THE FRAGILE EQUILIBRIUM OF DESIRE AND FEAR, CONSTANTLY BEING THROWN OUT OF BALANCE, HAS MADE MEXICO CITY A NEW CENTER FOR CONTEMPORARY ART
By NIKLAS MAAK

The relationship between Mexico and America is more labyrinthine than any other. On both sides, varying desires for the life of the other collide with neurotic fears of foreign infiltration. As late as 1970, 80 percent of the population of California was white; as of two years ago, Latinos are in the majority, just as they are in Houston and San Antonio. In Texas and California, the most common first name is José. The fear of a Latino invasion in the US has never been as great as it is now, but neither has Latin American sex folklore been as popular. Latinos’ supposed passion and obstinacy is seen politically as a threat, but aesthetically, these qualities are perceived as wildly sexually appealing, as in the case of, say, Selma Hayek. For North America, Mexico is both a dream destination and a psycho-social nightmare; no border is as heavily armed as the one between the US and Mexico. For its part, Mexico is the most distorted mirror of the US and one of the global cultures shaped by it. On the one hand, the Central American country is shot through with the desire to be like Miami (where most Mexican telenovellas are already produced), and on the other hand, companies and patrons like Jorge Vergara Madrigal, head of a pharmaceutical company, face vehement demands for a reflection of a tradition culturally independent of the United States; despite all the protests, the company plans to build an ideal futuristic Mexican city in the north of Guadalajara with architects such as Coop Himmelblau, Zaha Hadid, and Daniel Libeskind, with a university and an entertainment center with a nationalistic color scheme; nothing American is to disturb the imagery of Mexican traditions.

The fragile equilibrium of desire and fear, constantly being thrown out of balance, has, within just a few years, made Mexico by far the most important location in contemporary art. The country has become the distorted mirror of the first world, its victim and its toughest challenge. In the last few years in Mexico City, an art movement has taken shape that, like no other in the world, reflects the collisions and pulsations of a globalized world and uses them to create imagery. One thing is shared by the protagonists of this movement, including Francis Alys, Santiago Sierra, and Teresa Margolles: they all come from the experimental branches of minimal art. With one playful action, Sierra was suddenly widely known: a camera filmed something that, from afar, looked like a minimalist sculpture. A white bar was placed against a black background. As the camera zoomed in, the white bar revealed itself to be a truck that Sierra had placed on a busy highway at a right angle to the flow of traffic. The rigid aesthetic form, the absolute order produced a productive chaos: the people abandoned their metal cages and began to come together to try to discover the origin of the traffic jam.

This humanized minimalism can be seen in many of the works of this avant-garde. Mexican artist Teresa Margolles may be the most radical and controversial representative of a new generation of artists. One of her best works can be seen in Kunst Werke Berlin until January 5, 2003.

The moment one steps into the main hall is an odd one; the hall is empty. There’s a wall at the end of the white room; it’s twenty meters wide and five and a half meters high. The wall has been painted with a glimmering golden liquid and the traces left behind by the paintbrush can still be seen. You enter the room via a small gallery. You stand there like Casper David Friedrich’s monk by the sea, looking onto this monumental, sublime work as if looking onto a distant deluge: a huge, elegiac, golden shimmering expanse, nothing else.

The wall develops a strange pull. The effect is beautiful, an impression that frustratingly refuses to completely evaporate when one discovers what this golden glimmering material on the wall is actually seven kilos of liquid human fat attained via liposuction from Mexican beauty farms where members of the upper class lay down on the operating table in the hopes of reaching the ideal image of a slim body.

The extremely wealthy of Mexico City live right next to the extremely poor and nowhere are the borderlines so defined and yet so fragile as they are here. The apartments of the rich are like hysterical fortresses; well-to-do bodies are held captive inside them, threatened by the dangers on the outside, such as kidnapping, and on the inside, such as obesity brought on by eating as a way to kill time. New Mexican art addresses this collision of the First and Third Worlds, between the bright and clean and the filthy and dark, the iconic models and the anonymous masses, just as Mexican filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu does on a different level in Amores Perros; this art creates a new arsenal of images of the venerated and devalued body.

The only images to be seen next to Margolles’s wall of fat in the Berlin gallery are of rich and blonde Mexican women, photographed by Daniela Rossell for her series “Ricas y famosas”: images of artificial bodies perfected to death in hallucinatory, fantastic villas.

Surrounded by these images in the large hall, the wall of fat stands there like a border gone slippery. One could claim that Margolles’s work is tasteless and, if read only as a parable about the First World, often called fat, and the thin Third World, that it is ambitious socially critical kitsch. But the sensual effect of the work goes beyond that of a banal illustration of social criticism. Secreciones is like a magnifying glass under which the layers of post-war art are superimposed as if in slow motion. The beauty of this wall is an American one. In its monumental dimensions, with its abstract brush strokes on the surface, it has the effect of echoing Pollock’s all-over structures, or Rothko’s flirtations with the sublime, a resonance with the heroes of Abstract Expressionism and the Pop artists whose works were both a continuation and a critique of this American art mythology. Andy Warhol peed on canvases with wet copper paint that then oxidized and turned green and orange; these became the famous “Piss Paintings.” Margolles plays with the double effect of these oxidized paintings through its immediate beauty and the disgust aroused by the process of its creation. Her wall of fat is like a picture puzzle, an emotional borderline. Fat is always both defiling yet golden, gleaming, ennobling, a shimmering beauty and a filthy waste. Like a sculptor, the surgeon removes from the living body everything that stands in the way of the completed sculpture; the body becomes the material. Margolles raises a monument to this degradation of the body.

Secreciones is like a thrust-reverser of Joseph Beuys’ works that utilize fat. During WWII, Tatars, so goes the legend, wrapped the severely wounded soldier, Beuys, in felt and rubbed him with fat – a supposed experience that he later referred to as an artistic initiation. For Margolles, fat is the opposite of some archaic life origin. It is itself life-threatening, a spawn of unhealthy living that can lead to diabetes, heart attacks and social disdain.

Secreciones is the wailing wall of a luxury and fitness culture for whom fat, once a substance necessary for life, has become its greatest threat. The ideal body can only be recovered by destroying parts of it in the clinics offering liposuction services. The great movements and patterns of the modern end in Margolles’s wall of fat; the faith in perfect surfaces; the cult of the body and the fear of formlessness and deformation; pop’s playful confusion of cheap and expensive materials; authenticity and representation. What becomes an image here is not a representation of bodies. It is the remains of the bodies themselves that congeal into art. Minimal art has reached its zero point.