If organs are the instruments of scientific reason, then the head is the ultimate organ to be extirpated, and a headless woman—Sin cabeza’s

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protagonist—is the archetypal example of a body without organs. Deprived of eyes or ears, a mouth or a brain, a headless body can no longer think, see, hear, or speak. It can only act madly, like a chicken with its head cut off— precisely the type of irrational movement that Sin cabeza represents in its acoustic mad dash through the airwaves. But there is another body without organs roaming through Sin cabeza: Mexico City. In political philosophy, the head has always been a metaphor for authority (traditionally the monarch was the ‘‘head’’ of state, and now we speak of ‘‘heads of government’’). A headless body politic would thus be one lacking authority—a place, like Mexico City, that is out of control, lives in perpetual chaos, and is ruled only by the specter of anarchy. Though in theory the mayor (or ‘‘jefe de gobierno’’) is the head of Mexico City, in practice he has little control over the restless population. Laws, ordinances, and police presence cannot stop unruly citizens from staging protests, blocking traffic, and routinely paralyzing the city. Few people obey traffic signals, pay taxes, or respect authority. Mexicans have even coined a neologism describing the situation: ingobernabilidad— ungovernability! (‘‘A specter is haunting Mexico,’’ wrote a political commentator in 2002, ‘‘the specter of ingobernabilidad.’’)26 Sin cabeza gives many examples of the ungovernability that characterizes Mexico City and makes it a political body without organs: public transport that does not go anywhere, rampant crime, the ubiquitous threat of violence, and quack doctors teaching in medical schools. In addition to the headless woman and Mexico City, Sin cabeza contains a third example of a body without organs: radio. The medium broadcasts human voices, but they have been stripped of their bodies and their corresponding organs. The disembodied voices of radio are eerie, ghost-like (thus critic Allen Weiss has described radio as a ‘‘phantasmic’’ medium).27 The specter of radio also haunts Mexico City, and it is more radical than Artaud’s proposal: Radio does away not only with all organs but with the body itself, leaving not a body-without-organs but a voicewithout-body. But the broadcast voice is not the only one stripped of organs. The listener, too, sees his body altered by radio: Concentrating on a purely acoustic medium makes listeners temporarily blind, deprived of every sense except hearing (and, as Samuel Beckett’s radio plays so forcefully demonstrate, blind listening is a disturbing experience). Radio reduces the listener to a giant ear, to a body with a single organ.

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The Image of the City Y a mí se me hace chico el mar para echarme un buche de agua.28 —Taniel Morales, Sin cabeza, track 20 According to Mexican writer Juan Villoro, Mexico City is an unrepresentable urban space. Gone are the days when colonial draftsmen could depict the entire city, building by building and street by street, in a single print; and gone are the days when an aerial photograph could capture the outlines of the sprawling capital.29 Today’s megalopolis cannot be represented in its totality: the city is too large to be grasped by any one photograph, drawing, or painting. But it is not only a question of size: the city cannot be represented by traditional artistic media because so much of its sprawl is now invisible: The subway system, for instance, has created an entire underground city with a life of its own that mirrors the chaotic energy of the megalopolis above ground—its stations are crowded by street vendors, bookstores, food courts, even museums! Mexico City, Villoro concludes, is ‘‘ungraspable,’’ and ‘‘the project of painting an all-encompassing fresco’’ is an impossible one. In the twentyfirst century, writers and artists can only aspire to create fragmentary, incomplete representations of the monster megalopolis. Villoro considers only visual representations of the city (and texts based on the visual model), but perhaps the visual model is not the most appropriate for representing a place like Mexico City, where so much— from the subway to the airwaves—is hidden from view. But what cannot be seen can be heard, and thus an acoustic representation can potentially succeed where a visual one fails. The sounds of the city—unlike its sights—can be recorded and remixed to create a faithful representation of the city’s unruly diversity. Take simultaneity, for example: Cities are places where a million things always happen at once. At any given moment, there can be a teachers’ union marching through the downtown streets, a student protest at the university in the south, a public concert in the Zócalo, and an impromptu performance of neo-Aztec dancers in front of the cathedral. A visual medium like photography must focus on one of these events to the exclusion of all the others, while an acoustic medium can take sounds from all these places (even those emanating from invisible places, like dark subway tunnels) and replay them simultaneously, just like they occur in real life.

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This is precisely what Morales has done in Sin cabeza: He has created a representation of Mexico City with a breadth and reach that would be impossible to achieve in any other medium. His program records a city where thousands of radios blast every conceivable kind of music, from classical to mambo, all at once; where a passenger is caught in an endless maze of subway stations while a packed city bus driven by a psychopath zooms by above ground; where corpses are split open to the tune of sappy pop songs; where citizens flirt with death while television sets blare banal dialogues; where Artaud’s texts and cumbia mixes are mentioned in the same breath. The impossibility of representing the totality of the city is no longer an issue for acoustic media: Though the desire to ‘‘see everything’’ often accompanies visual media, one would never anticipate ‘‘hearing everything’’ in a sound piece. If visual media create the illusion that an allencompassing, total representation is possible, acoustic media remind us that reality itself is a fragmented accumulation of random sounds. In these postmodern times, we can no longer ask ‘‘What is the image of Mexico City?’’ The question, as Villoro points out, seems quaint, outdated. But we can ask ‘‘What is the sound of Mexico City?’’ (‘‘It sounds,’’ Morales would likely respond, ‘‘like a headless woman.’’)

Cumbia El aire es de quien lo trabaja.30 —Taniel Morales, Sin cabeza, track 24 Sin cabeza concludes its uncanny mélange of tropical music and urban legends with a cumbia. A program full of carjackings, dismemberments, and mutilations ends with an unexpectedly optimistic message: ‘‘Cumbia! Soñar un sueño profundo donde mire al mundo con amor de cumbia’’ [Cumbia! To dream a long dream in which I see the world through cumbia love]. But before the final cumbia, the artist makes one last announcement: ‘‘El aire es de quien lo trabaja’’—‘‘Airspace belongs to those who work it.’’ The phrase is a pun on ‘‘La tierra es de quien la trabaja,’’ Zapata’s revolutionary call to arms, which can be translated as ‘‘the land belongs to those who work it,’’ but also, as the artist reminds us in another radio program devoted to UFOs, ‘‘the earth belongs to those who work it.’’ ‘‘El aire es de quien lo trabaja’’ presents radio as the last communal medium in a virulently capitalistic world. It does not cost anything to broadcast a

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radio program like Morales’s Sin cabeza—all one needs is a creative imagination (and a captive audience found aboard any city bus). Unlike land, the airwaves are immaterial and can never become a commodity. They cannot be bought or sold, traded or mortgaged (only broadcasting licenses can be bought and sold—an operation that does not concern pirate broadcasters). Radio—especially pirate radio—is utopian because unlike paintings or photographs, which need museums or galleries to reach a small audience, it needs no institutional support to be heard by thousands or even millions of listeners. At a time when art has become a valuable commodity and book publishing has fallen into the hands of multinational corporations, pirate radio remains the last independent, free, and communally-minded creative outlet. Pirate radio fulfills the ambition of experimental artists from Marcel Duchamp to On Kawara: the dematerialization of the object of art, a radical action meant to save artistic creation from the trappings of consumerism. (Pirate radio also takes the medium back to its origins: Before the advent of commercial radio stations, all radio broadcasting was ‘‘pirate,’’ orchestrated by enthusiasts who used primitive, home-made equipment to send experimental programs into the air.) Sin cabeza ends on a hopeful note: a tropical song about boundless love. It leaves us with a tropicalized utopia, as the headless woman dances cumbia, the music of choice for bodies without organs. In the end, as must happen in all utopian tales (‘‘all that is solid,’’ wrote Marx in The Communist Manifesto, ‘‘melts into air’’), everything dissolves into the airwaves, such stuff as electronic dreams are made of. El aire es de quien lo trabaja, or as Octavio Paz wrote at the end of Posdata, ‘‘tenemos que aprender a ser aire, sueño en libertad,’’ ‘‘we have to learn to become air, a dream in freedom.’’31

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In chapter three, we discussed Juan Villoro’s assertion that Mexico City, like most sprawling megalopolises, cannot be represented. Taniel Morales, however, proved that there are still ways of representing Mexico City and capturing its anarchic spirit, and radio is one of the most effective. Perhaps Villoro’s statement needs to be qualified: The city can no longer be depicted by traditional media, like painting and photography, that aspire to a certain totality, but it can be represented by new, creative strategies that, though fragmentary, capture the most striking aspects of life in the capital. In this chapter we will discuss five artists from different walks of life who have come up with fresh, innovative proposals for representing the city. How does one represent Mexico City? In 1946, Salvador Novo, the irreverent poet who later became known as ‘‘the chronicler of Mexico City,’’ came up with one answer after he was asked to write a book about the new, modern city of skyscrapers and boulevards, Packards and restaurants that had sprung up in the two decades after the Mexican Revolution. The poet realized that capturing the city in all its complexity and diversity was a tricky endeavor: Even in the 1940s, Mexico City was already too large for a single poem or a single novel, and any text would inevitably leave out entire aspects of life in the capital (unlike, for example, Bernardo de Balbuena’s seventeenth-century Grandeza mexicana, an epic poem that aspired to represent Mexico City in its entirety). Faced with this challenge, Novo came up with an ingenious solution: He proposed practicing the city—he used the verb ejercer, to ‘‘practice’’ in the sense that doctors practice medicine or lawyers practice law—by walking through its streets, wandering through its neighborhoods, and exploring its hidden nooks, as the basis for any form of representation.1 ‘‘Practicing’’ the city was a highly selective exercise, and one destined to remain incomplete. In the same way that a doctor practices medicine,

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but can never achieving a total expertise in medical science, Novo ‘‘practiced’’ Mexico City without ever achieving a total mastery of the capital. And this is precisely the experience that Novo chronicles in his Nueva grandeza mexicana: a striking literary portrait of the city that narrates an individual—and fragmented—journey through its neighborhoods, streets, and hidden nooks. With the excuse of entertaining a foreign visitor, Novo crisscrosses the city, walking through the Centro, strolling down Reforma, marching through the Zócalo. The book focuses only on a few streets and a handful of select locations. By the 1940s the capital had grown too large to be covered on foot, and Novo is not afraid to embrace the changes brought about by modernity: He boards an automobile and takes his friend for a ride through gleaming roads and freshly paved highways. One ‘‘practiced’’ the city by exploring its neighborhoods, and Novo saw no reason why this practice should not be automated, along with other aspects of modern life: He became a motorized flâneur. But not every city can be ‘‘practiced’’ in this way. Take Brasilia, for example. Marshall Berman, who like Novo was an avid flâneur, complained bitterly that Brazil’s capital could not be ‘‘practiced’’—explored on foot or by car—because there was nothing to look at except buildings. ‘‘From the air,’’ writes Berman, ‘‘Brasilia looked dynamic and exciting: in fact, it was built to resemble the jet plane from which I (and virtually all other visitors) first observed it. From the ground level, however, where people actually live and work, it is one of the most dismal cities in the world . . . one’s overall feeling—confirmed by every Brazilian I met—is one of immense empty spaces in which the individual feels lost, as alone as a man on the moon. There is a deliberate absence of public space in which people can meet and talk, or simply look at each other and hang around. The great tradition of Latin urbanism, in which city life is organized around a plaza mayor, is explicitly rejected.’’2 In contrast to Mexico City, Brasilia cannot be ‘‘practiced.’’ It is a city of buildings and not of people, and the streets are dead. Though millions of people live in the city, they are nowhere to be seen: There are only ‘‘immense, empty spaces’’ and a complete ‘‘absence of public space.’’ Brasilia is a textbook example of what the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas has called ‘‘the generic city’’: a planned urban space where the urbanist’s tyrannical design rules over every aspect of life in the city. The generic city has been planned so rigidly that it cannot accommodate street life—a disorderly concentration of people on its thoroughfares. Generic cities cannot be ‘‘practiced’’ because their streets are dead—one could wander endlessly through their vast boulevards and open spaces without encountering anything except buildings designed to be looked at from an airplane.

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And though Koolhaas predicted that in the future all cities would become generic (‘‘the model for the generic city,’’ he wrote, ‘‘is the modern airport—all the same’’3), Mexico City has—at least so far— escaped this fate. While today’s Mexico City, like other megalopolises around the world, is crisscrossed by expressways, pedestrian overpasses, subway and suburban transit lines, it has still managed to keep a vibrant street life. Unlike Brasilia, where there are only towering buildings and vast but deserted stretches of empty space, almost every corner of the Mexican capital is packed with people, day and night. One can still ‘‘practice’’ Mexico City like Novo did in the 1940s and find much to see: all kinds of people, young and old, rich and poor, locals and foreigners, meeting, talking, arguing—just like in Berman’s ideal city. A crowded street is proof that the city still lives, that it has not yet become generic. It is not surprising, then, that a number of contemporary artists have taken the streets of Mexico City as inspiration for work that constitutes a modern version of Novo’s urban ‘‘practice.’’ Can the city be represented? ‘‘Yes,’’ they answer, and like Novo, their efforts begin with an exploration of the chaotic jumble found on Mexico City’s streets. Like Novo, the five artists discussed in the chapter are avid flâneurs who find the inspiration for their work in the capital’s public spaces and hidden nooks.

Francis Alÿs Francis Alÿs, a Belgian-born architect who has lived in Mexico since the 1980s, has devoted much of his work to exploring the varieties of street life in the capital. Alÿs keeps his studio in the Centro, Mexico City’s downtown district, in a once grand colonial building on Plaza Santa Catarina that has now been taken over by squatters. The Centro is one of the most crowded, chaotic, and animated neighborhoods in the world. To say that its streets are lively would be an understatement: Street vendors peddling everything from handicrafts to gay porn cram the sidewalks; hundreds of honking, fuming VW beetles, buses, motorcycles, and even ecological cycle taxis clog its avenues; on street corners, impromptu restaurateurs offer roasted corn cobs, hot dogs, hamburgers, and tacos cooked on improvised grills. And in the Zócalo, the City’s central square, the following motley crew rubs shoulders every day: busloads of peasant activists carrying signs; troupes of neo-Aztec dancers clad in loincloths and feather headdresses; stalls selling crucifixes and rosaries as well as Buddhas, Mandalas, and portraits of Gurumai; lines of

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construction workers, plumbers, house painters, and electricians—all holding signs announcing their professions—waiting to be hired by passers-by in need of home improvements; Indian women—wearing braids and white dresses and with one to four children in tow—sitting on the floor and begging for alms in heavily accented Spanish. And these characters don’t just meet and talk and flirt, as Berman would have it; they also yell and scream and squabble. The streets of downtown Mexico City—and their jumble of people from all walks of life—provide the setting for most of Alÿs’s performance pieces. Ambulantes (1995–2001) focuses on the hurdles faced by those whose livelihood depends on their ability to walk the streets: the thousands of street vendors who peddle everything from miraculous ointments to pirated computer programs. They are known as ambulantes, a term derived from the Spanish verb ambular, to wander. Like their name implies, they wander the streets, pushing their carts until they find an appropriate spot to set up shop for the day. Most of the vendors are unlicensed, unregistered, and uninclined to pay taxes. They form the backbone of Mexico’s ‘‘informal economy,’’ and they are one of the most visible signs of the city’s life (there are no street vendors in generic cities).4 This kind of wandering street work provides a means of subsistence for several million Mexicans—an impressive feat, especially in times of recession and rampant unemployment. (In 2003, the city government, following a recommendation by Rudolph Giuliani’s security consulting firm, attempted to remove the ambulantes from their spots.5 They were chased away repeatedly, but eventually they always managed to return to their place of business.6) Alÿs’s Ambulantes depicts the variety of ways in which street vendors make a living: There are those who sell food on the streets (they push carts loaded with candies and vats for steaming tamales); others work as bricoleurs, picking and recycling garbage (several photos depict cartoneros— men who collect discarded paper and cardboard and sell it to paper mills); there is a plant vendor pushing half a dozen cacti through the streets (Figure 19), and a balloon vendor whose face and torso are obscured by her colorful wares (the photo seems to depict a walking bunch of balloons, Figure 20). Unlike the English word ‘‘vendor,’’ which stresses the act of selling, the Spanish ambulantes puts the accent on the experience of wandering. In keeping with this etymology, Alÿs’s series depicts several individuals who push or pull carts not in order to sell something, but merely as the simplest—and most efficient—means of transporting merchandise through the Centro’s narrow streets: A man carries two mattresses on the back of his bicycle; others lug linens, lumber, inordinately long plastic pipes

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Figure 19: Francis Alÿs, from the series Ambulantes I (1995–2001). Image courtesy of the artist and Lisson Gallery, London.

(Figure 21), eggs, rolls of fabric, and vegetables. There is even a young man pushing a girl on a handcart (Figure 22)! As we can see, pre-modern modes of commerce and locomotion survive at the heart of the modern city. At a time when Mexico City’s vendors have come under fire from politicians, the public, and the press (they have been accused of blocking the streets, causing traffic jams, littering the sidewalks, and destroying the neighborhood’s colonial buildings,7 and historian Enrique Krauze blamed them for turning ‘‘the Centro’s streets into a garbage dump and a breeding ground for rats’’8), Alÿs’s series can be read as a tribute to these wandering merchants. Ambulantes highlights the inventiveness and creativity with which the vendors transport their wares—arranged in stacks, piles, heaps, or bunches. The artist seems to identify with his subjects: Like them, he lives in the Centro; like them, he has to walk through the clogged streets daily carrying a heavy load (art materials, in his case); like them, he is an ambulante—a wanderer who left his native Belgium for Mexico; like them, he travels from place to place—through the international art circuit of biennials, fairs, and museum shows—selling his wares. But Alÿs also invites us to see how the ambulantes are like him: By stressing the care they put into the arrangement and transportation of their wares, he shows us

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Figure 20: Francis Alÿs, from the series Ambulantes I (1995–2001). Image courtesy of the artist and Lisson Gallery, London.

that they, too, are artists. The series makes us see Alÿs as an artworld ambulante and the ambulantes as unacknowledged urban artists. In other works, Alÿs takes his identification with the Centro’s residents a step further. Many of his Mexico City Walks—performances in which he wanders through the city streets carrying out a single action— can be read as efforts to put himself in the shoes of the Centro’s inhabitants.9 Alÿs once staged a street performance, The Collector (1991–92, Figure 23), that is a clear allusion to the plight of Mexico City’s pepenadores, or garbage pickers, who roam the Centro’s heaps of refuse in search of scraps to be resold for profit. ‘‘Like the cigarette peddlers, the street-corner fire-eaters and cartwheel turners, the windshield washers and parking-space finders, the pot menders, the sidewalk violinists and portrait painters, the curtain-rod fixers, and the outright beggars who swarm through the city, the pepenadores are a result of Mexico’s constant failure to find a social space for its very poorest,’’ writes cultural critic Alma Guillermoprieto.10 For The Collector, Alÿs walked through the Centro pulling a tiny magnetic cart that picked up metal scraps as it moved. ‘‘The magnetized collector,’’ writes Alÿs in his description of the piece, ‘‘takes a daily walk through the streets and gradually builds up a coat made of any metallic

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Figure 21: Francis Alÿs, from the series Ambulantes I (1995–2001). Image courtesy of the artist and Lisson Gallery, London.

residue lying in its path. The process goes on until the collector is completely covered by its trophies.’’ For the duration of the performance, Alÿs became a pepenador: Like these impoverished pickers, he walked the streets, picking up bits of garbage. And, like the pepenadores, he turned refuse into a source of income: While the garbage pickers sell savaged materials to paper mills and glass factories, Alÿs sold the waste-covered Collector to a real-life art collector. The piece not only demystifies collectors—powerful individuals at the top of the artworld’s pecking order—by inviting us to see them as glorified garbage pickers who roam the artworld, picking up bits and pieces of artistic refuse, but it also suggests a number of similarities between the working methods of contemporary artists and pepenadores: Both trades consist in taking things out of their cultural context and inserting them in another. Alÿs’s work is a case in point: His performances are exercises in artistic garbage picking. He roams the streets, picking up bits of cultural refuse that he then sells for profit. Artists, he seems to imply, are cultural pepenadores as much as pepenadores are artisans of garbage. In Paradox of Praxis (1997), Alÿs pushed a large block of ice through the Centro’s streets until it melted away. This action—a postmodern

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Figure 22: Francis Alÿs, from the series Ambulantes I (1995–2001). Image courtesy of the artist and Lisson Gallery, London.

version of Sisyphus’s curse—can be read as a metaphor for the daily struggle endured by ambulantes and other poor Mexicans: Ultimately, their daily travails are as senseless as the artist’s performance; at the end of the day, after buying a few necessities, they will see their meager earnings evaporate—like melting ice—and be forced to start again at square one. (‘‘Sometimes,’’ the artist has said in relation to this piece, ‘‘making something leads to nothing.’’11) As in The Collector, the artist identifies with the plight of his neighbors to the point of becoming like them, even if only metaphorically. In other performances, Alÿs stages elaborate metaphors of loss: In The Leak, he roamed the Centro’s streets holding a punctured paint can, leaving a trail of colorful drips behind him; in The loser/the winner (1998), the artist wore a knit sweater that unraveled as he walked the streets.12 These actions can all be read as elaborate allegories for the declining fortunes of the Centro’s residents. In the 1940s, the neighborhood was solidly middle class: Most of its residents held well-paying jobs, many of them in nearby government offices, and they benefited from the country’s post-revolutionary boom. But their prosperity came to an abrupt end with the collapse of oil prices in the 1970s, the peso crisis of the 1980s, and the financial collapse of 1994. During the last 30 years, the Centro’s residents

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Figure 23: Francis Alÿs, The Collector (1991–92). Image courtesy of the artist and Lisson Gallery, London.

have seen their fortunes plunge, their savings evaporate, and their wellbeing disintegrate. José Joaquín Blanco, a writer who blames the Centro’s deterioration on the presidential decree on rent control introduced in the 1950s, has described the neighborhood’s waning fortunes as follows: ‘‘In the fifties, the middle classes abandoned the Centro en masse . . . faster than a war or a revolution could have chased them out. Landlords left their buildings to rot. (The owner of a house in the Centro was dubbed, by presidential decree, a ‘bourgeois exploiter’ to be punished by means of ‘frozen’ rents; whereas the owner of entire blocks in the fancy districts of Lomas, Polanco, Pedregal, or Satélite was a progressive capitalist, worthy of special privileges.) Nobody was prepared to invest in rental buildings downtown. Controlled rents dealt the final blow to this district as any kind of selfrespecting place to live. The great murderers of the Centro have always been, first and foremost, the Mexican presidents.’’13 A case in point is the building on Plaza Santa Catalina where Alÿs keeps his studio: In the 1940s it was occupied by upwardly mobile government

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workers and professionals; by the 1960s its residents were working-class families paying ‘‘frozen’’ rents; and by the mid-1990s the entire edifice, now severely dilapidated, had been taken over by destitute squatters. Like Alÿs’s sweater, the tenants’ finances have slowly unraveled: Many who were once middle class now live in complete poverty, and more than one has quite literally lost the shirt off his back (in contrast to the artist, who loses the sweater off his back only metaphorically). In the past few years, rising poverty has turned the Centro into one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the city. The area of Tepito— merely a short walk from Alÿs’s studio—has devolved into a hotbed of drug and weapons trafficking, a hideout for thugs, and the city’s largest marketplace for contraband. Violence is another element that sets Mexico City apart from its generic counterparts: The generic city is free of violence just as it is free of street life and free of public spaces. And though Mexico City’s astronomical number of homicides might lead us to suspect that generic cities might not be so sinister after all, Alÿs’s performances suggest that the city’s violence is the flipside of its intense street life. Re-enactments (2000), one of Alÿs’s most controversial performances, alludes to the wave of violent crime that has descended upon the Centro. For this performance, the artist strolled through downtown Mexico City carrying a loaded gun (and wearing dark shades) for 20 minutes, until he was finally stopped by a passing police car. He was detained briefly until he identified himself as an artist, whereupon the officers not only let him go but agreed to participate in a reenactment of the events so the artist could properly document his piece. As Cuauhtémoc Medina has written, ‘‘Re-enactments would have been impossible to produce in almost any other place in the world. Had Alÿs staged this piece in Los Angeles or New York, he would wave been arrested and probably shot to death. Only in Mexico would the public allow a man to walk busy streets with a gun for more than 10 minutes; only in Mexico could an artist make simple arrangements with police commanders for his own release; only in Mexico would a suspect end up receiving help from his own captors.’’14 Though Medina reads the piece as a reference to police corruption and its culture of violence, I would suggest that Re-enactments demonstrates one extreme of Alÿs’s efforts to identify with the Centro’s residents: Since some of these residents are thugs, the artist had to experience walking through life—even if for a few minutes—as a thug. Alÿs’s Walks constitute a postmodern version of Novo’s tour of Mexico City in 1946. If Novo ‘‘practiced’’ Mexico City by exploring its streets and marveling at its modern constructions, Alÿs ‘‘practices’’ the modern city

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by wandering through the impoverished streets of the Centro and identifying with the plight of its residents.

Minerva Cuevas The city’s vibrant and chaotic street life has inspired other representations in which it does not appear as explicitly as in Francis Alÿs’s photographs and performance pieces. Although the streets of Mexico City are apparently absent in the work of Minerva Cuevas—an artist and activist with a penchant for web projects—we will see that all of her projects stem from a prolonged meditation on the street and its problems. Like Alÿs, Cuevas has her studio in the Centro; like Alÿs she makes works about the experience of living in a working-class neighborhood; and like Alÿs, she identifies with her subjects. In 1997, Minerva Cuevas founded Mejor Vida Corporation, an enterprise devoted to improving the quality of life of Mexico City’s residents. Imitating the business practices of transnational corporations, Mejor Vida opened its headquarters at the Torre Latinoamericana, the Centro’s tallest skyscraper, occupied mostly by small businesses and modest offices (rich corporations establish their headquarters in the ritzy neighborhoods of Polanco and Lomas, far away from the Centro and its grimy chaos). But unlike most corporations, Mejor Vida is a one-woman enterprise: Minerva Cuervas serves as its president, CEO, CFO, public relations officer, secretary, and receptionist. And unlike most businesses, which are designed to make money, Mejor Vida was conceived to loose money, since all its products and services are given away for free. And instead of collecting a salary, Cuevas spends money to sustain the company. Mejor Vida’s mission is to make life in the city more bearable (its name translates as ‘‘better life’’). It offers products and services designed to counteract the numerous inconveniences that plague the city’s poorer residents. Take the metro, for instance. As we saw in the previous chapter, getting around the city by subway can be a hair-raising experience—as Carlos Monsiváis has put it, ‘‘every day close to five million people fight a vicious battle for oxygen and inches in the city’s metro’’15—so Mejor Vida came up with a number of ingenious remedies. Gargantuan lines form in front of ticket booths at rush hour, so the corporation (read: Minerva Cuevas) eases the bottleneck by handing out free tickets. There are not enough employees to clean up after the five million daily passengers, so the corporation sweeps the platforms for free (Figure 25). Exhausted riders who fall asleep in the subway cars risk being

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Figure 24: Mejor Vida Corporation webpage (www.irational.org/mvc). Image courtesy of the artist and Kurimanzutto, Mexico City.

robbed, so the corporation distributes caffeine ‘‘safety pills’’ to keep them awake and alert. Thieves and other thugs pose a constant threat, so the corporation offers free canisters of pepper spray. Other products (which clients can retrieve at the corporation’s office or order through its website) are designed to increase the purchasing power of those with limited means. The corporation offers official-looking student ID cards (Figure 26) that can then be used to obtain discounts and free admissions (clients send a recent photo and they receive a card in the mail); doctored barcode stickers, to be affixed on meat, cheese, and other products sold in the city’s supermarkets, designed to trick the checkout scanner into registering absurdly low prices (so that, for instance, a pound of meat can be bought for $1 instead of $10); and packaged seeds, which the corporation leaves on banks and ATMs, encouraging consumers to short-circuit consumerism by growing their own food. The corporation offers another service designed to help those between jobs secure gainful employment: letters of recommendation, which are

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Figure 25: Minerva Cuevas cleaning the Mexico City Metro—a free service provided by Mejor Vida Corporation. Image courtesy of the artist and Kurimanzutto, Mexico City.

required for all employment applications in Mexico and carry a disproportionate weight in a country where so much hinges on personal connections. To make up for their lack of friends in high places, job seekers can submit the letter’s content (unabashedly praising their years of experience, punctuality, reliability, and hard-work), and the corporation will then print it and stamp it on Mejor Vida letterhead. In the past, Minerva Cuevas has convinced some of the world’s most prestigious art galleries—Lisson Gallery in London and Galerie Chantal Crousel in Paris—to provide recommendation letters on their own letterhead for the corporation’s ‘‘clients.’’ Cuevas uses her Mejor Vida Corporation to address many of the same social problems tackled by Francis Alÿs’s performances—her work, like Alÿs’s, is an attempt to identify with the city’s poor. But though both artists make works about the vagaries of life in Mexico City, their approaches are quite different. They both allude to the constant threat of violence that hangs over Mexico City, but while Alÿs walks the street with a loaded gun, Cuevas distributes pepper spray and caffeine pills so residents can protect themselves from thugs with guns. Both artists allude to the gradual erosion of the middle class’s purchasing power, but Alÿs performs metaphorical actions—like pushing a block of ice—to identify with the poor man’s troubles, while Cuevas circulates products—doctored

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Figure 26: Mejor Vida Corporation, student identification card. Image courtesy of the artist and Kurimanzutto, Mexico City.

barcodes and phony student cards—designed to stretch the value of the poor man’s peso and reverse the trend of impoverishment. Alÿs merely points to problems; Cuevas tries to fix them. Both artists identify with the plight of the underdog, but Cuevas carries her identification a step further than Alÿs by proposing concrete solutions to the nightmares faced by the city’s residents. Both artists roam the streets of Mexico City, but if Alÿs is a flâneur, Cuevas is a handywoman: Like Alÿs, her inspiration comes from exploring the city streets, but her goal is to devise ingenious ways to fix the many things that are wrong in the capital, as if she were the superintendent of a rickety old building. And though her proposals are modest, they achieve actual results. Her services can be seen as politically committed talachas— the improvised, quick fixes that the city’s mechanics are so skilled at applying. For Cuevas, ‘‘practicing’’ Mexico City entails mending the tattered lives of its poorer denizens. Minerva Cuevas’s work belongs to a long tradition of utopian art projects: Like the Soviet constructivists and the Mexican muralists—to give only two examples—she believes that art has the potential to transform society. Her goals, however, are much more modest: Unlike Alexandr

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Rodchenko or Diego Rivera, she does not dream of using art to build a radically new world—a revolutionary utopia—but merely makes a few concrete proposals for improving the lot of Mexico City’s residents. She is more interested in finding solutions than in promoting revolutions. ‘‘I don’t intend to create an ideal world,’’ she has declared, ‘‘I don’t think it can be done, but I do think we can change small things for the better.’’16 It is easy to understand why Cuevas makes her goals so modest, and why she rejects the notion of a radically utopian, revolutionary art. Most of the twentieth century’s revolutionary projects—including both the Mexican and the Russian revolutions—degenerated into dystopian nightmares along with the artistic projects they inspired. As French historian Frédéric Rouvillois has observed, radical utopian projects laid the foundations for totalitarian states, ‘‘as if utopia were nothing more than the premonition of totalitarianism and totalitarianism the tragic execution of the utopian dream.’’17 Living in Mexico, Cuevas witnessed the sad outcome of the revolutionary project: The Mexican Revolution became ‘‘institutionalized’’ and ultimately fossilized, and the utopian art movements it inspired, including muralism, devolved into state-financed propaganda. It makes sense that after living though this catastrophic failure, Cuevas would renounce grand goals in favor of modest proposals like distributing free metro tickets and cleaning the subway. But we should not underestimate the importance—and subversive character—of Cuevas’s actions because of their modest scale. The mission of Mejor Vida Corporation is best understood in light of Georges Bataille’s theory of expenditure. According to the French theorist, modern societies are based on the principle of production, in which gain is the ultimate goal. The modern world privileges all that leads to accumulation— and maximizing productivity—and discourages all that is nonproductive. In the logic of production, all actions are a means to an end, and that end is always attainting the maximum gain. There are certain actions, however, that subvert the logic of production because they are not means to gain profit but ends in themselves. Rituals, cults, spectacles, perverse sexual acts, art, and poetry are all actions that are both useless and unproductive. In a world that privileges gain, these actions introduce a loss—of time, money, or energy. Bataille calls them ‘‘expenditures’’ and writes that ‘‘these constitute a class in which what is emphasized in every case is a loss, one that must be as great as possible in order to give the action its true sense.’’18 Acts of expenditure are extremely subversive because they threaten the most elementary principle of the modern world: accumulation. The products and services offered by Mejor Vida Corporation are all forms of expenditure. Not only are they free—Bataille reminds us that the

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gift is one of the most archaic forms of expenditure—but they also require an expenditure of time, money, and energy on Cuevas’s part.19 Like the examples given by Bataille, all of the corporation’s activities are exercises in loss. The corporation’s campaigns are to business practices what perversions are to reproduction: If perverse sexual acts are expenditures because they use up libido but do not reproduce human life, Mejor Vida’s services are expenditures because they consume labor but do not produce earnings. The corporation, however, is an unusual form of expenditure. Most activities that produce losses—from orgiastic experiences to poetic experiments—exist outside what Bataille has called ‘‘the realm of labor.’’ In all of his examples, work and expenditure are mutually exclusive: One can either work or make ritual sacrifices, hold a job or join a cult. Minerva Cuevas, on the other hand, proposes a form of expenditure that is also a form of work. To subvert capitalism’s accumulative logic, Mejor Vida’s sole employee does not have to join an orgy (one of the ultimate forms of expenditure celebrated by Bataille); she merely has to go to the office. What is most striking about Mejor Vida is that it is an exercise in expenditure masquerading as a corporation. Cuevas pretends to be a legitimate player in the capitalist game, though in reality she is a secret agent working toward its demise. Mejor Vida is a Trojan horse of expenditure, one that Minerva Cuevas successfully smuggled into the citadel of Mexico City’s corporate world.20

Santiago Sierra Santiago Sierra—a Spanish artist who has lived in Mexico City since 1995—also produces work about the harsh life endured by Mexico City’s poorer residents. As in the work of Alÿs and Cuevas, the streets of Mexico City play a crucial role in his projects, and in some cases the street itself becomes the support of the work. Sierra inserts his practice in the tradition of conceptual artists from the 1960s and 1970s like Gordon Matta Clark and Vito Acconci: He stages actions and interventions in buildings and public places, then documents the outcome in black-and-white photographs bearing long, descriptive titles (for instance: Bundle of 1,000 x 400 x 250 cm Composed of Waste Plastic and Suspended from the Front of a Building. 5 Isabel la Católica Street, 1997). The photographs are also accompanied by a paragraph or two describing the purpose and results of the artist’s interventions. Like the artists discussed earlier in the chapter, Santiago Sierra has been influenced by the experience of the Centro: His apartment on Calle

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Regina—blocks away from Alÿs’s studio on Plaza Santa Catarina and Mejor Vida’s headquarters at the Torre Latinoamericana—served as the setting for several of his early actions. And, like the projects of Alÿs and Cuevas, his work deals with the city’s most marginal inhabitants and the problems they face in their daily struggle for survival. Several of Sierra’s interventions, for example, allude to the endless transportation nightmares that complicate the lives of poorer residents. His 1996 Pedestrian Bridge Obstructed with Wrapping Tape (Figure 27), was installed on a pedestrian bridge located over one of the busiest intersections in the city: the corner of Viaducto Tlalpan and Río Churubusco, two multilane, high-speed highways traversing the city from north to south and from east to west. To get across this intersection, pedestrians must climb the bridge, an ugly structure towering 20 feet above street level, and cross over eight lanes of traffic before descending on the other side. Sierra’s piece consisted in blocking off access to the bridge by cordoning off the stairs with a roll of masking tape. The artist describes his action as follows: ‘‘In broad daylight, and without anyone feeling uncomfortable or in anyway affected by what I was doing, I obstructed the entrance to the bridge with wrapping tape, preventing the pedestrians from crossing the Tlalpan expressway. They simply moved down the street looking for another bridge.’’21 Sierra’s intervention points to the precarious situation of Mexico City’s pedestrians (a marginalized class in a city dominated by over five million cars). Since the 1950s, the city’s exponential growth has required the construction of multilane highways, inner expressways, viaductos and periféricos—public works that have had the unintended consequence of making life nearly impossible for anyone without a car. Pedestrians can no longer walk more than a few blocks without running into formidable obstacles like retaining walls for elevated highways and concrete ramps. Poor planning makes getting across ubiquitous expressways a life-threatening experience: Pedestrians either dart across these roads, running for their lives and dodging cars racing at 80 mph (not an uncommon sight on the Periférico), or they climb several stories to reach poorly planned bridges like the one in which Sierra set his action. As Jorge Ibargüengoitia wrote in the 1970s, what was once a paradise of flâneurs became a city of traffic jams and one of the worst pollution problems in the world (Ibargüengoitia, who did not drive, wrote dozens of bitter articles denouncing the city’s building projects as an all-out attack on pedestrians; eventually he gave up, packed his bags, and moved to Paris).22 José Joaquín Blanco, another writer and avid flâneur, denounced the dehumanizing effects of an urban planning designed exclusively for motorists. ‘‘For several years,’’ he wrote in 1978, ‘‘the city government

Figure 27: Santiago Sierra, Pedestrian Bridge Obstructed with Wrapping Tape (1996). Image courtesy Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zürich.

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has launched spectacular highway projects that benefit motorized individuals . . . The constructions favoring the individual transportation of the privileged not only take precedence over public transport for the masses, but positively hamper it, making it even slower and more tiresome; they destroy the lifestyles of the neighborhoods they cut through; they tend to ghettoize the poorer enclaves (some of which were not so badly off before, when a mixture of social classes brought with it better services). These areas are thus turning into quasi-underground slums, covered by fast, streamlined bridges carrying the privileged driver across and preventing him from touching or even seeing what lies beneath as he cruises in a matter of minutes from one fancy neighborhood to another. The proliferation of bypasses, urban freeways, expressways, turnpikes, and the like has a twofold purpose: to link together the city of affluence while insulating it from the city of indigence by means of the retaining walls of these grand constructions.’’23 Expressways, tunnels, and highways are some of the landmarks of the generic city, and one way to read these writers’ dismay at the proliferation of these pedestrian obstacles is as a warning that Mexico City might be on its way to becoming generic. We can see why the streets are dead in generic cities: All pedestrians have been killed—literally or figuratively—by speeding cars. Santiago Sierra makes the plight of Mexico City’s pedestrians painfully obvious: His action on the pedestrian bridge over Tlalpan—one of the ‘‘grand constructions’’ derided by Blanco—is a repetition, on a smaller scale, of what the city’s urban planners have been doing for decades: making life impossible for the city’s carless residents by erecting formidable obstacles throughout the city. But pedestrians are not the only ones to suffer as Mexico City grows: Drivers have it pretty bad as well. Many of the ambitious public projects designed to ease the flow of traffic last only a few years before they, too, become clogged and outdated—and require the construction of an even grander, newer project. As an example, take the Periférico, the main ring road connecting the northern suburbs to the city. In the 1960s this multilane expressway allowed drivers to zoom from north to south in a few minutes; now, it is perpetually jammed during rush hour, forcing commuters to spend up to two hours to get across the city. Those who live in the north and work in the south, or vice versa, experience what was once a symbol of Mexico’s modernity as an inhuman torture worthy of inclusion in Dante’s Inferno. One of Sierra’s 1998 interventions, set in the Periférico, alludes to the city’s perpetual traffic problems. For this piece, the artist convinced a curator at Jumex—the country’s leading fruit juice producer and owner of

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Figure 28: Santiago Sierra, Obstruction of a Freeway with a Trailer Truck (1998). Image courtesy Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zürich.

one of Latin America’s most impressive art collections—to lend him one of the company’s eighteen-wheeler trucks to block off one of the Periférico’s exits for five minutes. The artist filmed the events from a nearby pedestrian bridge and described his Obstruction of a Freeway with a Trailer Truck (Figure 28) as follows: ‘‘I asked to borrow a company’s truck without concealing my project. The driver did not object when he was asked to block the side lanes of one of the city’s busiest roads for five minutes. This piece consisted in installing a white prism on the road, and the end result was a traffic jam.’’24 But not all of Sierra’s work deals with traffic and its vicissitudes. Since 1998 many of his actions have focused on the experiences of those living

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on the margins of society: unskilled day laborers, drug addicts, prostitutes, and—in works done in the United States and Europe—illegal aliens. For several museum and gallery exhibitions Sierra has paid social outcasts to perform actions highlighting their precarious position in the world. He once hired several hundred working-class Mexicans to fill an exhibition room at the Museo Rufino Tamayo and stand, for several hours a day, as human sculptures.25 For the opening of an exhibition of his work at ACE—the Mexico City branch of the Los Angeles gallery—Sierra paid a boy to approach guests and shine their shoes without their consent.26 The artist has hired people to lie inside wooden boxes, masturbate in front of the camera, and have their heads shaved.27 He has tattooed lines on people’s backs, bleached their hair blond, and once made eleven indigenous women repeat a Spanish phrase they could not understand—all in exchange for a few pesos.28 These interventions focus on one of Mexico City’s gravest social problems: underemployment. Lacking steady jobs, millions of residents make a living as day laborers—a precarious existence that makes the lifestyle of ambulantes seem stable and desirable in comparison. Many of these occasional workers line up every morning outside the Cathedral, waiting to be hired for the day and holding signs announcing their profession—‘‘construction worker,’’ ‘‘electrician,’’ ‘‘plumber’’ (Francis Alÿs once joined the lineup, holding a sign reading ‘‘tourist,’’ Figure 29). These day laborers—also called milusos, or thousand-use workers—juggle dozens of occasional jobs without contracts, benefits, or even guaranteed paychecks. Ricardo Garibay wrote a striking portrait of these jacks-of-alltrades in El milusos (which inspired the 1986 eponymous film—one of the biggest box-office hits in Mexico), the story of an illiterate peasant named Tránsito Pérez who arrives in Mexico City in search of a better life, and, over the course of a few weeks, holds a long string of odd jobs that includes stints as bearer, butcher’s assistant, public baths attendant, construction worker, street sweeper, night watchman, and messenger. He ends up penniless and depressed (‘‘¡Lo matan a uno,’’ he exclaims in untranslatable slang, ‘‘quieren gato, bañero, excusadero y jeringa! . . . ¡Méndiga movida!’’).29 Though they are treated like criminals (in Garibay’s text Transito Pérez is arrested and imprisoned), the city’s milusos are a pillar of the economy: their presence in the city ensures an almost unlimited supply of cheap, expendable labor. Sierra’s projects draw attention to the precarious conditions in which the city’s milusos live. Most of these laborers are desperate for money and will take any job, no matter how demeaning or risky. For an exhibition at Acceso A (Figure 30), a short-lived gallery in one of Mexico City’s most

Figure 29: Francis Alÿs, Turista (1996). Image courtesy of the artist and Lisson Gallery, London.

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Figure 30: Santiago Sierra, Wall of a Gallery Torn Out, Tilted at an Angle of Sixty Degrees, and Supported by 5 People (2000). Image courtesy Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zürich.

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elegant shopping districts, Sierra hired five milusos to work as human columns, holding up a wall of sheetrock for several hours a day. Sierra describes the piece, Wall of a Gallery Torn Out, Tilted at an Angle of Sixty Degrees, and Supported by 5 People (staged at Acceso A, Mexico City, on April 2000) as follows: ‘‘A sheetrock wall installed in the gallery was torn out. Four workers served as human buttresses, keeping the wall tilted at an angle of sixty degrees, for four hours a day during five days. Four of them supported the wall, while a fifth checked that the angle was exact. For the five working days, each worker earned 700 pesos, about 65 US dollars.’’30 Sierra addresses many of the same issues as Minerva Cuevas, including the capital’s grave transportation and employment deficiencies. But the approaches taken by these two artists could not be more different: While Cuevas’s services make life in Mexico City more bearable, Sierra’s interventions make it less so. Take transportation, for instance: Cuevas makes it easier for people to get around the city (by handing out free metro tickets and cleaning the subway), while Sierra throws obstacles in their way (by blocking off pedestrian bridges and expressway exits). And faced with the city’s employment crisis, Cuevas helps the unemployed by providing recommendation letters, while Sierra exploits them by paying them a pittance to perform cruel and demeaning tasks—like pointlessly holding a piece of drywall for hours at a time. If Alÿs is a flâneur and Cuevas a handywoman, then Sierra is a vandal, spreading destruction throughout the city in the name of art (one of his early pieces, Gallery Burned with Gasoline [Art Deposit, Mexico City, November 1997], consisted in torching the walls of a newly opened artistrun gallery). And if Sierra had a company, it would be called ‘‘Peor Vida Corporation.’’ Sierra’s actions and interventions raise a number of important questions: Is it ethical for an artist to block traffic, inconvenience pedestrians, and exploit workers in the name of art? Curiously, most critics have applauded Sierra as a politically engaged artist determined to raise the public’s awareness about social problems. Spanish curator Rosa Martínez has praised Sierra for exposing ‘‘with jarring clarity the repetitive mechanisms of labour exploitation and human oppression for economic ends’’;31 Mexican critic Cuauhtémoc Medina defended Sierra’s hiring of day laborers as an intervention that defied ‘‘the productivist logic of modern capitalism’’ by ‘‘exposing the power structures inherent in labor practices.’’32 Coco Fusco argued that ‘‘Sierra’s work flies in the face of a longstanding tradition of romanticizing Mexico’s poor.’’33 And Brazilian curator Adriano Pedrosa admonished offended viewers that ‘‘turning away’’ from Sierra’s work is analogous to ‘‘avoiding the real world.’’34

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But how do these critics reach such enthusiastic conclusions about Sierra’s interventions? Their reasoning seems to go as follows: Social ills like exploitative employment practices are unethical but generally overlooked by most middle-class Mexicans; by staging them inside a gallery, the artist forces the art public to confront the injustices that they generally choose to ignore. When gallery visitors discover that they are accomplices to the exploitation on display—the laborers are paid to perform for them—they recognize Sierra’s intervention as a metaphor for the world outside the gallery, where they are passive spectators of the social injustices that abound in Mexico City. And, as in the gallery, their passivity translates into a tacit endorsement. But there is a flaw in this reasoning: Critics like Medina and Pedrosa assume that staging an act inside a gallery, for an allegedly good cause, frees it from the constraints of ethical rules. Though we usually consider hiring a laborer to perform a demeaning task as unethical, these critics argue that doing so inside a gallery and for the purpose of enlightening the public transforms it into a principled action. But to demonstrate the problem with this line of reasoning, we only need to consider the scenario that would result if we were to substitute Sierra’s exploitation of laborers with another, much graver, unethical act—murder, for instance. Staging a murder inside a gallery—even if the victim were ‘‘compensated’’ for dying—would certainly shock the art public into thinking about the evils of killing, but it would not justify the murder in the eyes of the law. Neither the gallery context nor the artist’s intention to raise awareness would make him immune from prosecution (and this is perhaps the only reason why Sierra has not added murder to his catalog of exploitative practices). And just like murder is a criminal act whether it occurs in the gallery or on the street, human exploitation is unethical regardless of the context in which it is produced or the artist’s intentions. What Sierra’s enthusiastic critics have failed to realize is that Sierra’s interventions are acts and not representations of exploitation. And all acts have to be judged according to the same standards, whether they take place on the street, in a gallery, or inside a circus. Indeed Sierra’s work would have been more effective—and more ethical—if it consisted, like Francis Alÿs’s photos and performances, of representations. There is a vast difference between representing the numerous obstacles faced by Mexico City pedestrians (by taking photographs, making a film, or simply writing about their experiences) and acting to create more obstacles, as Sierra does by roping off pedestrian bridges and blocking traffic. His interventions become a mere repetition—an acting out—of the misdeeds they are meant to address.

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In psychoanalytic theory, ‘‘acting out’’ is the opposite of representation. Psychoanalysis—like art—is an exercise in representation: Patients represent themselves by translating their experience into words for the analyst. But Freud discovered that some patients find it easier to act out: An angry patient, for example, can either represent his feelings by putting them into words, or he can act on them by smacking the analyst (or performing other similar actions, like withholding payment, missing sessions, arriving late). In the latter case, Freud explains, the patient acts out his aggression ‘‘before us, as it were, instead of reporting it to us.’’35 The acting out of emotions can also occur outside the consulting room, leading to criminal acts ranging from vandalism to murder. In their Language of Psycho-Analysis, Jean Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis show how in all of these cases ‘‘the subject is deemed to proceed from an idea or tendency to the corresponding act.’’36 Sierra’s interventions are good examples of this kind of destructive acting out. The artist does not represent the causes of the city’s problems; he merely acts them out. And if representation fosters analysis and understanding, acting out consists in a series of unexamined repetitions. In acting out, the subject ‘‘yields to the compulsion to repeat,’’37 and this is precisely what we find in Sierra’s interventions: By blocking the Periférico, Sierra merely repeats the destructive gestures of arrogant drivers; by hiring day laborers to perform demeaning tasks, he repeats the exploitative actions of unethical employers. In contrast to Francis Alÿs and Minerva Cuevas, Sierra has found a way of ‘‘practicing’’ Mexico City that spreads inconveniences and destruction.

Teresa Margolles The three artists discussed so far find the inspiration for their work on the streets of Mexico City. We will now consider a fourth artist, Teresa Margolles, who finds the material for her work not on the street but in one of the darkest recesses of Mexico City’s underworld: The morgue—a place that is nowhere to be seen in the generic city’s aseptic spaces where anything signaling dirt or death is concealed from view. Margolles was born in Culiacán, a city in northern Mexico with one of the highest murder rates in the country, and since the early 1990s she has used the Mexico City morgue as an artist’s studio. Unlike the generic city, in Mexico City the morgue is not hidden from view. The central morgue, also known as SEMEFO (an acronym for ‘‘Servicio Médico

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Forense’’ or ‘‘medical forensic services’’), is a scary place, even from the outside: Its volcanic stone façade looks like a pre-Columbian temple, and its main entrance is flanked by a stone replica of Coatlicue, the Aztec goddess of life and death, a monstrous monolith wearing a skirt of serpents and a necklace of human hearts. The morgue is located in one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the city: Colonia Doctores, a working-class district where the streets are named after eminent Mexican physicians (from ‘‘Doctor Vértiz’’ to ‘‘Doctor Lucio’’). It is an irony of the city’s geography that the road to the morgue is paved with good doctors! Margolles began frequenting the morgue in 1993, when she enrolled in a course on forensic medicine designed for doctors and medical students. The artist belonged to neither category, but no one asked any questions; she successfully learned to perform autopsies and was granted a diploma.38 Since then Margolles has produced dozens of gory sculptures and installations made with fragments of the human body retrieved from the morgue. Her work includes the following little shop of horrors: a corroded metal casket freshly unearthed from a cemetery (Larvario, 1992);39 hospital sheets bearing the bloody silhouettes of human figures (Dermis, 1995); a series of tattoos on human skin sliced from cadavers (Tatuajes, 1996); an installation consisting of metal drums for boiling corpses in a medical school (Untitled, 1997);40 a set of Cards for Cutting Cocaine (1998) bearing bloody photos of men killed in drug-related violence; a human fetus buried inside a minimalist-looking cement block (Burial, 1999); an old couch reupholstered in raw cow stomachs (Untitled, 1998);41 a severed tongue perforated by a silver piercing (Tongue, 2000, Figure 31); a coat of human fat (retrieved from a medical school) applied like paint on the façades of various government buildings in Havana (Havana Biennale, 2000); and a museum gallery filled with steam from water used to wash corpses in the Mexico City morgue (Vaporization, 2000).42 Contrary to what the reader might expect, these works never caused a stir in Mexico City. Margolles held her first major exhibition, as part of the aptly named artists’ collective SEMEFO, at Carrillo Gil, one of the city’s most prestigious museums (the 1994 show—featuring several horse carcasses and a set of foul-smelling mare fetuses—went by without attracting the attention of journalists),43 and since then she has shown in most of the city’s government-run museums as well as in private galleries. And although these bloody installations have been reviewed in the art press, mainstream news media have shown little interest in her case. Compare this generalized indifference to the avalanche of outraged

Figure 31: Teresa Margolles, Tongue (2000). Image courtesy of the artist and Enrique Guerrero Gallery, Mexico City.

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articles sparked by Daniela Rossell’s photographs of the ‘‘rich and famous’’: Mexico City’s residents, it seems, find death less shocking than wealth. Surprisingly, Margolles has never shown a human corpse taken from the morgue, though such an act would seem to be the ultimate realization of her necrophiliac aesthetics. Indeed her work contains everything that one could possibly smuggle out of the morgue—from body parts to bloody drums—except for an actual corpse. But though there are no corpses in her work, everything she has done seems to point back to the dead body. The dead body is represented indexically (by the contours imprinted on the bloody sheet), photographically (in the Cards for Cutting Cocaine), synecdochically (by the severed tongue and human fat—body parts that stand in for the missing whole), literally (the fetus contained in Burial), and even in absentia (the body is what is missing inside the metal drums taken from the medical school).44 The artist’s entire œuvre could well be titled ‘‘variations on a corpse,’’ but the corpse is always conspicuously absent (even in Burial the corpse is nowhere to be seen, and the artist’s assertion that the block of cement contains a dead fetus could only be confirmed by destroying the piece). The body is always implied, never present. The body is missing, as in the scene of a puzzling crime. ‘‘Where’s the body?’’ the viewer asks after perusing this assortment of severed organs, stained sheets, and fetid vats. It is as if the artist wanted her viewers to assume the role of detectives and go in search of the corpus delicti. But we don’t have to look very far: There are no bodies in Margolles’s installations, but there are plenty of corpses in recent Mexican history. The missing element in Margolles’s work can be read as an allusion to the countless bodies that have surfaced during the nineties, a decade plagued by a gruesome wave of violence—from political assassinations to drug murders—that has left behind a pile of corpses, some as hideously mangled as the cadavers found in the city’s SEMEFO. Body number one: In October 1996, a dead man was found buried in a ranch belonging to Raúl Salinas, a brother of the infamous ex-president. Before stunned reporters and television cameras, a government prosecutor announced that the body belonged to Manuel Muñoz Rocha, a minor politician and the prime suspect in the 1994 murder of the PRI’s secretary general, José Francisco Ruiz Massieu, who was gunned down as he was leaving his office in Mexico City. This had been the third assassination of a prominent politician in less than a year: In May 1993, Juan Jesús Cardinal Posadas, the archbishop of Guadalajara, was shot point-blank as he was leaving his car to board a plane; and in March 1994, Luis Donaldo Colosio, the PRI’s presidential candidate, was killed by a gunman during a

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campaign rally in Tijuana. In these two murders the bodies were found, but the crimes were never solved. When the body surfaced in Raúl Salinas’s ranch, the special prosecutor appointed by President Zedillo to investigate the Ruiz Massieu murder claimed victory: At least one of the three political assassinations that shook the country, it seemed, would be resolved. The found body would prove not only that Muñoz Rocha had played a hand in the secretary general’s killing, but also that Raúl Salinas was the mastermind behind the entire scheme (overzealous prosecutors did not wait for this piece of evidence; they had put Raúl Salinas behind bars back in 1995). But rather than solving the murder mystery, the found body merely complicated the plot. Reporters discovered that the prosecutor had enlisted the help of a fortuneteller—a woman nicknamed ‘‘La Paca,’’ who, after smelling one of Muñoz Rocha’s old t-shirts, was led to Salinas’s ranch by her extrasensorial powers. ‘‘He rose up from his tomb to point to his assassins,’’ she boasted.45 They also noticed that the body’s skull had been sawn off—a common practice in autopsies—and that its fingers and teeth were missing, thus complicating the prospects of its easy identification. Months later, DNA tests showed that the body did not belong to Muñoz Rocha, but to one of La Paca’s relatives: The special prosecutor had paid a large sum to the psychic and instructed her to plant a body—any body—in Salinas’s ranch. The fortuneteller pocketed the money and ordered an accomplice to dig up the family grave, retrieve the remains of her in-law, and drive the body to the ranch. When the plot came to light, the special prosecutor and La Paca were sent to prison. Her in-law’s body, mutilated and severely damaged from all the comings and goings, was buried for the third time. Muñoz Rocha’s body—the real corpus delicti— was never found.46 It is still missing, like the body in Margolles’s work. Bodies number 2 to 101: More than 100 women have vanished in the northern state of Chihuahua since 1993—poor, unskilled workers in Ciudad Juárez’s maquiladoras who were abducted, raped, and dumped in the desert. And though more bodies keep surfacing every month, the police have been unable to solve the crimes or even to suggest a plausible motive. Scores of equally implausible scenarios have been suggested: that the women have been killed by organ traffickers; that they were the victims of human sacrifices performed by a narco-satanic cult; that they had been tortured and shot by bored police officers. Wild theories abound, but, despite the growing number of bodies, the police have been unable to come up with a single believable hypothesis. The women’s mangled bodies turn up in the desert, months after their disappearance, often so badly disfigured that their relatives cannot identify them. Most of the victims have been beaten, raped, and

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tortured—sometimes for days—before being strangled or executed.47 And, as in the Ruiz Massieu investigation, the police forces have proven to be incompetent, corrupt, and unable to ascertain the correct identity of the found bodies. In an article on the murders published in The New Yorker, Alma Guillermoprieto reports a disturbing number of ‘‘incidents in which disfigured corpses have been returned to grieving parents— only to have the parents subsequently conclude that the corpse, though dressed in recognizable remnants of their daughter’s clothing, isn’t their daughter.’’48 In one case, a mother discovered the authorities had delivered the wrong body after the family had already buried it. ‘‘When the mother insisted on an exhumation of the girl’s remains, police managed to dig up the wrong coffin.’’ In another case, the father of a missing girl was summoned to the Chihuahua morgue, and shown ‘‘photographs of a corpse, swollen and bruised from the waist down, a skeleton from the waist up’’; with the pretext of sparing the man more pain, the authorities urged him not to see the body, and to identify his daughter from the photographs alone. He agreed, only to discover eventually that the mangled body was not his daughter’s.49 Bodies number 102 to 5,957: In Mexico City, more bodies—thousands more—turn up every year at the Mexico City morgue. In the year 2000, Mexico City’s SEMEFO received 5,855 bodies.50 Hundreds of these bodies are never identified or claimed, and eventually they are dumped in a common grave at Panteón Civil. One of the city’s other morgues maintains a website with photographs of the corpses, in the hope that someone will recognize and help identify them. If we now return to Teresa Margolles, we see that the missing body in her work points to the culture of violence that prevails in Mexico City and to the countless deaths it has produced. The missing body in her work is the most effective representation of the thousands of bodies left behind by the spiraling crime rate. Take her Cards for Cutting Cocaine (Figures 32–33), for instance. In recent years, cocaine has become the recreational drug of choice in Mexico: It is now a trendy drug—one associated with glamour and decadent fun—and it is not uncommon to see well-dressed teenagers snorting it openly in the city’s hippest bars and discos, blissfully unaware of its connection to the culture of violence that lies beyond the dance floor. Margolles’s piece is designed to bring back the repressed: One side of these cards is blank; the other shows the mangled, bloated faces of those killed by drug violence. The artist distributed these cards at art world parties where cocaine use was rampant. She would approach a would-be snorter and leave a card, lying face down, close by. Upon taking the card to

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Figure 32: Teresa Margolles, Cards for Cutting Cocaine (1998). Image courtesy of the artist and Enrique Guerrero Gallery, Mexico City.

‘‘cut’’ a line, the user would discover the photograph. ‘‘Some partiers were so revolted that they got up and left,’’ the artist reports.51 Margolles’s cards are designed not only to cut lines of cocaine but also to make users see the link between their party favors and the drug trade’s brutal reality (drug lords are responsible for much of the violence that has descended upon Mexico in the last decade; they are suspected of having played a hand in the Juarez murders and in the Ruiz Massieu assassination). To use Margolles’s cards, users must look the drug traffickers’ victims in the face—disfigured, bloodied faces, bloated beyond recognition—and, in order to follow through with the act, they must cut lines using body parts. These cards constitute a grisly memento mori, a reminder of the thousands of bodies left behind by Mexico’s narcos. Dermis, another work (Figure 34), consists of the impression left by corpses on white sheets. During one of her routine visits to the morgue, Margolles stumbled upon two young men, lying side by side, covered in blood: Gay lovers who had taken their lives in a double suicide. She put a white sheet over the bodies to create a ghostly imprint of the men’s silhouettes, and then placed the imprint on a stretcher. The result is an eerie, indexical representation of the corpses, one that—like footprints or plaster casts—bears the physical trace of its referent (an index, explains

Figure 33: Teresa Margolles, Cards for Cutting Cocaine (1998). Image courtesy of the artist and Enrique Guerrero Gallery, Mexico City.

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Figure 34: Teresa Margolles, Dermis (1995). Image courtesy of the artist and Enrique Guerrero Gallery, Mexico City.

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critic Denis Hollier, ‘‘is less the representation of an object than the effect of an event.’’)52 Dermis is such a disturbing work because it is made with physical residues of the dead bodies. The men’s outlines, formed by bloodstains, constitute an incontestable proof that where there is now only an absence there was once a living presence. And what could be a more striking representation of violent death than a human body reduced to a bloody splotch? After such gory sights, the reader might conclude that Margolles’s work is not much different from Santiago Sierra’s interventions. Here again, we seem to have stumbled upon an artist who stages unethical acts—the desecration of human remains—in museums and galleries. And if we found that Sierra’s practice amounted to a dangerous form of acting out, shouldn’t we reach the same conclusion about Margolles’s irreverent (and often stomach-turning) manipulation of corpses and body parts? Despite the apparent similarities, there is one important difference between Sierra’s interventions and Margolles’s installations. Sierra uses people, while Margolles works with corpses and human remains. And if ethics demands that we treat living beings justly, there is no equivalent code of conduct for handling corpses. As Georges Bataille—a writer often quoted by Margolles as an inspiration for her work—reminds us, it is not ethics but social taboos that are responsible for the mixture of fear and respect that corpses inspire. A lifeless human body, explains Bataille, is no different from an animal carcass or from inanimate matter like rocks and dirt. But man regards it with awe because ‘‘the corpse is the image of his destiny. It is witness to a violence that not only destroys one man, but which will destroy all men.’’53 In most cultures the corpse is taboo—it is not to be seen or touched—because it reminds us of our inescapable fate: death. But the taboo concerning corpses, which Bataille locates in most societies, does not have much force in Mexico. The corpse found in Raúl Salinas’s ranch, the careless and sloppy handling of the dead women found in Juárez and Chihuahua, and the daily tours offered by the Mexico City morgue are all evidence that human remains inspire neither fear nor respect in Mexico. In other cultures, human bodies are expediently buried and put to rest; in Mexico they are routinely mutilated, transported across town, left for days in the morgue, unearthed, planted as evidence—even displayed in museums as mummies or contemporary art. Readers might be tempted to link this generalized disregard for corpses to the much-celebrated Mexican attitude toward death—a phenomenon that has been described extensively in exoticizing accounts of the ‘‘Day of

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the Dead’’ festivities. What Margolles’s work demonstrates, however, is that there is a dark, gruesome flipside to this special stance toward death: It is not merely an exotic cultural difference but one of the most visible signs of the generalized violence that has torn the country apart in recent years. Margolles’s work can be read as an effort to draw attention to the breakdown of the taboo against corpses in Mexican society and to its dehumanizing effects. The cultural attitudes and institutional practices that make her work possible are also what make possible the horrific treatment of bodies that we have seen in the Ruiz Massieu case and in the Juárez murders. And her work demonstrates that the weakness of this taboo in Mexican society can be seen as the root of many recent evils. Cuauhtémoc Medina reads Margolles’s work as an unmasking of institutional corruption in Mexico: ‘‘Her art practice owes its existence to the laxness of police services in Mexico. Her works are both a candid exposé of their current state and a product of her complicity with that same system.’’54 I would argue that institutional corruption is but one of the many aspects of the culture of violence that has spread throughout the country as a result of the breakdown of the taboo against corpses. Every taboo is related to an interdiction, and Bataille shows that the taboo concerning human remains stems from the fundamental interdiction that guides most societies: Thou shalt not kill. A dead body—especially one that is the result of a violent death—is taboo because it is evidence that the interdiction against taking human lives has been broken. Thus a society in which the corpse no longer inspires fear is also a society in which murder is no longer prohibited. The flip-side of Mexico’s famously irreverent attitude toward death, as Octavio Paz argues in The Labyrinth of Solitude, is ‘‘an indifference towards life.’’55 Mexicans are not afraid of looking at bodies because they are not afraid to kill—or to die: Margolles makes this explicit by linking the disregard for human remains that makes her work possible to the spiral of violence that has terrorized the country for most of the 1990s. If Alÿs is a flâneur, Cuevas a handywoman, and Sierra a vandal, then Teresa Margolles is a tinkerer. She ‘‘practices’’ Mexico City by roaming its underbelly in search of abject materials and bloody organs that are striking signifiers of the widespread violence, cruelty, and indifference toward human remains. And in most cases, she simply moves them from one place to another: from the morgue to the gallery, from the forensic department to the museum. In the same way that Duchamp moved a urinal from the restroom to the gallery to bring the gallery a step closer to the restroom, and art a step closer to filth, Margolles brings the museum closer to the morgue, and art to Mexico’s culture of violence.

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Jonathan Hernández We will discuss a fifth and final artist who gets the inspiration for his work from the streets of Mexico City: Jonathan Hernández, who has devoted several pieces to what might be termed urban dysfunctionalism. For one work, the artist took dozens of posters that had been taped to lampposts around the city, offering cash rewards for missing dogs, and exhibited them in a museum (Se busca recompensa, 1998–2001); another time he created a series of ‘‘Explore Mexico City’’ postcards showing not idyllic streetscapes but images of broken streetlights and confusing street signage that included traffic arrows pointing the wrong way. But the piece that is most relevant to our discussion is a photo-conceptual series from 1995 titled Credencial sordomudos [deaf-mute ID card]. The inspiration for this piece came not from the Centro but from the southern confines of the city: the ‘‘university city’’ housing the country’s largest public university. The artist traveled south and pretended to be a deaf-mute student at UNAM in need of a replacement student ID card. He approached university officials wearing a sign around his neck that read ‘‘To whom it may concern: we students are deaf-mute but we still need our ID. Please write down the next step in order to get a replacement ID card.’’ The series consists of nearly three dozen photographs and post-it notes documenting the labyrinthine bureaucratic procedures required for this simple task: Polaroid snapshots showing the artist walking through a maze of offices (Figure 35) alternate with post-it notes on which university employees wrote—in a language plagued by grammatical and spelling mistakes—the steps required to get a replacement card. These telegraphic messages reveal the convoluted, kafkaesque atmosphere that prevails in the university: ‘‘Go to your departmental library and ask for a confirmation that no books are owed. Take that sheet to the central library and get it stamped, then come back here,’’ reads one; ‘‘We can do it after 12:00. It is 11:00,’’ reads another (Figure 36). Though the reader might be tempted to dismiss this piece as a lighthearted joke or a photo-conceptual equivalent of ‘‘Candid Camera,’’ Credencial sordomudos exposes many of the problems plaguing what was once Latin America’s most prestigious university. UNAM is the world’s largest university, with more than 250,000 students and almost 30,000 professors.56 It was planned in the 1950s as a utopian modernist project: Mario Pani and a team of architects designed an autonomous ‘‘university city’’ in the southern suburbs and artists from Diego Rivera to Juan O’Gormann created murals for its buildings. One critic has called the university project ‘‘the mythical topos for the creation

Figure 35: Jonathan Hernández, from the series Credencial Sordumudos (1995). Image courtesy of La Colección Jumex, Mexico City, and Kurimanzutto.

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Figure 36: Jonathan Hernández, from the series Credencial Sordumudos (1995). Image courtesy of La Colección Jumex, Mexico City, and Kurimanzutto.

of the new Mexican . . . the environment where a modern society would be born.’’57 Ironically, the University City was inspired by Le Corbusier’s theories of urban planning—the same ideas that inspired the proliferation of generic cities.58 And though the university is still known as ‘‘la casa máxima de estudios,’’ in recent years it has gone from utopian project to dystopian nightmare, and it is now a disorderly campus plagued by labor tensions, shrinking budgets, and student strikes (the most recent lasted almost ten months, from April 1999 to January 2000). As the latest strike dragged on, Mexicans feared that this episode would lead to another student massacre like the one at Tlatelolco in 1968, the bloodiest moment in the 71 years of PRI rule. This time around, however, the strike led not to tragedy but to a comedy of the absurd: Months went by, and student

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leaders and government officials proved equally inept at resolving the conflict. The deadlock finally ended when President Ernesto Zedillo ordered a special police task force to enter the campus and reclaim it from the striking students. The university’s grave problems, however, were not solved when the police forces broke up the student strike. In 2000 Guillermo Sheridan, a regular contributor to Octavio Paz’s journal Vuelta and a long-time UNAM professor, published Allá en el campus grande, a scathing indictment of the bureaucratic culture that was threatening to choke the university. He noted, for example, that the university had grown into a gargantuan system that included not only academic units and departments but also high schools, publishing houses, a department devoted to the promotion of culture, the National Seismological System, and even movie theaters and supermarkets! No wonder the university’s resources are spread too thin. ‘‘UNAM,’’ wrote Sheridan, ‘‘is a fat whore exploited by an army of procurers: multifaceted politicians, avid union leaders, occasional cheguevarists, political careerists, mediocre academics, incontinent sloths, alienated gang members.’’59 Sheridan lamented that it had become all but impossible to get work done at UNAM, either as a professor or a student. When the university was not closed down by strikes, it was paralyzed by bureaucracy. To give the reader a sense of the absurd that permeates every day life on campus, Sheridan transcribed a series of dialogues, which read like the perfect textual companion to Hernandez’s Credencial sordomudos. A professor arrives on campus, hoping to get some work done, on the day of the Constitution, a national holiday in Mexico. He engages in the following absurd—and untranslatable—dialogue with the guard: —¿Puedo pasar a mi oficina? —Quistá cerrado. Sólo sentra por la puerta principal. —Entrar por esa puerta me obliga a manejar seis kilometros. Mi oficina está aquí a la vuelta. —¿Y qué quiere quiaga? —Pues que utilice su sentido común y me deje pasar. —No. —Mire, me doy cuenta de que solo soy un miserable académico y de que usted es un empleado muy importante, pero, por favor, déjeme pasar. —No. —¿Por qué? —Pus porque no. —Hable a la puerta principal con su güokitoki y pregunte si me dejan pasar. —No. —¿Por qué no?

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—Porquel güokitoki es palas emergencies. —Y si me infarto, ¿califico como emergencia? —Pusí. —Pues mire: ya me infarté. —Éjele, nisierto.60

In another dialogue, Sheridan recounts a scene that is uncannily similar to the those portrayed in Credencial sordomudos: —I’ve come for my paycheck. —The lady in charge isn’t here. —How can she not be here? Today is payday. —That’s why. —What do you mean that’s why? —She’s gone to get her paycheck.61

Credencial sordomudos, a work completed four years before the latest student strike, can be read as an uncanny premonition of the disaster to come. Hernández’s piece suggests that even when the university is in session, its labyrinthine bureaucracy prevents it from operating efficiently. How can a university function, the work seems to ask, when it takes three dozen steps—standing in line, filling out countless forms, securing numerous stamps—to merely get a replacement ID? We can only imagine the number of steps required to register as a new student, sign up for classes, or—even more gravely—graduate and receive a diploma. Credencial sordomudos can be seen as a timely critique of the UNAM’s greatest problem—the excessive bureaucratization that undermines its teaching mission. Getting an ID card, however, is merely a metaphor for a more important—and more difficult—process: becoming a UNAM student. The university embodies one of the Mexican Revolution’s most utopian ideals: to provide education, free of charge, to all who are qualified. During the 1950s and 1960s hundreds of thousands of poor Mexicans benefited from the university’s mission: Armed with UNAM degrees, they secured stable jobs—often government positions guaranteed for life—and joined the ranks of the middle class. And the UNAM was not only for the poor: Until recently, virtually all of Mexico’s presidents and high-ranking government officials studied at the university and flaunted their degrees as proof of their allegiance to what was then called ‘‘the Revolutionary family.’’ All this, however, has changed drastically in recent years. As enrollments have swollen to unmanageable numbers, a UNAM degree is now seen as a liability, and many job postings explicitly discourage applications

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from the university’s graduates. Since the advent of neoliberal governments in the 1990s, the credential of choice for Mexican presidents and ministers is not a UNAM education but an ivy-league degree, preferably in economics. And the free university education that was once seen as a utopian accomplishment has become a bitter bone of contention: The 1999 strike erupted after the university’s president attempted to raise matriculation fees from a few cents to a few dollars and replace the tradition of ‘‘automatic admissions’’ with a more competitive process. But perhaps the worst time to be a card-carrying UNAM student was in October 1968, in the wake of the Tlatelolco massacre. Credencial sordomudos can be read as an allusion to this somber episode, in which UNAM ID cards became tickets to jail. Hundreds of students around the city were arrested and accused of promoting social unrest, and those carrying UNAM ID cards fared the worst. Carlos Galván, one of the students arrested in the massive crackdown, recounts how in jail, he destroyed his UNAM ID card because the police were roughest on the university’s students. ‘‘The first thing I did,’’ he writes, ‘‘was to tear up my student card and flush it down the toilet.’’62 When he made this piece, Hernández was enrolled at UNAM, and thus Credencial sordomudos is a documentary piece allowing us a glimpse of a day in the life of a student enrolled at the university. Unlike the other works discussed in this chapter, Hernández’s is a straightforward, autobiographical representation. He needed to get an ID card, and when he discovered the convoluted procedure, he decided to bring his camera along. Unlike Alÿs, he did not stage a performance in order to identify with the plight of his peers; he did nothing to either improve the lot of his fellow students (as Cuevas would have) or aggravate their problems (as Sierra might have done). And luckily all UNAM students were alive and well, so he could not have followed Margolles’s lead to create a post-mortem installation. Hernández merely ‘‘practiced’’ the University City by following his usual routine, though accompanied by a camera operator.

Conclusion In this chapter we have seen five strategies for representing Mexico City that move from traditional forms of representation into more active endeavors. There is a common theme running through all of these works: an interest in the experience of Mexico City’s poorer residents, who are unemployed, work as jacks-of-all-trades, live hand to mouth, are the victims of violence, don’t own cars, use the metro, study at a dysfunctional

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and overcrowded university, and risk their lives whenever they cross highspeed expressways. Each of these five artists has found a highly original approach to the experience of poverty: Alÿs puts himself in the poor man’s shoes by staging elaborate metaphorical performances—pushing a block of ice or walking with an unraveling sweater—that represent the rising poverty rate. Despite Alÿs’s empathy, the poor remain poor, a situation that Cuevas tries to remedy by handing out free products and student ID cards (so poor Mexicans don’t have to go through the three-dozen bureaucratic steps captured in Hernández’s Credencial). But Cuevas’s good deeds are cancelled out by Santiago Sierra’s actions, which leave the poor exploited, physically exhausted, and probably depressed. And when a poor person dies and turns up at the city morgue (only the bodies of impoverished Mexicans end up at SEMEFO), Margolles takes their remains and puts them on display in a museum, granting them a kind of post-mortem poetic justice.

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The Drive to Institutionalize Of the many paradoxes that marked the seven-decade-long rule of Mexico’s official party, perhaps the most puzzling was the party’s name: The Institutional Revolutionary Party. How could a political organization be both institutional and revolutionary? Don’t revolutions, by definition, do away with institutions? And what does it mean when a party declares itself to be ‘‘institutional’’? Perhaps the PRI’s greatest achievement—as well as the strategy that allowed it to retain power for so long—was that it found a way to institutionalize the Mexican Revolution, as paradoxical as the project might sound. The party’s founder, Plutarco Elías Calles, realized that, if left unchecked, the Revolutionary spirit would continue to claim lives, inspire political intrigues, and lead to more assassinations (the PRI’s predecessor, the PNR, was founded in 1929 in response to the 1928 assassination of president-elect Alvaro Obregón). Calles thus decided to institutionalize the Revolution and subsume its disruptive energy into a mammoth bureaucracy. Institutionalizing became the PRI’s most cunning strategy of survival. ‘‘If you can’t defeat them, institutionalize them,’’ was the party’s unacknowledged motto for most of its existence. Whenever it faced opposition from the outside, the party would respond by incorporating the rebellious group or individual into its massive bureaucracy. In the 1940s, as the PRI moved away from the social ideals of the Mexican Revolution, labor unions protested; the party responded by institutionalizing them, making labor an official ‘‘sector’’ within its ranks (and appointing labor leader Fidel Velázquez to one of the most powerful positions in political life: head of the Workers’ Union). Over the years, the PRI would repeat the same strategy of incorporating the enemy with industrialists, campesinos, the military—all of which became institutional ‘‘sectors’’ within the government. As more and more groups were institutionalized, the party

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grew astronomically to become what Octavio Paz has called a ‘‘philanthropic ogre.’’ Traces of the PRI’s obsession with institutionalizing can be seen in the hundreds of bureaucratic organizations created during its rule. There are secretariats, departments, institutes, commissions, councils, and associations devoted to almost everything under the sun, including: National Institutes for Statistics, Film, Youth, Senility, and Indigenism;1 National Councils for Fauna, Agriculture, and AIDS;2 Federal Commissions for Electricity, Telecommunications, and even Competition (to ensure that government contracts are awarded fairly and without conflict of interest);3 National Associations of Actors, Cheerleaders, Bullfighters, and even Rabbit Farmers.4 The government response to most crises, including the Chiapas uprising, has always been the same: Create yet another institute or commission and hope the problem gets lost amid the stacks of paperwork. (The artist Pablo Helguera has called attention to this phenomenon by creating an ‘‘Instituto de la Telenovela,’’ a fictional institute devoted to the study of soap operas).

The Museum as Institution Museums, the PRI discovered, were perfect vehicles for institutionalization. PRI governments opened hundreds of state-run museums devoted to everything from pre-Columbian history to the Mexican Revolution. Throughout Mexico there are a number of museums whose existence points to the government’s penchant for institutionalization: There is a Museum of Interventions (devoted to lambasting foreign occupations of Mexico), a Museum of the Child, a Museum of Cartography, a Museum of the Desert (in Coahuila), a Museum of Mexican Birds, a Museum of Anatomy, a Museum of Charrería, a Museum of Shoes, a Museum of Drug Trafficking (run by the Ministry of Defense and featuring mannequins attired in ‘‘narco-fashion’’), and even what sounds like a caricature of Mexican museums: a Museum of Caricature.5 The twentieth century produced copious amounts of criticism on the museum as an institution: André Malraux was an optimist and believed that photography would make possible an unprecedented ‘‘museum without walls’’ that would bring distant artworks to everyman’s living room;6 Theodor Adorno, who was a pessimist, considered museums dreary spaces and wrote that ‘‘museum and mausoleum are connected by more than phonetic association’’;7 in an even more radical attack, Douglas

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Crimp argued that ‘‘the set of objects the Museum displays is sustained only by the fiction that they somehow constitute a coherent representational universe . . . Should the fiction disappear, there would be nothing left of the museum but ‘bric-a-brac,’ a heap of meaningless and valueless fragments and objects.’’8 But in addition to these well-known theorists, there was another extremely important critic who wrote a lengthy, eloquent, but mostly forgotten critique of the museum as institution: Octavio Paz, who devoted an entire section of The Labyrinth of Solitude to the PRI’s obsession with erecting museums. Octavio Paz argued that the governmental obsession with building museums was not innocent: In most cases, these institutions served to present a vision of history that would legitimize the PRI regime. Paz points to the Museum of Anthropology, a vast complex on Chapultepec Park, as the clearest example. Although this museum is allegedly devoted to the history of pre-Columbian civilizations, from the Maya to the Aztecs, Paz demonstrates the tendentious nature of its presentations: The exhibits present pre-Columbian history as a gradual evolution leading toward the Aztec rule of Tenochtitlan, suggesting that this last group was the most advanced and sophisticated of all indigenous peoples. ‘‘From the point of view of science and history,’’ Paz writes, ‘‘the image the Museum of Anthropology presents of our preColumbian past is false. The Aztecs were in no way the culmination of the various cultures that came before them. As a matter of fact the opposite is true.’’9 But why would the museum’s designers present such a flawed view of Mexico’s past? There is a simple answer: The nationalist mythology created by the PRI after the 1920s presented post-revolutionary governments as heirs to the Aztec past, and the PRI regime identified itself with the Aztec Empire. ‘‘The regime sees itself,’’ writes Paz, ‘‘transfigured in the Aztec world.’’10 By reducing pre-Columbian history to a gradual evolution in which the Aztecs emerge as the cultural victors, the PRI heralds itself as the culmination of this teleological view of ancient history. The glorification of the Aztec world in the Museum of Anthropology is yet another symbolic strategy devised by the PRI to lend historical legitimacy to its hold on power. Museums ultimately served the same purpose as the countless statues, monuments, memorials, and plaques obsessively erected by PRI governments: to celebrate and immortalize the regime. If the Museum of Anthropology, as Paz argues, is the clearest expression of the PRI’s drive to institutionalize, then perhaps we can counteract its obfuscating designs by writing a critical anthropology of Mexican museums.

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Alternative Museums I: Vicente Razo As we saw in the introduction, PRI governments often used their historical support for the arts, including the awarding of grants for museum exhibitions, as a veiled form of controlling content: Artists whose work was apolitical found it easier to exhibit in state-run spaces than those who touched on controversial topics. As Shifra Goldman has written, this tacit form of censorship had a deleterious effect on art production: It promoted ‘‘laundered’’ works that stayed clear of politics or sensitive issues. Beginning in the mid-nineties, a number of artists refused to bow down to the government control exercised through state museums. Some artists created independent art centers like Temístocles or La Panadería, but others were more radical and created their own museums. Such is the case of Vicente Razo, who created a ‘‘Museo Salinas’’ (Figure 37) in his bathroom and later published an Official Museo Salinas Guide, a catalog raisonné of the institution’s collection. The permanent collection consists of all the toys, figurines, and other tchotchkes bearing Salinas’s likeness that began to appear on Mexico City’s streets in the wake of the 1994 devaluation. In a statement published in The Official Museo Salinas Guide, Razo explains his decision to build a museum to house these figures: ‘‘considering the torpid state of Mexican museums—immersed in a colonized and elitist agenda, with an atrophied bureaucratic corps, and fearful of confronting the smallest figment of reality—I decided that it would be a healthy and necessary act to preserve these original testimonies of contemporary Mexican history in the space of a museum: I wanted to ‘activate’ these objects.’’11 First and foremost, the Salinas Museum collected figures depicting the ex-president as the chupacabras (Figures 39–40): In 1995, rumors of a strange beast called the chupacabras, or goat-sucker, began circulating throughout Mexico. The bloodsucking beast allegedly attacked cattle and other farm animals at night, sucking on their blood and leaving fang marks on their dead bodies. While experts debated whether the beast was real or imaginary, the popular imagination reached a striking conclusion. The chupacabras existed, and it was none other than Carlos Salinas (the reasoning seemed to go as follows: the chupacabras sucks blood; Salinas sucked the life blood out of Mexico; thus Salinas is a chupacabras). Almost overnight, the streets of Mexico City were flooded with figures depicting Salinas—unmistakable with his bald head and large ears—as the fanged chupacabras.

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Figure 37: Museo Salinas, installation view (1996). Image courtesy of Vicente Razo.

The chupacabras figures inspired a number of t-shirts (also collected by Razo’s Museo Salinas) and temporary tattoos (Figure 41) presenting the ex-President not only as a goat-sucker, but as a sucker of many and diverse things: chupadólares (dollar-sucker), chupalanas (money-sucker), chupacasas (house-sucker, a reference to the thousands of people who, at the height of the 1995 economic crisis, lost their homes in foreclosure proceedings after they could no longer afford to pay their mortgages), and chupatodo (suckeverything).12 Razo devoted another section of his museum to toys and figures depicting Salinas as a mythological figure. Here we find Salinas piñatas, Salinas judas figures, Salinas as devil, and Salinas as skeleton, even Salinas as Fantasia’s sorcerer (Figure 42). And the museum also contains popular inventions that resist any efforts to categorize them: Salinas lollypops and a surrealist object consisting of a stuffed rat with the superimposed head of the ex-president. Parodying the PRI’s penchant for creating bureaucratic institutions, Razo drafted a set of ‘‘bylaws and statues’’ defining the museum’s mission statement, and—following the logic of the PRI’s boundless nepotism—he named himself director. The Salinas Museum is not only a space to show a controversial body of work that would not be welcome in Mexico’s state-run museums (as we

Figure 38: Museo Salinas, installation view (1996). Image courtesy of Vicente Razo.

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Figure 39: Salinas-Chupacabra rubber mask, Museo Salinas (1996). Image courtesy of Vicente Razo.

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Figure 40: Street kid in Mexico City wearing a Salinas-Chupacabra mask (1996). Image courtesy of Vicente Razo.

Figure 41: ‘‘Chupa-Mex’’ and ‘‘Chupacabras’’ tattoos, Museo Salinas (1996). Image courtesy of Vicente Razo.

Figure 42: Luis Felguérez, Carlos Salinas as Fantasia’s Sorcerer. Collection Museo Salinas (1996). Image courtesy of Vicente Razo.

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saw in the introduction, INBA officials would not allow the book to be presented at Sala Siqueiros), but it is also the polar opposite of the Museum of Anthrolopolgy analyzed by Paz. The Museum of Anthropology is designed to exalt the PRI, Razo’s museum to debunk it. The Museum of Anthropology presents a heroic vision of the past; Razo’s museum a tragic account of the present; the Museum of Anthropology is a grandiose space (Paz calls it a ‘‘monument’’ and a ‘‘temple’’), Razo’s occupies a marginal space in a small apartment. And if the Museum of Anthropology places PRI presidents on a pedestal, Razo exiles them to the abject realm of the bathroom. The Museum of Anthropology sublimates, Razo’s museum desublimates. Razo’s artifacts give expression to highly subjective views of recent Mexican history: They tell us how the men and women on Mexico City streets really feel about the ex-president. They express the individual feelings about Salinas that must be excluded from historical narratives, which aspire to objectivity. The artifacts collected by Razo express rage, resentment, and humor, a range of emotions that serve to write a subjective history of the Salinas period. In contrast to official history, which must exclude individual feelings in the name of impartiality, Razo’s museum presents a history that is written from below and is based on Mexican’s subjective experience of the Salinas presidency.

Alternative Museums II: Gustavo Prado In the early nineties, Gustavo Prado, a painter and photographer, became known for a series of gender-bending performances. He had two artistic personae: one male, the other female. As a man he was known simply as Gustavo Prado, and he painted loud canvasses adorned with hand-sewn fabrics portraying a parade of camp figures that included Frida Kahlo, Morticia Adams, as well as cartoon characters like ‘‘Príncipe En-KhanTador’’ (or ‘‘Sha-R-Ming Prince’’). As a woman, the artist was known as Aurora Boreal, a photographer who dressed in frilly dresses and visited the Centro’s old-fashioned photo studios to have her portrait taken (Figure 43).13 Gustavo explains that Aurora’s mania for self-portraiture began with a childhood experience: When he was a little kid, every few weeks his mother would dress him up as Superman, Batman, or Peter Pan and take him to a photo studio to have his portrait taken. ‘‘When I returned to the studio twenty years later wearing a costume,’’ he writes, ‘‘the old lady who ran

Figure 43: Aurora Boreal, Self Portrait (1995). Image courtesy of the artist.

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the shop was not the least surprised.’’14 One of Aurora’s most successful works, the photo triptych Yo ni existo ([I don’t even exist], 1994), showed three women wearing elaborate wedding gowns. The first photo depicted the artist’s grandmother on her wedding day (‘‘She wore white at her wedding,’’ reads the caption); the second featured the artist’s mother (‘‘She didn’t,’’ divulges the caption); and the third portrayed Aurora Boreal dressed in a frilly white dress (‘‘And I don’t even exist!’’ the text tells us). Aurora the photographer had a more successful career than Gustavo the painter. Mexican curators loved Aurora’s campy self-portraits, and the sense of humor with which (s)he transgressed gender and sexual boundaries. Aurora was invited to show in galleries, museums, and artist-run centers, while Gustavo’s paintings languished in his apartment.15 Gustavo grew increasingly jealous, until one day he decided to kill Aurora, an art crime he staged as a performance in 1994. The performance began with a visit to a funeral home in the Centro. Gustavo went in and asked the attendant for a coffin suitable for a woman of his height and weight. To ensure that Aurora’s body would fit in comfortably, Gustavo climbed inside several coffins, lying inside them for a few minutes while the attendant patiently explained the differences among the various models. The artist selected an austere model, but the attendant informed him that Mexican law prohibited the delivery of coffins without a valid death certificate. The law, however, said nothing about cash-and-carry, so Gustavo paid for his purchase, loaded it onto a handcart, and wheeled the coffin home, to the mild consternation of pedestrians.16 The coffin now rests in a corner of the artist’s living room (though the body, as in Teresa Margolles’s work, is missing). After Aurora’s death (‘‘Aurora died of obesity,’’ Gustavo was fond of telling those who enquired after the photographer’s fate), the artist found himself surrounded by remnants of her successful career (including a kneehigh stack of fake Interview covers announcing ‘‘The rise and rise of Aurora Boreal’’) that vied for space with his own paintings. What to do with such a collection of camp objects? Since Mexico City lacked a Museum of Deceased Personae, Gustavo decided to open his own museum. He called it ‘‘El Museo del Prado,’’ appropriating the name of the venerable Madrid institution. Gustavo installed El Museo del Prado in his apartment (like Francis Alÿs, Minerva Cuevas, and Santiago Sierra, he lives in the Centro, on a street that was once called El Callejón de las Ratas, or Rat Alley). He placed Aurora’s photos on coffee tables. He hung the paintings of Frida and Morticia over Aurora’s coffin (Figure 45). The apartment got increasingly cluttered as Gustavo succumbed to an aesthetics of horror vacui: He

Figure 44: Gustavo Prado, Museo del Prado, corner with the souls of Purgatory (1999). Image courtesy of the artist.

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Figure 45: Museo del Prado, Aurora Boreal’s coffin (1999). Image courtesy of the artist.

filled every square inch of his house with pictures bought in flea markets and street fairs: photos of souls burning in purgatory (which take up an entire corner of his bedroom, Figure 44), the stations of the cross, statues of Saint Anthony (patron saint of lost causes), Ken and Barbie dolls, boy calendars, family portraits . . . even an examination table rescued from a dumpster outside a gynecologist’s office. Gustavo painted the entire apartment red and inscribed the walls of every room with captions promoting asexual virtues—‘‘Fidelidad’’ [faithfulness, Figure 46], ‘‘Castidad’’ [chastity], ‘‘Moralidad’’ [morality], and ‘‘Decencia’’ [decency]—that contrast with the sexy themes of the works on display, which include a series of photos provocatively titled Pornografía infantil ([Child pornography], 2000) portraying the teenage members of various Mexican boy bands posing, in their underwear, in various corners of the Museo del Prado (Figure 47).17 Pornografía infantil, Gustavo claims, was inspired by Daniela Rossell’s voyeuristic project. But his series—like the creation of El Museo del Prado—is in many ways the opposite of Rossell’s photographic ethnography. If Rossell found kitschy mansions to photograph, Gustavo turned his own apartment into a palace of camp; if Rossell was a guest in her models’ homes, Gustavo hosts boy models in his own home. Rossell’s project was purely voyeuristic; Gustavo’s is both voyeuristic (he gets to see the boys in their underwear) and exhibitionistic (he flaunts the exuberance of his home-turned-museum).

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Figure 46: Museo del Prado, detail (1999). Image courtesy of the artist.

The museum opened to the public in 1997, and at one point it drew over 100 visitors a month. It was such a hit that in 1998 Centro de la Imagen, a museum devoted to photography, organized an exhibition of photographs of El Museo del Prado, giving rise to an institutional pleonasm: Gustavo’s museum became an exhibit in another museum (a show that hinted at the possibility of a future Museum of Museums?). El Museo del Prado made explicit what state-run museums work so hard to conceal: the individual vision that acquires, organizes, displays, and arranges the permanent collection. The Museum of Anthropology, for example, presents its grand narrative of Mexican civilizations as historical truth and not as an individual interpretation of history. The historical account presented by its displays, timelines, and didactic panels masquerades as truth (‘‘this is the way it happened,’’ they announce), obscuring not only the fact that there could be other, alternate—and more accurate—readings of the country’s past, but also that this particular interpretation has an author. And who is the author of this particular and—as Paz shows—flawed reading of Mexico’s pre-Columbian past presented in the Museum of Anthropology? The visitor will never know, for the individual who imposed his or her reading on the museum’s collections is never identified. His identity is buried under the weighty stones that make up the museum’s collection. In contrast, every detail in El Museo del Prado reveals that it was acquired, categorized, and exhibited by an individual. And everything in the museum—from the paint color to the layout of its artifacts—expresses

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Figure 47: Museo del Prado, installation view with Pornografía Infantil on the back wall (2000). Image courtesy of the artist.

the curatorial intentions and campy personality of its director. If the Museum of Anthropology purports to give the visitor an objective account of Mexican history, El Museo del Prado presents a history that is not only subjective but purely individual: the psychic history of its creator, chronicled in great detail from infancy to adulthood through props ranging from baby pictures to adult toys. The ‘‘I’’ that was suppressed in the Museum of Anthropology returns with an exhibitionistic vengeance in El Museo del Prado. Upon entering the museum, the visitor gets the impression that he has walked not into an institution but into Gustavo Prado’s psyche: All the objects on display serve no other purpose than to give expression to the artist’s psychic life, revealing his innermost fears, desires, anxieties, and perverse thoughts. To create his museum, Gustavo followed a strategy almost identical to Vicente Razo’s: He bought toys, figures, t-shits, and all kinds of tchotchkes from street stalls, flea markets, and departments stores. Like Razo’s, Gustavo Prado’s museum is about subjective experience. But if Razo’s objects express popular resentment against the ex-president, El Museo del Prado is an institution at the service of Gustavo Prado’s psyche. It allows visitors to glimpse into his inner world just like dreams, parapraxes, and slips of the tongue allow the psychoanalyst to glimpse into the workings of the patient’s unconscious. El Museo del Prado is the diametrical opposite of the Museum of Anthropology. One deals with history, the other with events that are

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outside of time (the unconscious, as Freud discovered, is zeitlos, or timeless, and so are unconscious fears, anxieties, desires). One deals with public life, the other with private experience. In the Museum of Anthropology everything is black and white, including the vision of history it presents; in Prado’s museum everything is painted in a myriad colors, and the individual history it presents is highly nuanced. The Museum of Anthropology’s artifacts are made of stone, a material that is well-suited for the construction of monuments and mausoleums (the PRI’s history, as Paz showed, was written in stone—in monuments and statues—and ultimately became petrified); El Museo del Prado renounces stone in favor of velvet curtains, frilly fabrics, plastic toys, and fluffy cushions. Its vision of history is far from petrified: It’s voluptuous. El Museo del Prado’s most original rebellion against official museums, however, lies in the vision of gender in presents. PRI museums are filled with statues of men and they conflate nationalism and machismo. Their tributes to heroes ranging from Aztec warriors to Revolutionary caudillos present an ideal of masculinity defined by fearlessness and violence. All the variants of masculinity that have been excluded from PRI museums can be found in El Museo del Prado: boy bands and their sexualization of the adolescent body; cross-dressers and their insistence on the performative nature of gender; gay men and the urban culture they have created in Mexico City. This is a museum of experimental masculinities! If Razo’s objects would never make it into an official museum because of their political context, Prado’s tchotchkes would be excluded because of their links to subversive experiences of gender.

Institutional Critique: Miguel Calderón If Vicente Razo and Gustavo Prado respond to the petrification of Mexican exhibition spaces by creating their own museums, Miguel Calderón, one of the founders of La Panadería, does the same by staging interventions inside state-run museums. One of Calderón’s first projects was a 1995 intervention-cumperformance at the Museum of Natural History in Mexico City. The museum was one of the city’s most forgotten institutions, a remnant of nineteenth-century scientific discourses that drew only a trickle of visitors every year. Its vitrines and dioramas had accumulated inches of dust, and their stuffed animals were stained and full of holes. Its jungle scenes and pastoral landscapes were out of place in the concrete jungle that Mexico City had become in the years since the museum was built. Calderón was

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inspired to work with the Museum of Natural History because of its sorry state: ‘‘It was crumbling, falling to pieces,’’ like the country—and the PRI—at the height of the 1995 crisis.18 Calderón convinced the museum’s officials to grant him access to the dioramas. Wearing a wig and carrying a gun (a parody of the ideal of heroic masculinity turned on its head by Gustavo Prado), he stepped inside the displays and posed for the camera, aiming his gun at a lion, threatening a zebra, menacing a tiger (Figure 48). He shot a dozen photos, and called the series Artificial History (a title that not only inverts the name of the museum, but is also an accurate description of the strategies through which state institutions like the Museum of Anthropology construct a deceitful narrative of the past). Weeks after the photo shoot, Calderón exhibited Artificial History inside the Museum of Natural History; he taped the photos to displays and, for the duration of the opening, he locked himself—wearing the same mad outfit—inside one of the dioramas, thus becoming, like the tigers and zebras, lions and bears, another animal on display. Calderón’s intervention broke the ice that kept the Museum of Natural History frozen in time and cut off from the reality of life in post-Salinas Mexico City. The entire museum was like its dioramas: a bubble, separated from the outside world by a glass wall. Walking into this building is like entering a time warp: The visitor leaves behind a hectic city full of smog, traffic jams, and rampant crime to enter a tranquil and ahistorical realm of jungles and mountains, savannahs and oceans. Calderón pierced the bubble and allowed the reality of city life to seep into the displays. By entering the dioramas dressed as a gun-touting thug, he symbolically allowed the epidemic of violent crime to break into the pastoral scenes depicted in the museum. He effectively brought the life of the street into the museum’s rarefied displays. Calderón’s intervention also transformed, albeit for a limited time, the Museum of Natural History into a Museum of Contemporary Art. In the world of official institutions, these two types of museums are at opposite ends of the spectrum. Museums of natural history are oldfashioned, stagnant, and literally dead (they are filled with stuffed carcasses). Museums of contemporary art, in contrast, present themselves as hip, dynamic, and in touch with living culture (they show artists who are not only living but also young). Though Calderón’s wildly irreverent project would be more at home within the trendy confines of a museum of contemporary art (or an artist-run space, like La Panadería), by exhibiting it in a museum of natural history, the artist not only breathes life into a moribund institution but also leaves the viewer with an intriguing suggestion: perhaps some contemporary art—especially

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Figure 48: Miguel Calderón, from the series Artificial History (1995). Image courtesy of Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York. © Miguel Calderón.

work that is entirely cut off from the harsh reality of life in the 1990s, like neo-Mexicanist painting—ultimately belongs in a museum of natural history. The abyss separating art from everyday life is a central concern in another of Calderón’s museum interventions. In 1998 he was invited to take part in an exhibition at Mexico City’s National Museum of Art, one of the most traditional institutions in the city. The MUNAL, as it is known, is housed in a nineteenth-century palace that was once Porfirio Díaz’s Ministry of Mines (a building flanked by Manuel Tolsá’s equestrian sculpture of Charles IV known affectionately as ‘‘El Caballito’’), and contains the country’s largest collection of nineteenth-century painting and sculpture. Attendance at the MUNAL had dwindled over the years, and by the mid-1990s this institution was on its way to becoming another dusty anachronism, like the Museum of Natural History. To avoid such fossilization, MUNAL’s board of directors decided to stir the museum toward a livelier model by transforming it into a Museum of Contemporary Art. In 1998 the directors invited Robert Littman, who had headed Centro Cultural Arte Contemporáneo, the country’s foremost contemporary art museum until its disappearance in 1998, to curate an exhibition of young art. Littman designed a show called ‘‘En construcción’’ (alluding to

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the fact that much of the museum was closed for renovations), and he invited Miguel Calderón to participate. After a series of exploratory visits to the MUNAL, Calderón was struck by two things: the works on display and the demographics of the viewers. The museum’s endless galleries were filled with pompous nineteenthcentury works: paintings of biblical scenes, mythological episodes, and pastoral landscapes that were, for the most part, completely uninteresting and unoriginal imitations of European models. And although visitors were few and far between, the MUNAL’s galleries were always crowded, not with museum-goers but with museum employees—a veritable army of custodians, janitors, security guards, window cleaners, and even floor polishers. A great abyss separated the bucolic world found in the paintings from the working-class world inhabited by their keepers. The relation between the museum’s workers and the art displayed on its wall captured, in a nutshell, the oppositions that dominated aesthetic debates for much of Mexican history: local versus foreign, elitist versus popular, fantasy versus reality. Calderón designed a project that would involve the museum’s workers and bridge the gap that separated their everyday experience from the art displayed on the walls: a photographic series titled Employee of the Month (a reference to the museum’s practice of displaying a ‘‘Work of the Month’’ in a prominent spot near the entrance). For this series, Calderón staged a series of photographs replicating the pastoral scenes found in the collection’s paintings, but with a twist: He would use the museum’s workers as protagonists and Mexico City as a setting. The difficulties in ‘‘translating’’ traditional scenes into a contemporary setting soon became apparent. One of the paintings selected by Calderón, for example, depicted a shepherd carrying a lamb over his shoulders. How to recreate this tableau in a chaotic city where there are no lambs and no shepherds? Calderón found an ingenious solution: He asked a janitor to adopt the shepherd’s pose, holding a stray dog over her shoulder (Figure 49). In translating the original scene, Calderón’s reasoning proceeded as follows: In feudal times, shepherds performed menial tasks and lived in poverty, much like unskilled workers today. Janitors would thus be the modern-day, urban equivalent of shepherds. And though there are no lambs (except hanging from hooks in meat markets), there are thousands of stray dogs throughout Mexico City. As Alejandro González Iñárritu showed in his film Amores Perros (2000), stray dogs define the experience of living in the megalopolis, in the same way that lambs and sheep once defined a pastoral way of life. Calderón also discovered that the museum’s janitors routinely feed the block’s stray dogs and care for them in the same

Figure 49: Miguel Calderón, from the series Employee of the Month (1998). Image courtesy Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York. © Miguel Calderón.

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way that shepherds care for their flock, making the analogy between shepherds and janitors even more compelling.19 Another photograph (Figure 50) in the Employee of the Month series recreates a biblical scene showing two men holding a lifeless woman. Calderón substituted the landscape for a cityscape and had one of the cleaners pose on the roof of the museum, sitting on her work tool, a bulky floor polisher (the employee’s tools—mops, brooms, vacuum cleaners— are visible in all the photos), as she is held by two other janitors. A security guard points to the dramatic scene with a two-way radio (another work tool), like a modern-day king. Calderón’s project achieves a utopian goal: not only does it allow the museum workers to look at the paintings in a new light (their interaction with these works is no longer limited to looking after them, cleaning, and protecting; they can now imitate, parody, and laugh at them), but it also bridges the gap separating their experience from the rarefied world depicted in the collections. Calderón’s gesture transformed the daily lives of the janitors and guards into art, and, at least during the opening of the exhibition, their portraits hung side-by-side nineteenth-century biblical scenes and pastoral landscapes. It is telling that Calderón, unlike Razo or Prado, decided not to create his own museum but to stage interventions in two of the city’s most traditional institutions: the Museum of Natural History and the National Museum of Art. If Razo and Prado follow revolutionary strategies, Calderón prefers a reformist approach: He does not give up on state-run museums to create his own but merely proposes a series of solutions to fix what is wrong. Calderón’s working methods are similar to Minerva Cuevas’s: Cuevas wanders the streets of Mexico City in search of problems to fix; Calderón does the same with the city’s museums. Like Cuevas, Calderón proposes a series of optimistic and utopian solutions: the Museum of Natural History is decrepit and abandoned? Spice it up with a bit of performance art! Custodians get bored looking at nineteenthcentury paintings all day? Boost their morale by hanging their portraits on the museum’s walls! If Calderón ever decided to found a company, it would surely be called Mejor Museo Corporation. There is another important difference between the two alternative museums discussed earlier in this chapter and Calderón’s project: Razo and Prado focus on artifacts (they collect objects that have been excluded from state institutions because they have been deemed too subversive, either in their politics or in their gender dynamics); Calderón, on the other hand, focuses on people: His projects explore the museum’s effects on human subjects, including visitors and employees, and the role of these people within the institutional framework. Razo and Prado turn their

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Figure 50: Miguel Calderón, from the series Employee of the Month (1998). Image courtesy Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York. © Miguel Calderón.

homes into museums; Calderón devises ways to make the museum more homey for those who spend 12-hour days within its walls.

Conclusion In a colorful ‘‘bathroom poster’’ designed to promote his Salinas Museum, Vicente Razo depicted the ex-president as a horned devil sporting red eyes, sharp fangs, and bat-like wings. Under this Salinas monster, a text reads ‘‘Stop doing ready-mades / start making museums.’’ These words can be read as a piece of advice to other artists: The streets of Mexico City are filled with so many fascinating cultural products, from Salinas-aschupacabras figures to provocative t-shirts, that contemporary artists should follow Razo’s example and limit their activities to collecting, categorizing, and exhibiting these artifacts. Razo suggests that artists have to compete with a city that loves producing art. There are countless spontaneous cultural creations that residents encounter every day on the streets of Mexico City: toys and t-shirts with political messages, popular songs with ingenious lyrics (like

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those sampled by Taniel Morales in Sin cabeza—Necropsia), accumulations of discarded artifacts that read like involuntary installations (chance encounters of umbrellas and sewing machines are not uncommon in the city’s dumpsters), and even wild street performances, such as the 1999 episode of the giant rosca: On January 3, 1999, residents of Mexico City woke up to an uncanny sight: One of the main downtown avenues, 20 de Noviembre, was closed to traffic and filled with an army of several thousand frantic bakers, who were installing a giant cake on a long line of tables set along the pavement. They were on a mission to make the world’s largest rosca de reyes, the doughnut-shaped pastry traditionally eaten to celebrate the Day of the Magi on January 6. This rosca was a mile long and weighed almost 20,000 pounds. Its production required a staff of 15,000, including the services of 2,1000 bakers from 40 different establishments, as well as a list of ingredients that included: 33,000 eggs, 13,000 pounds of flour, 5,600 pounds of butter, 400 gallons of milk, 66 pounds of baking powder, and 660 pounds of cherries.20 For weeks before the event, the giant rosca was the talk of the town, the main news item in the papers and talk shows. And when it was finally sliced, a reported one million residents turned up with high hopes of getting a slice of the cake. But, alas, the rosca was designed to feed only 250,000, so 750,000 sweet-craving residents were turned away and went home hungry. But the giant rosca was not produced by a gallery or a museum, and it was not conceived by a performance artist but by a political figure: Mayor Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, who used the occasion to launch his presidential campaign. The way to voters’ hearts is through their stomachs, he seems to have reasoned. And what better way to reach potential voter’s stomachs than with a sweet, fluffy, and monumental rosca? How could an artist ever match this monumental event? Isn’t this one of the most original performances ever made (especially given the fact that it was designed not as a performance but as a political event!)? Razo’s text warns artists that they simply cannot compete against the popular works of art that can be found daily on the streets of Mexico City: All artist-made performances pale in comparison to the monumental rosca. Why bother making art, Razo asks, when so much of it is created every day on the city’s streets? Razo suggests a radical solution to this conundrum: Artists should stop creating ready-mades (a synecdoche for all art after Duchamp) and start making museums; they should no longer create objects but simply devote their creative energies to selecting and preserving the popular works of art that can be found on the streets of Mexico City if one knows how to look.

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Making museums is a useful trope for understanding many of the radical art practices that have emerged in the late nineties. The artists surveyed in this chapter are not the only ones who make museums (or remake them, as in the case of Miguel Calderón). Daniela Rossell uses photography to create a museum of corrupt wealth. Taniel Morales creates an acoustic museum. And the five artists discussed in chapter four could be seen as working toward a Museum of Mexico City. All radical art practices after orientalism, it seems, are concerned with making museums: Artists have stopped creating objects in order to focus on selecting and displaying the countless artworks that fill the streets of Mexico City. And perhaps one day someone will make a Museum of the Rosca de Reyes where accounts and photos of Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas’s giant rosca will be on permanent display for the enjoyment and delectation of future generations.

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Introduction 1. The following historical overview has been assembled from the following sources: Alma Guillermoprieto’s essays on Mexico in Looking for History, the Library of Congress’s Mexico: A Country Study (1997), as well as articles from Reforma and La Jornada. 2. ‘‘The 10 Most Powerful Billionaires,’’ Forbes Global (March 17, 2003), accessed at http://www.forbes.com/global/2003/0317/050.html. 3. Alma Guillermoprieto, ‘‘Loosing the Future,’’ in Looking for History: Dispatches from Latin America (New York: Pantheon Books, 2002), 178–184. 4. ‘‘The church, and its large conservative faction that includes Posadas’s successor, Cardinal Juan Sandoval Iñiguez, has for years alleged that highranking officials in the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), the once all-powerful party, and the former regime of President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, plotted to have Posadas killed. They contend that the Salinas administration tried to cover up the case because it feared that the investigation would reveal the government’s alleged ties with the Tijuana-based Arellano Felix drug cartel.’’ Joseph Treviño, ‘‘A Cardinal Conspiracy: Renewed Interest in an Unsolved 1993 Killing in Guadalajara,’’ LA Weekly (May 21– June 6, 2002), available online at htttp://www.laweekly.com/ink/02/28/ news-trevino.php. 5. Guillermoprieto, ‘‘Zapata’s Heirs,’’ in Looking for History, 185–206. 6. Guillermoprieto, ‘‘Whodunnit?’’ in Looking for History, 239–254; Guillermoprieto, ‘‘The Riddle of Raúl,’’ in Looking for History, 255–274. 7. Banco de México, Informe anual 1994 (Mexico City: Banco de México, 1994), 154–156. 8. Carlos Monsiváis, ‘‘The Museo Salinas and the Masks of the Mexican,’’ in Vicente Razo, The Official Museo Salinas Guide (Santa Monica: Smart Art Press, 2002), 9–10. 9. Daniel Lizárraga, ‘‘Indaga Suiza cuenta de hijo de Díaz Ordaz,’’ Reforma, 9 July 1998. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are mine. 10. See the catalog El corazón sangrante: The Bleeding Heart (Boston: ICA, 1991). 11. Hal Foster, The Return of the Real (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000).

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12. See Kurt Hollander’s discussion of the influence of foreign artists on the Mexican scene in his text for the exhibition catalog Así está la cosa (Mexico City: Centro Cultural Arte Contemporáneo, 1997). 13. Other artists who participated in Temístocles include Damián Ortega, Melanie Smith, Fernando García, Hernán García Garza, Ulises Ponce, Miguel González Casanova, Diego Guitiérrez, Conrado Tostado, and Maria Teresa Gálvez. 14. Acné o el nuevo contrato Ilustrado (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, 1995). 15. Coco Fusco, ‘‘Art in Mexico after NAFTA,’’ in The Bodies That Were Not Ours and Other Writings (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 64. 16. Foster, The Return of the Real. 17. Lucy R. Lippard, ‘‘The Dematerialization of Art,’’ in Changing: Essays in Art Criticism (New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., 1971), 255. 18. Edward J. Sozanski, ‘‘Mexico Shines in Survey of Its Current Art Scene,’’ The Philadelphia Inquirer, 21 September 2003. 19. Parachute 104 (October–December, 2002); FlashArt 225 (July–September, 2002); Rim (March 2003); Felix (July 2003). 20. Osvaldo Sánchez, et al., La colección Jumex (Mexico City: Carrillo Gil, 1999). 21. Mary Schneider Enríquez, ‘‘Silvia Pandolfi: History and High Tech,’’ ARTnews (April 1996): 126. 22. Shifra M. Goldman, Dimensions of the Americas: Art and Social Change in Latin America and the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 273. 23. Itala Schmelz, personal communication with author, August 20, 2002. 24. Cuauhtémoc Medina, ‘‘El ojo breve / Viajeros frecuentes,’’ Reforma, 25 September 2002. 25. Elisabeth Malkin, ‘‘Mexico Is Warned of Risk from Altered Corn,’’ New York Times, 13 March 2004, A5. 26. Klaus Biesenbach, ed., Mexico City: An Exhibition about the Exchange Rates of Bodies and Values (New York: P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center; Berlin: Kunst Werke, 2002), 32. 27. Octavio Paz, El laberinto de la soledad (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1993), 314–317.

Chapter One 1. Pablo Soler Frost, Cartas de Tepoztlán (Mexico City: Ediciones Era, 1997). Hugo Diego Blanco, Tinta china (Mexico City: Ediciones Heliópolis, 1995). 2. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), 343. 3. Ibid., 144–145. 4. Julia A. Kushigian, Orientalism in the Hispanic Literary Tradition: in Dialogue with Borges, Paz, and Sarduy (Alburquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1991), 1. 5. Ibid., 3.

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6. Said, Orientalism, 5. 7. Olived Dunn and James E. Kelley, eds., The Diario of Christopher Columbus’s First Voyage to America 1492–1493 (Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989), 109. 8. Eliot Weinberger, an insightful critic of Mexican orientalism, gives the following account of the San Felipe story: ‘‘The Shogun, having reluctantly permitted Christian missionaries in Nagasaki, now believes they are the cause of a recent earthquake. Felipe and twenty-six other priests are crucified by Samurai. At that moment, back in Mexico, the dried branch of a fig tree in the family’s patio are suddenly covered with leaves.’’ Eliot Weinberger, ‘‘Paz in Asia,’’ in Outside Stories, 1987–1991 (New York: New Directions, 1992), 24. 9. The following are among the few historical studies of anti-Chinese sentiment in Mexico: Humberto Monteón González and José Luis Trueba Lara, eds., Chinos y antichinos en México: documentos para su historia (Guadalajara: Gobierno de Jalisco, Secretaría General, Unidad editorial, 1988); José Jorge Gómez Izquierdo, El movimiento antichino en México (1871–1934): problemas del racismo y del nacionalismo durante la Revolución Mexicana (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, 1991); Juan Puig, Entre el río Perla y el Nazas: la china decimonónica y sus braceros emigrantes, la colonia china de Torreón y la matanza de 1911 (Mexico City: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 1993). 10. José Juan Tablada, Poesía, vol. 1 of Obras, (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Centro de Estudios Literarios, 1971), 402. 11. I thank Asa Satz for translating Tablada’s poem for this book. 12. Tablada, Obras, 1:392. 13. Weinberger, ‘‘Paz in Asia,’’ 27. 14. In the past, orientalist scholars were often accomplices to imperialist designs against the very people to whose culture they devoted their studies. Said writes that ‘‘there is a remarkable (but nonetheless intelligible) parallel between the rise of modern Orientalist scholarship and the acquisition of vast European Empires by Britain and France.’’ Said, Orientalism, 343. 15. Lombardo Toledano, Diario de un viaje a la China nueva (Mexico City: Ediciones Futuro, 1950), 132. 16. Weinberger, ‘‘Paz in Asia,’’ 17–45. 17. Eliot Weinberger has written a very poetic version of the china poblana story: ‘‘In the seventeenth century some six-hundred Asian immigrants arrive each year to Mexico. One of them is a twelve-year-old Mogul princess of Delhi, who was kidnapped by pirates off the Malabar Coast. Sold in the Manila slave market, she is shipped to Acapulco and sold again to a pious couple from Puebla. Under the religious training of her owners, she soon becomes famous as an ascetic and mystic. She is known as Catarina de San Juan, la china poblana. Many miracles are attributed to her.’’ Ibid., 25.

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18. Barthes, The Empire of Signs (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 3–4. 19. Teresa del Conde, Historia minima del arte mexicano en el siglo XX (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1994), 38–39. 20. For more on neo-Mexicanism, see Sullivan, Aspects of Contemporary Mexican Painting (New York: Americas Society, 1990). 21. Olivier Debroise calls this phenomenon ‘‘a cultural nostalgia sui generis.’’ He writes that, ‘‘although the search for idiosyncratic roots by Mexican-American artists from Texas and by the Chicanos and Cholos of California may be easily understood, it is more difficult to grasp the motives of certain NorthAmerican artists like Michael Tracy, Ray Smith, and, to a lesser extent, Terry Allen and Jimmie Durham, who seem to have rejected the canons of the New York mainstream in order to place their work within the parameters of contemporary art in Mexico.’’ Olivier Debroise, ‘‘Heart Attacks: On a Culture of Missed Encounters and Misundertandings,’’ in El corazón sangrante / The Bleeding Heart (Boston: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1991), 39. 22. David A. Greene, ‘‘Yishai Jusidman and the Reenchantment of Painting,’’ in Investigaciones pictóricas / Pictorial Investigations (Cuernavaca: Instituto de cultura de Morelos, 1995), 48. 23. David Miklos and Mario Bellatín, eds., Una ciudad mejor que ésta: antología de nuevos narradores mexicanos (Mexico City: Tusquets, 1999).

Chapter Two 1. Nico Israel, ‘‘Daniela Rossell: Greene Naftali,’’ Artforum (April 2000): 143–44. 2. Teresa del Conde, ‘‘Valencia: Bienal y diálogos II,’’ La jornada, 1 July 2001. 3. Holland Cotter, ‘‘Art in Review: Daniela Rossell,’’ New York Times, 26 April 2002. 4. Daniela Rossell, Ricas y famosas (Madrid: Turner, 2002). 5. Juan Villoro, ‘‘Ricas, famosas y excesivas,’’ El país semanal 1341 (June 9, 2002): 42–50. 6. Lorenzo Meyer, ‘‘Agenda ciudadana: el otro México profundo,’’ Reforma, 12 June 2002. 7. Klaus Biesenbach, Mexico City: An Exhibition about the Exchange Rates of Bodies and Values (New York: P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center; Berlin: Kunst Werke, 2002), 34. 8. Marcela García Machuca, ‘‘Me interesa documentar cómo viven,’’ interview with Daniela Rossell, Reforma, 28 July 2002. 9. Marcela García Machuca and Ernesto Sánchez, ‘‘Exponen a mexicanas y sus lujos,’’ Reforma, 28 July 2002; ‘‘Exhibe galleria de Nueva York a ricas y famosas mexicanas,’’ Reforma, 28 July 2002. 10. Lorenzo Meyer, ‘‘Agenda ciudadana: Escándalo,’’ Reforma, 22 August 2002. 11. César Güemes, ‘‘En Ricas y famosas de Daniela Rossell, el dinero sólo es la mitad de la Mirada,’’ La jornada, 30 August 2002.

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12. Edgar Alejandro Hernández, ‘‘Ofende a Díaz Ordaz que publiquen sus fotos,’’ Reforma, 30 August 2002. 13. Gaby Vargas, ‘‘Genio y figura: Ricas y famosas,’’ Reforma, 1 September 2002. 14. Dallia Carreño, ‘‘Orgullosa de ser . . . ¡rica y famosa!’’ Reforma, 29 August 2002. 15. Hernández, ‘‘Ofende a Díaz Ordaz.’’ 16. Daniela Rossell, ‘‘Aclara Rossell relación con Díaz Ordaz,’’ Reforma, 3 September 2002. 17. Antonio Jáquez, ‘‘Autorretrato de la decadencia,’’ Proceso 1349 (September 8, 2002): 10–19. 18. Guadalupe Loaeza, Las niñas bien (Mexico City: Cal y arena, 1990); and Compro, luego existo (Mexico City: Alianza editorial, 1993). 19. Guadalupe Loaeza, ‘‘Cursis y escandalosas,’’ Reforma, 10 September 2002. 20. Cuauhtémoc Medina, ‘‘El ojo breve: Mundos privados, ilusiones públicas,’’ Reforma, 11 September 2002. 21. Jo Tuckman, ‘‘Outrage as Mexico’s Super-rich Flaunt Their Tacky Lifestyles,’’ The Observer, 15 September 2002. 22. ‘‘Photos of Wealthy Mexicans Prompt Outrage,’’ CNN, 22 September 2002. 23. Guadalupe Loaeza, ‘‘Por los suelos,’’ Reforma, 26 September 2002. 24. Ibid. 25. Ginger Thompson, ‘‘The Rich, Famous, and Aghast: A Peep-Show Book,’’ New York Times, 25 September 2002, A2. 26. Julieta Riveroll, ‘‘Rinden homenaje a Rossell a la ‘vieja usanza,’’’ Reforma, 11 November 2002. 27. Larry Clark, Tulsa (New York: Grove Press, 2000); Nan Goldin, The Other Side: 1972–1992 (Zurich: Scalo Verlag, 2000). 28. Larissa MacFarquhar, ‘‘Photographs: Theater of Manners by Tina Barney,’’ Bookforum (spring 1998): 3, 6. 29. Tina Barney, Friends and Relations (Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 6–8. 30. David Rimanelli, ‘‘People like Us: Tina Barney’s Pictures,’’ Artforum (October 1992): 70–73. 31. Daniel Lizárraga, ‘‘Indaga Suiza cuenta de hijo de Díaz Ordaz,’’ Reforma, 9 July 1998. 32. The author takes Mexico’s Green Party as a case study, noting that ‘‘during the midterm elections last year, it received an average of more than $100,000 a day in public funds—more than $30 million—making it one of the richest Greent parties in the world.’’ Ginger Thompson, ‘‘Color It Green, and See How It Fills Politicians’ Pockets,’’ New York Times, 10 March 2004, A4. 33. The inscription reads: ‘‘Para Don Manuel Suárez, con la más grande [unreadable] Siqueiros, 3–24-68’’ [‘‘for Don Manuel Suárez, with the greatest . . . Siqueiros, 3–24-68’’].

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34. Fabrizio Mejía Madrid narrates the history of the Hotel de México in ‘‘Insurgentes en días lluviosos,’’ in Pequeños actos de desobediencia civil (Mexico City: Cal y arena, 1996), 63–140. 35. Leah Ollman expands on Benjamin’s fears: ‘‘Worker photographers and especially the editors of the AIZ [Worker’s Illustrated Journal] recognized the malleability and ambiguity of photographs and the subsequent need to direct their meaning through photo-sequences and photo-text combinations.’’ Leah Ollman, Camera as Weapon: Worker Photography between the Wars (San Diego: The Museum of Photographic Arts, 1991), 25. 36. Walter Benjamin, ‘‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility (Second Version),’’ in Selected Writings, vol. 3, edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 108. 37. Benjamin, ‘‘A Small History of Photography,’’ in One-way Street, and Other Writings, translated by Edmund Jephcott and Kignlsey Shorter (London: New Left Books, 1979), 256. See also ‘‘Little History of Photography,’’ in Selected Writings, vol. 2, edited by Howard Eiland, Michael W. Jennings, et al. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 527. Jephcott and Shorter use the term ‘‘caption,’’ but Eiland and Jennings translate the German term as ‘‘inscription.’’ 38. Haacke’s Manet-Projekt ’74 (1974) traced the acquisition history of Manet’s Bunch of Asparagus (1880), a painting that was owned by a wealthy Jewish family, seized by Nazi officials, and eventually sold to a prestigious German museum; Rossell could have presented a similar history of the Siqueiros paintings and other famous works that appear in her photographs. For a discussion of Haacke’s critique of art institutions, see Rosalyn Deutsche, ‘‘Property Values: Hans Haacke, Real Estate, and the Museum,’’ in Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996). 39. Carlos Fuentes, Where the Air Is Clear (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1960).

Chapter Three 1. ‘‘Radio Pirata XCH—Sin Permiso’’ began broadcasting in 1995 from the southern district of Coyoacán on 92.1 FM. The station had a modest power output ranging between 5 and 10 watts. 2. This lack of interest in radio is a recent phenomenon. Mexican artists of the 1920s were fascinated by radio, and they devoted poems, essays, paintings, and drawings to the new invention. 3. Taniel Morales, Sin cabeza—Necropsia, Audio CD, Mexico City, 1999, track 3. All quotes from Sin cabeza are courtesy of the artist. 4. Antonin Artaud, ‘‘To Have Done with the Judgment of God [1947],’’ in Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings, edited by Susan Sontag, translated by Helen Weaver (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976), 570–571.

166 5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11.

12.

13.

14.

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16. 17. 18.

N EW T ENDENCIES IN M EXICAN A RT Morales, Sin cabeza, track 6. Ibid., track 8. Ibid., track 24. ‘‘Please tell the honorable about your diet / Uhm . . . I eat twinkies and coca cola . . . and coca cola . . . and also a ham sandwich with a bit of avocado sometimes.’’ Arnheim, Radio (London: Faber and Faber, 1936), 265. Georges Duhamel, In Defense of Letters (New York: Graystone Press, 1939), 30, 35. Marinetti devotes a section to ‘‘The Wireless Imagination’’ in his ‘‘Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature,’’ in Marinetti: Selected Writings, edited by R. W. Flint (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972); Apollinaire’s ‘‘Lettre-Océan’’(1914) is based on a radiotelegraphic communication sent by the poet’s brother from Mexico. Guillaume Apollinaire, ‘‘Lettre-Océan,’’ in Œuvres poétiques (Paris: Gallimard, 1956), 183–185. Salvador Novo, ‘‘Radioconferencia sobre el radio,’’ Antena 2 (August 1924): 10; reprinted in El Universal Ilustrado 399 (January 1, 1925): 4–5; anthologized in Toda la prosa (Mexico City: Empresas Editoriales, 1964). ‘‘With an army of rancheros / composed of ten strapping fighters and riding a frisky nag / for which reins are useless / Guadalupe la chinaca goes in search of Pantaleon.’’ Amado Nervo, ‘‘Guadalupe,’’ in Poesías completas (Barcelona: Teorema, 1982), 269–271. Luis Quintanilla, Radio: poema inalámbrico en trece mensajes (Mexico City: Editorial Cultura, 1924). Reprinted in Luis Mario Schneider, ed., El Estridentismo o una literatura de la estrategia (México City: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 1997). ‘‘Is it true that Zapata said that the earth belongs to those who work it because he was an alien? / He wanted to take away the earth to outer space.’’ Arnheim, Radio, 232–233. Velimir Khlebnikov, ‘‘The Radio of the Future,’’ in Snake Train: Poetry and Prose, edited by Gary Kern (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1976), 238. ‘‘I run, I get on, I get on again, Universidad, Copilco, Miguel Angel de Quevedo, I walk, I walk, I keep on walking, Viveros, Coyoacán, Zapata, I trip, División del Norte, Eugenia, Etiopía, I stop, Centro Medico, I change trains, Lázaro Cárdenas, Chabacano, Jamaica, Mixuca, Unidad deportiva, Puebla, Pantitlán, . . . I change trains, I climb in, I run, I fly, I rush, I go on, Rosario, Aquiles Serdán, Camarones, Tacuba, I fall asleep, I dream, San Joaquín, Polanco, Auditorio, Constituyentes, Tacubaya, San Pedro de los Pinos, San Antonio, Mixcoac, Barranca del Muerto, I get woken up, I get off, I take a bus, it’s packed, Taxqueña, General Anaya, Ermita, Portales, Natitivitas, Villa de Cortés, Xola, Viaducto, Chabacano, San Antonio Abad, Pino Suárez, I get pushed, make room, I get squashed, . . . Obervatorio, Tacubaya, Juanacatlán, Chapultepec, Sevilla, Cuauhtémoc, Balderas, Salto del Agua, Isabel la Católica, Pino Suarez, La Candelaria, San Lázaro, Moctezuma, Balbuena, Aeropuerto,

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21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

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Gómez Farias, Zaragoza, Pantitlán, I change trains, I get off, I get on, I scream ‘AAAAAAAHHHH.’ I get off and I take a cab.’’ Morales, Sin cabeza, track 10. Italics mine for emphasis. Arnheim, Radio, 232. ‘‘Make a deep incision on the left side of the chest. Insert your hand into the slit. Break the thorax to pieces without hesitation. Extract the dead heart. Observe it. Lick it. Smell it. Press the sinoventricular nodule between your fingers.’’ Morales, Sin cabeza, track 20. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987), 200. ‘‘We want,’’ said Goebbels in this crucial speech, ‘‘a radio that reaches the people, a radio that is an intermediary between the government and the nation, a radio that also reaches across our borders to give the world a picture of our life and our work.’’ Josef Goebbels, ‘‘Der Rundfunk als achte Großmacht,’’ Signale der neuen Zeit. 25 ausgewählte Reden von Dr. Josef Goebbels (Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP, 1938), 197–207. Artaud, ‘‘To Have Done with the Judgment of God,’’ 570–571. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 8. Jaime Sánchez Susarrey, ‘‘Ingobernabilidad,’’ Reforma, 10 August 2002. Allen S. Weiss, Phantasmic Radio (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995). ‘‘And the ocean seems small enough to drink it in a sip.’’ Juan Villoro, ‘‘La ciudad es el cielo del metro,’’ Número 10 (June–August 1996): 43–46. ‘‘The air belongs to those who work it.’’ Octavio Paz, El laberinto de la soledad (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1993), 318.

Chapter Four 1. Salvador Novo, Nueva grandeza mexicana: Ensayo sobre la ciudad de México y sus alrededores en 1946 (Mexico City: Editorial Hermes, 1946), 23. 2. Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air (New York: Penguin Books, 1982), 6–7. 3. Rem Koolhaas, S, M, L, XL (New York: Monacelli Press, 1995), 1249–50. 4. Analysts estimate that the informal sector of the economy ‘‘represents from 30 to 40 percent of the urban workforce in the mid-1990s . . . They face considerable job instability, and, unlike those in the formal sector, are effectively excluded from IMSS [health insurance] benefits. The informal sector includes street vendors, domestic servants, pieceworkers in small establishments, and most construction workers.’’ Mexico: A Country Study (Washington D.C.: Library of Congress, 1997). 5. ‘‘Tal como lo recomendó Rudolph Giuliani,’’ Reforma, 21 August 2003.

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6. See Alejandra Bordón, ‘‘Limpia de ambulantes el DGF al Eje Central,’’ Reforma, 12 September 2003; ‘‘Toman ambulantes el centro,’’ Reforma, 16 September 2003. 7. Arturo Páramo, ‘‘Usan como tendedero edificios históricos,’’ Reforma, 13 September 2003. The author accuses vendors of nailing tarpaulins to the walls of historic buildings: Every day, he argues, their actions hurt about 400 buildings. 8. Enrique Krauze, ‘‘Cara y cruz de la Ciudad de Mexico,’’ Reforma, 14 September 2003. 9. See Francis Alÿs, Walks / Paseos (Mexico City: Museo de Arte Moderno, 1997) and Francis Alÿs, The Prophet and the Fly (Madrid: Turner, 2003). 10. Alma Guillermoprieto, ‘‘Mexico City, 1990,’’ in The Heart That Bleeds (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), 55. 11. Harper Montgomery, ‘‘Francis Alÿs’s Modern Procession,’’ Projects 76 (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2002). 12. Though this piece took place in Stockholm, it can be read as an effort by the artist to perform an allegory of the experience of impoverished Mexicans for an international art audience. 13. José Joaquín Blanco, ‘‘Una limosna para la Diana,’’ in Álbum de pesadillas mexicanas (Mexico City: Era, 2002), 9–14. 14. Cuauhtémoc Medina, ‘‘Zones de Tolérance: Teresa Margolles, SEMEFO et (l’) au-delà / Zones of Tolerance: Teresa Margolles, SEMEFO and Beyond,’’ Parachute 104 (October-December 2001): 50–52. 15. Carlos Monsiváis, ‘‘La hora del transporte. El metro: viaje hacia el fin del apretujón,’’ in Los rituales del caos (Mexico City: Era, 1995), 111–113. 16. Yazmín Juandiego, ‘‘Critican con arte al neoliberalismo,’’ Reforma, 6 July 2000. 17. Frédéric Rouvillois, ‘‘Utopia and Totalitarianism,’’ in Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World, edited by Roland Schaer et al. (New York: New York Public Library, 2001), 316. 18. Georges Bataille, ‘‘La notion de dépense,’’ La part maudite (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1967), 28. All translations from the French are mine unless otherwise indicated. 19. Ibid., 32. 20. Cuevas has used this ‘‘Trojan horse’’ strategy in recent works that straddle the line between political activism and experimental art. Del Montte (2002) consists of a series of labels modeled after the stickers found on Del Monte bananas. Though her piece masquerades as a corporate marketing device, Cuevas writes a mock advertisement to expose the transnational company’s less-than-stellar labor practices: One of her texts, for example, reads ‘‘Guatemala / Del Montte Criminal / Struggles for Land.’’ 21. Rosa Martínez, Santiago Sierra: Pabellón de España, 50a Bienal de Venecia (Madrid: Turner, 2003), 116. I modified the English given in Martínez’s book to make it more grammatically accurate.

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22. See Jorge Ibargüengoitia, Instrucciones para vivir en México (México City: Joaquín Mortiz, 1990). 23. José Joaquín Blanco, ‘‘Panorama bajo el puente,’’ in Función de medianoche (Mexico City: Era, 1981), 62–65. 24. Martínez, Santiago Sierra, 63. I modified the English given in Martínez’s book to make it more grammatically accurate. 25. Santago Sierra, ‘‘465 Compensated People’’ (Rufino Tamayo, Sala 7, México City, October 1999). 26. Santiago Sierra, ‘‘Person compensated to shine, without permission, the shoes of guests attending an opening’’ (ACE, Mexico City, March 2000). All page numbers for Sierra’s works refer to Martinez’s Santiago Sierra. 27. Santiago Sierra, ‘‘3 People Paid to Lie Still Inside 3 Boxes During a Party’’ (Vedado, Havana, Cuba, November 2000), 44; Santiago Sierra, ‘‘Ten People Paid to Masturbate’’ (Tejadillo Street, Havana, Cuba, November 2000), 126; Santiago Sierra, ‘‘10-Inch Line Shaved on the Heads of Two Junkies Who Received a Shot of Heroin as Payment’’ (302 Fortaleza Street. San Juan, Puerto Rico, October 2000), 121. 28. Santiago Sierra, ‘‘30 cm Line Tattooed on a Compensated Person’’ (Regina 51, May 1998), 117; Santiago Sierra, ‘‘133 People Paid to Have Their Hair Dyed Blond’’ (Arsenale, Vence, Italy, June 2001), 123; Santiago Sierra, ‘‘11 People Paid to Learn a Phrase’’ (Casa de la Cultura de Zinacatán, México, March 2001), 139. 29. ‘‘They want a servant, a bath attendant, a toilet cleaner, and a human syringe . . . damn life.’’ Ricardo Garibay, ‘‘Milusos,’’ in Novela, uno, vol. 2 of Obras reunidas (Mexico City: Océano, 2002), 282. 30. Martínez, Santiago Sierra, 47. 31. Ibid, 17. I modified the English given in Martínez’s book to make it more grammatically accurate. 32. Cuauhtémoc Medina, ‘‘El ojo breve / Keynes en Polanco,’’ Reforma, 17 May 2000. 33. Coco Fusco, ‘‘Art in Mexico after NAFTA[1994],’’ in The Bodies That Were Not Ours and Other Writings (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 76. 34. Adriano Pedrosa, ‘‘Santiago Sierra,’’ in Cream 3 (London: Phaidon Press, 2003). 35. Sigmund Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, translated James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–1974), 23:176. Hereafter S.E. 36. Jean Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis, Language of Psycho-analysis (London: Hogarth Press, 1973). 37. Freud, ‘‘Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through,’’ S.E., 12:151. 38. Teresa Margolles, personal communication with author, October 12, 2003. 39. In collaboration with SEMEFO, Margolles retrieved the coffin from one of the city’s cemeteries, the Panteón francés. The artist explains that when families neglect their funeral plots for a number of years, the cemetery

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41. 42. 43. 44.

45.

46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

57.

N EW T ENDENCIES IN M EXICAN A RT exhumes the grave, transfer the remains to a common grave, and throws the casket in the garbage (Margolles, personal communication with author, October 12, 2003). This piece, done in collaboration with SEMEFO, was exhibited in the show ‘‘Accionismo,’’ held at Art & Idea in Mexico City, 1996. Margolles explained that the city morgue donates bodies that are never claimed to the city’s medical schools, where they are used for anatomy lessons. In some schools, the corpses are boiled in metal drums to produce a clean skeleton. The artist obtained the used drums through an ingenious ruse: She donated a set of new metal containers to the medical school. The old ones were thrown in a dumpster, and the artist merely retrieved them before the garbage truck (Margolles, personal communication with author, October 12, 2003). This piece was shown in ‘‘Doméstica,’’ a day of ‘‘open studios’’ in Condesa curated by Tomás Ruiz Rivas in 1998. Margolles produced some of these works as an individual artist, others as a member of the aptly named artists’ collective SEMEFO. SEMEFO, Lavatio corporis (Mexico City: Museo de arte contemporáneo Alvar y Carmen T. Carrillo Gil, 1994). Upon approaching the metal drums, many visitors to the exhibition Accionismo expressed their disappointment that ‘‘there was nothing there.’’ (Margolles, personal communication with author, October 12, 2003). Quoted in Alma Guillermoprieto, ‘‘The Riddle of Raúl,’’ in Looking for History: Dispatches from Latin America (New York: Pantheon Books, 2002), 256–257. Ibid., 273–274. Alma Guillermoprieto, ‘‘Letter from Mexico: A Hundred Women,’’ The New Yorker (September 29, 2003): 82–93. Ibid., 86. Ibid., 92. Servicio Médico Forense, Informe Anual (Mexico City, 2000). Margolles, personal communication with author, October 12, 2003. Hollier, ‘‘Surrealist Precipitates: Shadows Don’t Cast Shadows,’’ October 69 (summer 1994): 111–32. Georges Bataille, L’Erotisme (Paris: Éditions de minuit, 1970), 50. Medina, ‘‘Zones de tolerance,’’ 46–48. Octavio Paz, El laberinto de la soledad (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1993), 63. In 1999 the university counted 269,516 students and 29,795 academics. See ‘‘Población escolar’’ and ‘‘Personal académico,’’ Agenda estadística (Mexico City: Univesidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1999). Celia Esther Arredondo Zambrano, ‘‘Modernity in Mexico: The Case of the Ciudad Universitaria,’’ in Modernity and the Architecture of Mexico, edited by Edward R. Burian (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997), 92.

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58. The plan for the university, writes Valerie Fraser, ‘‘was influenced by the Le Corbusian ideas of the CIAM’s 1933 Charter of Athens [and its] utopian declaration.’’ Fraser, Building the New Mexico: Studies in the Modern Architecture of Latin America, 1930–1960 (New York, London: Verso, 2000), 66. 59. Guillermo Sheridan, Allá en el campus grande (Mexico City: Tusquets Editores, 2000), 96–97. 60. ‘‘Can I drive to my office? / It’s closed here. Go to the main entrance / The main entrance is six kilometers away and my office is just ahead / And what do you expect me to do? / To use your common sense and let me through / No / Look, I realize that I’m just a lowly academic and that you’re a very important employee, but please, let me through / No / Why not? / Cause I said no / Why don’t you use your walkie-talkie to call the main office and see if they let me go through? / No / Why not? / Cause the walkie-talkie is for emergencies / And if I get a heart attack, do I qualify as an emergency? / Uh huh / Look: I’m having a heart attack / I don’t believe you.’’ Ibid., 44. 61. Ibid., 45. 62. Elena Poniatowska, Massacre in Mexico, translated by Helen R. Lane (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1992), 290.

Chapter 5 1. Instituto Nacional de Estadíastica, Geografía e Informática, Institutio Mexicano de Cinematografía, Instituto Nacional de la Senectud, Instituto Nacional de la Juventud, Instituto Nacional Indigenista. 2. Consejo Nacional de la Fauna, Consejo Nacional Agropecuario, Consejo Nacional para la Prevención y Control del SIDA en México (CONASIDA). 3. Comisión Federal de Electricidad, Comisión Federal de Telecomunicaciones, Comisión Federal de Competencia. 4. Asociación Nacional de Actores (ANDA), Asociación Nacional de Porristas, Asociación Nacional de Matadores de Toros y Novillos de México, Asociación Nacional de Cunicultores de México. 5. See ‘‘Santos, amuletos y pistolas ‘regalos’ para el Museo del Narco,’’ El imparcial, 1 June 2002. 6. André Malraux, The Museum without Walls, trans. Stuart Gilbert and Francis Price (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1967). 7. Theodor Adorno, ‘‘Valéry Proust Museum,’’ in Prisms (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981), 182. 8. Douglas Crimp, On the Museum’s Ruins (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993), 52. 9. Octavio Paz, El laberinto de la soledad (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1993), 316. 10. Ibid., 317. 11. Vicente Razo, The Official Museo Salinas Guide (Santa Monica: Smart Art Press, 2002), 64. 12. Ibid., 35–38.

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13. Prado explains that the name ‘‘Aurora Boreal’’ came from a short dialogue found in a novel by the Spanish writer Jardiel Poncela: ‘‘¿Conoces la Aurora Boreal?’’ asks a character. ‘‘Yo no conozco poetisas venezolanas,’’ responds the other. Prado, personal communication with author, September 1, 2003. 14. Gustavo Prado, untitled talk given at the symposium ‘‘Políticas de identidad cultural: arte e identidad sexual,’’ X-Teresa, Mexico City, 1999. 15. ‘‘Aurora,’’ explains Gustavo Prado, ‘‘was a tele-suppository aimed at curators; it had all the right elements [to make her work a hit in the art world]: 1) gender identity; 2) a pastiche of foreign work (equal doses of Yasumasa Morimura and Cindy Sherman); 3) the appropriation of others’ work; 4) it looked trendy.’’ Prado, untitled talk presented at X-Teresa. 16. Gustavo Prado, personal communication with author, September 1, 2003. 17. Gustavo calls his museum ‘‘una megainstalacionsota . . . un pequeño museo personal, con un cuarto para los recuerdos y otro para los demonios’’ [‘‘a huge megainstallation . . . a small personal museum with a room for memories and another one for demons’’]. Elsewhere he writes: ‘‘mi departamento es una recreación culterana de las casas de esas señoras de la colonia escuadrón 201, o chance como me dijo un amigo: ‘es la casa de interés social que le regalaría el Marqués de Sade a su mamá.’’’ [‘‘my apartment is a cultish recreation of a house of some lady from Colonia Escuadrón 201, or, as a friend once said, ‘it is the public housing project that the Marquis de Sade would give to his mother’’’]. Gustavo Prado, ‘‘El Museo del Prado,’’ unpublished text, Mexico City, 2002. 18. Miguel Calderón, personal communication with author, August 20, 2003. 19. Ibid. 20. See the articles in Reforma, 7 January 1999.

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Index 1968 see Tlatelolco student massacre Abaroa, Eduardo 7–8, 10, 13, 14, 20, 31, 33–4, 45, 52; Elotes/maíz trangénico, 13; Invasión metafísica de los hombres desperdicio, 8; Vicisitudes iniciáticas, 34, 35; Vida instantánea, 34 Acceso A, 111, 114 Acconci, Vito, 106 ACE Gallery, 111 Acné, 8 acting out, 115–6, 125 Adorno, Theodor, 136 Aitken, Doug, 11 Alatorre, Antonio, 52 Aldana, Rodgrigo, 20, 33–4; Con título (después de Shi T’ao), 34; Mi pelo está cano, 34; Por un México mejor, 20, 33 Allá en el campus grande (Sheridan, Guillermo), 130–1 Allen, Woody, 73; Radio Days, 73 Álvarez Bravo, Manuel, 56 Alÿs, Francis, 7, 10, 15–16, 83, 93–101, 107, 112, 111, 115, 114, 132, 133; Ambulantes, 94–98, 95, 96, 97, 98; The Collector, 96–98, 99; The Leak, 98; The loser/the winner, 98; Paradox of Praxis, 97; Reenactments, 83, 100; Turista, 112; Walks, 16, 96, 100 Ambulantes (Alÿs, Francis), 94–98, 95, 96, 97, 98 Amores Perros (González Iñárritu, Alejandro), 154 Anti Œdipus (Deleuze and Guattari), 86 anti-Chinese movement, 26–7 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 77; ‘‘LettreOcéan,’’ 77 Arnheim, Rudolf, 76, 80, 82 Artaud, Antonin, 74, 85–7; To Have Done with the Judgment of God, 74, 85–6

Artificial History (Calderón, Miguel), 152-153 Asiain, Aurelio, 21 Aspects of Contemporary Mexican Painting, 41 Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (Vargas Llosa, Mario), 73 ‘‘Aventuras en Revolución’’ (González, Rockdrigo), 75, 84 Axis Mexico, 10 Balbuena, Bernardo de, 91; Grandeza mexicana, 91 Banuet, Beto, 62 Barney, Tina, 57–8; Friends and Relations, 57; Theater of Manners, 58; Watch, The, 57 Barrera, Lizzie, 55 Barthes, Roland, 14, 32–3, 38; The Empire of Signs, 14, 32–3, 38 Bataille, Georges, 105–6, 125, 126 Batman, 75 Beatles, The, 74, 78, 79 Beckett, Samuel, 87 Bellatín, Mario, 45; Una ciudad mejor que ésta, 45 Benjamin, Walter, 66–7 Berman, Marshall, 92, 93, 94 Biesenbach, Klaus, 13, 50–1 Blanco, Hugo Diego, 20; Tinta china, 20 Blanco, José Joaquín, 99, 107 Blin, Roger, 82 body without organs, 15, 86–7 Boreal, Aurora see Prado, Gustavo Borges, Jorge Luis, 23 Breton, André, 79 Brüggemann, Stefan, 8 Brunet, Fernanda, 20, 21 Buendía, Manuel, 42 Bundle of 1,000 x 400 x 250 cm Composed of Waste Plastic and Suspended from the Front of a

INDEX Building. 5 Isabel la Católica Street, 1997 (Sierra, Santiago), 106 Burial (Margolles, Teresa), 117, 119 Calderón, Miguel, 8, 10, 16–17, 151–7, 159; Artificial History, 1523; Employee of the Month, 154–6, 155, 157 Calles, Plutarco Elías, 135 Calzado Canadá, 65 Cantoral, Itati, 52 Cárdenas, Cuauhtémoc, 2, 5, 158–9 Cárdenas, Lázaro, 2 Cards for Cutting Cocaine (Margolles, Teresa), 117, 119, 122–3 Carranza, Venustiano, 61 Carrillo Gil see Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Alvar y Carmen T. Carrillo Gil Cartas de Tepoztlán (Soler Frost, Pablo), 20 Cartier Bresson, Henri, 56 Casares, Maria, 86 Castañón, Paulina, 5, 59 Centro Cultural Arte Contemporáneo, 153 Centro de la Imagen, 149 Centro Histórico, México City, 92, 93, 94–5, 98–100, 101, 106, 146 Chiapas uprising see Zapatistas china poblana, 31 China poblana (Galán, Julio), 7, 42, 43 chupacabras, 138–9 Cioran, E. M., 73 City of Palaces: Chronicle of a Lost Heritage, The (Tovar y de Teresa, Guillermo), 55 Ciudad Juárez, 120, 122, 125 ciudad mejor que ésta, Una (Bellatín, Mario), 45 Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl, 71 Clark, Larry, 56–7 Cobos, Wendy de los, 52, 61 Colección Jumex, La, 10–11, 109–10 Collector, The (Alÿs, Francis), 96–8, 99 Colosio, Luis Donaldo, 4, 42, 119–20 Columbus, Christopher, 25 Communist Manifesto, The (Marx, Karl), 90 Compro, luego existo (Loaeza, Guadalupe), 54 Conde, Teresa del, 38, 49 Conjunctions and Disjunctions (Paz, Octavio), 29 constructivism, 104

Con título (después de Shi T’ao) (Aldana, Rodrigo), 34 Credencial sordomudos (Hernández, Jonathan), 127–32 Crimp, Douglas, 136–7 Critique of Judgement (Kant, Immanuel), 84 Cruzvillegas, Abraham, 7–8 Cuevas, Minerva, 1, 9–10, 11, 15–16, 17, 101–6, 107, 114, 116, 132–3, 156; see also Mejor Vida Corporation Debroise, Olivier, 7 Defense of Letters (Duhamel, Georges), 76 del Conde, Teresa, 38, 49 Deleuze, Gilles, 15, 86 Dermis (Margolles, Teresa), 117, 122, 124, 125 Diario de un viaje a la China nueva (Lombardo Toledano, Vicente), 28 Díaz Ordaz, Gustavo, 5, 14, 52, 59–60 Díaz Ordaz, Paulina, 52, 58–60, 62, 66 Díaz, Porfirio, 55, 153 Doy Fe (Kuri, Gabriel), 65 Duchamp, Marcel, 90, 126, 158 Duhamel, Georges, 76–7; Defense of Letters, 76 Echeverría, Luis, 2 ejemplo de sonora, El (Espinoza, José Ángel), 27 Elotes/maíz trangénico (Abaroa, Eduardo), 13 Empire of Signs, The (Barthes, Roland), 14, 32, 38 Employee of the Month (Calderón, Miguel), 154–7, 155, 157 ‘‘Eres tú’’ (Molina, Adriana), 75 Espinoza, José Angel, 27; El ejemplo de sonora, 27; El problema chino en México, 27 Estridentismo, 78 expenditure, 105–6 Faro de Oriente, El, 71 Fernández Garza, Mauricio, 55, 63 Finale (Vargas Lugo, Pablo), 34, 36 flâneur, 15, 92, 93, 104, 107, 126 Flaubert, Gustave, 23 Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes (FONCA), 8 Fonseca, Gonzalo, 8; La Torre de los Vientos, 8 Foster, Hal, 7, 9, 45 Fox, Vicente, 6 Freud, Sigmund, 116, 151

179

180 Friends and Relations (Barney, Tina), 57–8 Fuentes, Carlos, 67; La región más transparente, 68 Fusco, Coco, 8, 114 Galán, Julio, 7, 40, 41, 42, 43; China poblana, 7, 42, 43 Galerie Chantal Crousel, 103 Galerie Peter Kilchmann, 10 Gallery Burned with Gasoline (Sierra, Santiago), 114 Galván, Carlos, 132 Gandhi, 79 garbage pickers, see pepenadores Garibay, Ricardo, 111; El milusos, 111 Garza, Javier de la, 40 Geishas al descubierto (Jusidman, Yishai), 42, 44 Giuliani, Rudolph, 56, 94 Goebbels, Josef, 84 Goldin, Nan, 56–7 Goldman, Shifra, 11, 138 González Iñárritu, Alejandro, 154 González, Rockdrigo, 75, 84; ‘‘Aventuras en Revolución,’’ 75, 84 González Torres, Félix, 17 Gordon, Douglas, 11 Grandeza mexicana (Balbuena, Bernardo de), 91 Greene Naftali Gallery, 10, 49 Guattari, Félix, 15, 86 Guillermoprieto, Alma, 96, 121 Guzmán, Daniel, 11 Haacke, Hans, 68; Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings; A Real Time Social System, as of May, 1971, 68; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Board of Trustees, 68 Hank González, Carlos, 49 Havana Biennale, 117 Helguera, Pablo, 136 Hello Kitty (Orlaineta, Edgar), 35 Hernández, Jonathan, 11, 15–16, 127–32; Credencial sordomudos, 127–32; Se busca recompensa, 127 Hollier, Denis, 125 Hotel de México, 63–4 Ibargüengoitia, Jorge, 107 INBA, see Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes Infinita compasión (Vargas Lugo, Pablo), 34 In Light of India (Paz, Octavio), 29

INDEX Institutional Revolutionary Party see Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, 11, 12, 144 Invasión metafísica de los hombres desperdicio (Abaroa, Eduardo), 8 ‘‘. . .IU IIIUUU IU. . .’’ (Quintanilla, Luis), 78–80 Jaffe, Jana, 55 Juárez see Ciudad Juárez Juicio a Salinas (Rodríguez, Jesusa), 5 Jumex see Colección Jumex, La Jusidman, Yishai, 14, 22, 34, 41–2, 44; Geishas al descubierto, 42, 44 Kahlo, Frida, 144 Kant, Immanuel, 84; Critique of Judgement, 84 Kawara, On, 90 Khlebnikov, Velimir, 80 Koolhaas, Rem, 92–3 Krauze, Enrique, 95 Kristeva, Julia, 28 Kuri, Gabriel, 11, 65; Doy Fe, 65 Kuri, José, 11 Kurimanzutto, 11 Kushigian, Julia A., 23–4; Orientalism in the Hispanic Literary Tradition, 23 Labyrinth of Solitude, The (Paz, Octavio), 16, 126, 137 Language of Psycho-Analysis (Laplanche and Pontalis), 116 Lankenau, Marien, 63 Laplanche, Jean, 116; Language of Psycho-Analysis, 116 Larvario (Margolles, Teresa), 117 Leak, The (Alÿs, Francis), 98 Le Corbusier, 129 ‘‘Lettre-Océan’’ (Apollinaire, Guillaume), 77 Lipard, Lucy, 10 Li Po (Tablada, José Juan), 27–8 Lisson Gallery, 10, 103 Littman, Robert, 153 Loaeza, Guadalupe, 54, 55; Compro, luego existo, 54; Las niñas bien, 55 Lombardo Toledano, Vicente, 28–9, 31; Diario de un viaje a la China nueva, 28 López, Sonia, 75 López Portillo, José, 2, 54, 56 López Rocha, Aurelio, 2 López Rocha, Eugenio, 10–11, 63 López Rocha, Sandy, 65

INDEX loser/the winner, The (Alÿs, Francis), 98 Madona Tsunami (Vargas Lugo, Pablo), 34 Madrid, Miguel de la, 2, 42 Maldonado, Rocío, 40 Manzutto, Mónica, 11 Mao Tse-tung, 28–9 Margolles, Teresa, 1, 9–10, 15–16, 116–26, 132, 146; Burial, 117, 119; Cards for Cutting Cocaine, 117, 119, 122–3 ; Dermis 117, 122–3, 124; Havana Biennale, 117; Larvario, 117, Tatuajes 117, Tongue, 118, 117; Vaporization, 117 Marian Goodman Gallery, 11 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 77 Martín, Patricia, 10 Martínez, Rosa, 114 Marx, Karl, 90; Communist Manifesto, The, 90 Massenet, Jules, 77 Matta Clark, Gordon, 106 McCarthy, Paul, 11 Medina, Cuauhtémoc, 12–13, 55, 100, 114–5, 126 Mejía Madrid, Fabrizio, 64 Mejor Vida Corporation, 1, 9, 17, 101–106, 107; see also Cuevas, Minerva metro, Mexico City, 74, 81–2, 88, 101–2 Mexican Arts Council, see Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes (FONCA) Mexican Revolution, 1, 2, 15, 26, 58–9, 63, 105, 131, 135 Mexico City: An Exhibition about the Exchange Rates of Bodies and Values, 10, 50 Mexico Illustrated, 10 Meyer, Lorenzo, 50, 51 milusos, El (Garibay, Ricardo), 111 Mi pelo está cano (Aldana, Rodrigo), 34 Moffat, Tracey, 49 Molina, Adriana, 75; ‘‘Eres tú,’’ 75 Monkey Grammarian, The (Paz, Octavio), 29 Monsiváis, Carlos, 5, 52, 101 Montes de Oca, José Maria, 26 Morales, Taniel, 15, 71, 73–90, 91, 158, 159; Sin cabeza-Necropsia, 15, 73–90, 158 morgue see SEMEFO (Servicio Médico Forense)

181

MUNAL, see Museo Nacional de Arte Muñoz Rocha, Manuel, 4, 119–20 muralism, 104–5 Museo de Antropología, 16, 137, 144, 149–51, 152 Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Alvar y Carmen T. Carrillo Gil, 11, 117 Museo de Historia Natural, 151–3, 153–7 Museo del Prado, El, 146–51, 147–50 ; see also Prado, Gustavo Museo Nacional de Arte, 16, 153–4, 156 Museo Rufino Tamayo, 111 Museo Salinas (Razo, Vicente), 9, 138–44, 139–143, 157 Museum of Anthropology, 16, 137, 144, 149–51, 152 Museum of Natural History, 151–3, 153–7 My Melody (Orlaineta, Edgar), 38, 40 NAFTA, see North American Free Trade Agreement National Action Party see Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) National Autonomous University of Mexico see Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México National Institute of Fine Arts see Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes National Museum of Art, 16, 153–4, 156 Napoleon, 23 neo-Mexicanism, 7–8, 17, 38–42, 65, 153 Nervo, Amado, 77 niñas bien, Las (Loaeza, Guadalupe), 55 North American Free Trade Agreement, 1, 2–3, 13, 65 Novo, Salvador, 77–8, 91–3, 100; Nueva grandeza mexicana, 92 Nuevo León, 63 Núñez, Dulce María, 7, 40 Obregón, Alvaro, 135 Obstruction of a Freeway with a Trailer Truck (Sierra, Santiago), 110, 110 Official Museo Salinas Guide, The (Razo, Vicente), 11, 138 O’Gormann, Juan, 127 Okón, Yoshua, 8 Oldenburg, Claes, 20 Orientalism (Said, Edward), 14, 21–4 Orientalism in the Hispanic Literary Tradition (Kushigian, Julia), 23

182 Orlaineta, Edgar, 8, 14, 20, 35, 40; Hello Kitty, 35; My Melody, 38, 40 Orozco, Gabriel, 11, 13, 65 Ortíz, Rubén, 13; Elotes/maíz trangénico, 13 PAN, see Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) Panadería, La, 8, 138, 151, 152 Pandolfi, Silvia, 11 Pani, Mario, 127 Paradox of Praxis (Alÿs, Francis), 97 Parque de la Lama, 63 Partido Acción Nacional (PAN), 6, 58, 63 Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), 1, 2–6, 9, 11–12, 14–15, 16, 42, 48, 49, 54, 58, 61, 62–3, 69, 85, 119, 129, 135–8, 139, 144 Paz, Octavio, 16, 20, 23, 29, 31, 72, 90, 126, 130, 136, 137, 144, 149, 151; Conjunctions and Disjunctions, 29; In Light of India, 29; The Labyrinth of Solitude, 16, 126, 137; The Monkey Grammarian, 29; Posdata, 90 ‘‘Paz in Asia’’ (Weinberger, Eliot), 29 Pecados (Rossell, Daniela), 35, 38, 39 Pedestrian Bridge Obstructed with Wrapping Tape (Sierra, Santiago), 105, 108 Pedrosa, Adriano, 114 Pelli, Cesar, 51 pepenadores, 96–8 Pérez Prado, Dámaso, 74, 84 Periférico, 75, 109–10, 116 Plaza Santa Catarina, 93, 99, 107 Polyforum Siqueiros, 54, 63–4 Pontalis, J. B., 116; Language of PsychoAnalysis, 116 Pornografía infantil (Prado, Gustavo), 148, 150 Por un México mejor (Aldana, Rodrigo), 20, 33 Posadas, Juan Jesús Cardinal, 3, 119 Posdata (Paz, Octavio), 90 Prado, Gustavo 16, 144–51, 152, 156; El Museo del Prado, 146–51, 147–50 ; Pornografía infantil, 148, 150; Yo ni existo, 146 PRI see Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) problema chino en México, El (Espinoza, José Ángel), 26 P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, 10, 13, 50, 65

INDEX Punkenhofer, Robert, 8 Quintana, Georgina, 40 Quintanilla, Luis, 78–80; ‘‘. . .IU IIIUUU IU. . .,’’ 78–80; Radio: poema inalámbrico en trece mensajes, 78 ‘‘Radioconferencia sobre el radio’’ (Novo, Salvador), 77–8 Radio Days (Allen, Woody), 73 Radio Pirata XCH—Sin Permiso, 73 Radio: poema inalámbrico en trece mensajes (Quintanilla, Luis), 78 Razo, Vicente, 1, 9, 12, 16, 138–44, 139–43 , 151, 156–8; Museo Salinas, 9, 138-43, 156; The Official Museo Salinas Guide, 12, 138 Re-enactments (Alÿs, Francis), 83, 100 región más transparente, La (Fuentes, Carlos), 68 Revolución, Avenida, 73, 75, 81, 84 Revolution see Mexican Revolution Reyes, Pedro, 8 Ricas y famosas (Rossell, Daniela), 14, 47–69, 48, 53–4, 59–62, 67 Río Churubusco, 107 Rising Sun (Vargas Lugo, Pablo), 34, 37 Rivera, Diego, 11, 28, 29, 105, 127 Rockdrigo, see González, Rockdrigo Rodchenko, Alexandr, 104–5 Rodríguez, Jesusa, 5 rosca de reyes, 158–9 Rossell, Daniela, 1, 5, 7–9, 10, 14–15, 34–5, 38, 39, 47–69, 148, 159; Pecados, 35, 38, 39; Ricas y famosas, 14, 47–69, 48, 53–4, 59–62, 67 Rossell de la Lama, Guillermo, 55, 56, 63–4 Rossell, Guillermo, 61 Rouvillois, Frédéric, 105 Rovirosa Wade, Leandro, 54 Ruiz Massieu, José Francisco, 4, 5, 119, 122, 126 Ryman, Robert, 20 Said, Edward, 14, 21–4, 32; Orientalism‚14, 22–4 Sala Siqueiros, 11, 144 Salinas de Gortari, Carlos, 1, 2–5, 9, 14, 16, 54, 60, 138–44, 157 Salinas, Emiliano, 55, 60–1, 66 Salinas Museum, see Museo Salinas Salinas, Raúl, 5, 52, 59, 66, 119, 125 San Felipe de Jesús, 25–6, 30, 31

INDEX Santos, Alicia, 55 Sarduy, Severo, 23 Schwabsky, Barry, 49, 67 Se busca recompensa (Hernández, Jonathan), 127 SEMEFO (Servicio Médico Forense), 9, 116–21, 124, 133 SEMEFO artists’ collective, 117 Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings; A Real Time Social System, as of May, 1971 (Haacke, Hans), 68 Sheridan, Guillermo, 130–1; Allá en el campus grande, 130–1 Shitao, 34 Sierra, Santiago, 1, 9–10, 15–16, 106–16, 125, 132–3; Bundle of 1,000 x 400 x 250 cm Composed of Waste Plastic and Suspended from the Front of a Building. 5 Isabel la Católica Street, 1997, 106; Gallery Burned with Gasoline, 114; Obstruction of a Freeway with a Trailer Truck, 110, 110; Pedestrian Bridge Obstructed with Wrapping Tape, 107, 108; Wall of a Gallery Torn Out, Tilted at an Angle of Sixty Degrees, and Supported by 5 People, 114, 113 Sin cabeza—Necropsia (Morales, Taniel), 15, 73–90, 158 Siqueiros, David Alfaro, 12, 63; Cartas de Tepoztlán, 20 Smith, Melanie, 7 Smith, Ray, 40 Soler Frost, Pablo, 20 Sollers, Phillipe, 28 Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Board of Trustees (Haacke, Hans), 68 Sonora Santanera, 75 Stalin, Josef, 84 Suárez, Manuel, 63–4 subway see metro, Mexico City Tablada, José Juan, 27–8; Li Po, 27–8 Táboas, Sofía, 7–8 Taniya, Kyn, see Quintanilla, Luis Tatuajes (Margolles, Teresa), 117 Tel Quel, 28 Temerarios, Los, 74 Temístocles, 7–9, 12, 14, 19, 48, 138 Tepito, 100 Theater of Manners (Barney, Tina), 58 Thompson, Ginger, 63, 67 Tigres del Norte, Los, 73 Tinta china (Blanco, Hugo Diego), 20

183

Tiravanija, Rikrit, 17 Tlalpan, 107, 109 Tlatelolco student massacre, 5, 14, 52, 59, 129, 132 To Have Done with the Judgment of God (Artaud, Antonin), 74, 85–6 Tongue (Margolles, Teresa), 117 Torre de los Vientos, La, 8 Torre Latinoamericana, 101, 107 Torreón, 26 Tovar y de Teresa, Guillermo, 55; City of Palaces: Chronicle of a Lost Heritage, The, 55 Tracy, Michael, 40 Turista (Alÿs, Francis), 112 Twenty Million Mexicans Can’t Be Wrong, 10 UNAM see Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 5, 16, 74, 127–32 Vaporization (Margolles, Teresa), 117 Vargas, Gaby, 52 Vargas Llosa, Mario, 6, 73; Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, 73 Vargas Lugo, Pablo, 7–8, 10, 14, 20, 31, 33–4, 36, 37, 45; Finale, 34, 36; Infinita compasión, 34; Madona Tsunami, 34; Rising Sun, 34, 37 Velasco, José María, 65 Venegas, Germán, 65 Viaducto Miguel Alemán, 72 Viaducto Tlalpan, 107, 109 Vicisitudes iniciáticas (Abaroa, Eudardo), 34, 35 Vida instantánea (Abaroa, Eduardo), 34 Villa, Pancho, 61, 62 Villoro, Juan, 49–50, 63, 88, 89, 91 Walks (Alÿs, Francis), 16, 96, 100 Wall of a Gallery Torn Out, Tilted at an Angle of Sixty Degrees, and Supported by 5 People (Sierra, Santiago), 114, 113 Watch, The (Barney, Tina), 57 Weinberger, Eliot, 28; ‘‘Paz in Asia,’’ 29 Weiss, Allen, 87 Yo ni existo (Prado, Gustavo), 146 Zapata, Emiliano, 15, 60, 61–2, 66, 80, 89 Zapatistas, 1, 3–4, 7, 42, 136 Zebra Crossing, 10 Zedillo, Ernesto, 4–6, 120, 130 Zenil, Nahúm, 7, 40, 41 Zócalo, 88, 92, 93