A visit from the artist Thomas Glassford to the exhibition Mexico Inside Out: Themes in Art Since 1990 offered an excuse to revisit the exhibition a few months after it opened at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. You can’t miss Glassford’s piece in the show — thousands of collected broomsticks, displayed on book shelves, arranged in neat rectangular shapes on the floor, or constructed into a monolithic pillar at the center of the room. It takes up the central gallery that overlooks the bottom floor and three works by Ellsworth Kelly. It’s a surprisingly evocative piece, the worked surfaces of these modest workaday objects present in vast quantity suggest the presence of the workers. The pairing with Kelly is inspired, helping to emphasize Glassford’s employment of formal aesthetics, color and shape, to activate these toss-away broomsticks.
During his talk, though, Glassford downplayed his work’s formal qualities. Aesthetics in his work is a strategy, a way of orchestrating objects that possess subtle, easily overlooked histories into to their most potent and active form, so that the indexical information inherent in these overlooked objects is available to the viewer. It’s a familiar approach to contemporary art, but one that, going back over the Modern exhibition, seems particularly prevalent in the work gathered here.
There are a number of artists in the show that reuse or recycle toss-away material in a way that mines a hidden, evocative power engendered in refuse, or brings such material into a heightened political context. Miguel Monroy saves receipts that track peso to dollar exchange transactions that eventually dwindle the original dollar amount down to zero. Teresa Margolles displays tabloid newspapers, which catalog a year of the front page of the publication PM, strewn with juxtaposed images of dead bodies and sexualized women. Artemio mines not the dust bin, but the dust itself, excavating a heaping mound of dirt form the northern Mexico desert and placing it in the gallery as a kind of proxy, like Glassford’s broomsticks, for murdered women found buried in that region. In all these works, the material elements of the art function as a kind of evidence, in themselves insufficiently satisfying as autonomous art objects, but activated and enlivened when understood with the charged social-political context that they refer to or derive from.
In conceptual art context is the key, and aesthetics are to be manipulated, misconstrued, or subverted. That’s part of the game at play in Yoshua Okón’s four screen video piece, which employs day laborers, some of whom fought in the Guatemalan civil war, to reenact tiny vignettes from that war in the parking lot of a Home Depot in southern California. The result is an awkward, startling, and surprisingly humorous video. The men act-out tiny moments of guerrilla warfare (with pointed fingers as guns) in the open parking lot of an American big box retailer. We see these men crawling on their stomachs underneath parked cars and through the little tufts of grass on concrete islands in the middle of the lot while cars and customers walk by. We see them lying on the ground – Playing dead? Waiting to strike in an imaginary ambush? — in front of shed with a clearly displayed price tag as customers and employees alike pass by with hardly a glance.
It is the way the passersby ignore the men that made me think again of Glassford’s broomsticks. Day laborers, after all, are like modern day lepers, overlooked, exploited, less-than, other. Their objectification is precisely a byproduct of being a human byproduct of an economic system that uses and discards material and human resources alike. And yet, Okón’s video is neither didactic nor drably preachy because the conceit is so plainly ridiculous it’s funny. Perhaps the actors are ignored not because they are societal nobodies, but simply because this is the home of Hollywood, where everyone knows that presence of a camera, even in a Home Depot parking lot, might merely mean someone is trying to stage a homemade movie, to manufacture dreams. Here too the medium of representation, the video, is an untrustworthy means to a conceptual end: the historical, social, political tension inherent in the absurdity and the disconnect between Hollywood fiction and the pantomimed, but lived and emotional real memories of the day laborer-actors.
Humor is an active component in so many of the best works in this exhibition. Another of Okón’s videos disarms a violent political subtext by juxtaposing three images of three police officers, one showing off his ability to twirl his nightstick, another showing an officer berating the artist behind the camera, and a third showing a policeman in uniform doing a silly dance by himself to music blaring from a small radio. Francis Alÿs’ hilarious video of a car trying to drive up a steep hill is another example of the artist employing seemingly random set of parameters (such as pushing a block of ice through city streets, kicking a plastic bottle up a hill) to orchestrate an action that becomes a performed Sisyphean metaphor. In this one, a recording of a band practicing a difficult piece of marching music that starts the car on its merry way up the hill, and it’s the band’s failure to play through the whole number that “causes” the car to come careening backwards back down the hill.
There’s a readymade quality to some of these conceptual art strategies in this exhibit – a pile of dirt, a bullet-ridden wall, a sagging sac hanging from the gallery ceiling – that feel derivative of the minimal and conceptual investigations of the late 1960s, early 1970s. And yet, since much of the work itself is a semiotic proxy for the charged context to which they refer, the freshness of the work in the exhibition is bound up in unpacking how these articulations relate to particularities of their social context. There’s an irony there, the employment of vetted international art stylings to plumb locality. That can account for what can sometimes feel like an endless feedback loop of recurring approaches to contemporary art. Despite its claims at endless diversity, contemporary artists often find themselves shifting through a menu of established approaches to find ones that resonate with a new and particular cultural context.
What’s more interesting than focusing on what is familiar, however, is taking note of what is missing from Mexico Inside Out, namely more highly aestheticized artistic forms currently burning up the auction blocks. The suggestion is that a common inclination among these artists is a distrust of the containers, so to speak, that cultural information is normally delivered in. It is all work which is profoundly concerned with an elusive and shifting sense of meaning, inverting, subverting, and poking fun at the lies that become so every day they invisibly prop up institutions of power and subjugation. It is no surprise, then, that the video pieces are the strongest works in the show. The moving image, as Godard famously proclaimed, is truth at “24 frames-per-second,” and yet “every edit is a lie.” Video is a medium that is already questionable, fictionalizing the real by its very apprehension of the visible world. There is a freedom there, the framed fiction, an appropriate setting for a reworking of a cultural narrative.
