The Age of Discrepancies
On 2 October 1968, ten days before the opening of the 19th summer Olympics in Mexico City, soldiers and police opened fire on a student protest in the Tlatelolco district's Plaza de las Tres Culturas, killing several hundred people. This chilling event laid bare the authoritarian character of the PRI (the political party that had ruled Mexico continuously since the 1920s) and ushered in an era of violence and alienation that culminated in 1994 with the Zapatista rebellion, the peso crash and Mexico’s submission to economic globalization in the form of the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA. ‘The Age of Discrepancies: Art and Visual Culture in Mexico, 1968–1997’ at MUCA, the main art gallery on the campus of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), is the first major exhibition to bring together the anti-institutional, Conceptual, performance and collective artistic practices that developed outside official structures in Mexico during these decades of social upheaval. More than an exhibition, this massive documentary effort offers rich fodder for future projects on this under-explored period.
As the museum of the UNAM, the heart of Mexico’s student movement, MUCA is a particularly charged site in which to show these art works, which often combine political and visual dissent. A recreation of Helen Escobedo’s iconic Corredor blanco (White Corridor), a three-sided hallway formed from slightly curved white boards and a mirror, opens the show. It functions as a phenomenological time machine, depositing disoriented viewers in 1969, the year it was originally installed in MUCA for the second annual ‘Salon Independiente’, an exhibition organized by artists in opposition to government salons following the Tlatelolco massacre. Works and ephemera from the salons set the tone for the exhibition, largely a saga of artists seeking alternatives to state-run venues and mass media after 1968. These new sites would range from Martha Hellion’s portable Fluxus display cubes and mail art sent from Europe in the 1970s to ‘Mel’s Café’ – Melanie Smith’s Mexico City apartment-cum-studio-cum-exhibition space in the early 1990s.
Over 300 works by 119 artists are installed in MUCA’s enormous white cube in loosely chronological order under thematic groupings such as ‘Rebellions’, ‘Identity as Utopia’ and ‘Inclemency’, concepts addressed at length in the accompanying 469-page bilingual catalogue. The curators, led by Olivier Debroise and Cuauhtémoc Medina, have mapped out a specifically local genealogy for the Mexican artists who have achieved international fame since the early 1990s. Curiously, Gabriel Orozco, the best-known among them, declined to participate in this show, although the catalogue does document his significant role within Mexico’s artistic community between 1987 and his move to New York in 1991. Orozco’s self-selected absence may reflect a lack of interest in being associated with this particular version of local history or perhaps a lack of enthusiasm for certain early works.
The exhibition highlights the presence of installation and Conceptual forms in Mexico since the 1960s, countering the received wisdom that these phenomena were imported from Europe at the end of the 1980s. It also demonstrates the importance of international dialogue within Mexico’s artistic community at this time. Forgotten (or suppressed) finds include the hard-edged abstractions of Argentine-Japanese artist Kazuya Sakai, who arrived in Mexico via New York in 1965, and Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky’s fascinating psychedelic comic strips and films from the 1960s and 1970s. These works by foreigners complicate and enrich the more familiar story of the impact of José Bedia, Jimmie Durham, Francis Alÿs, Santiago Sierra and other non-native artists on the Mexican art scene in later years.
The exhibition’s most significant contribution, however, is its resuscitation and recuperation of the grupos, artist collectives that staged urban interventions in the 1970s and 1980s. The work of these artists, many of whom participated in the student movement, is present in the form of original materials, replicas, photographs and films that skilfully recreate their original moment. Images of Mexico City’s demi-monde by Fotógrafos Independientes (Independent Photographers), a group led by Adolfo Patiño from 1976 to 1984, have been hung by clothes pins to recreate their original outdoor display in streets and parks. Their original mats, now yellowed and bent, are poignant evidence of the massive effort undertaken by the curators to rescue these and dozens of other works that could have been completely forgotten or lost, lacking a place in any institutional or market framework in Mexico (until now).
‘The Age of Discrepancies’ is set to travel to the Museo del Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (MALBA), a context that should inspire useful comparisons with contemporaneous regional movements, from Tucumán Arde to Tropicália. Sorely needed, however, are American and European venues, so that audiences that have grappled with the recent spate of exhibitions of post-1990 Mexican art (among others Klaus Biesenbach’s ‘Mexico City: An Exhibition about the Exchange Rates of Bodies and Values’, at PS1, New York, in 2002, and ‘Made in Mexico’, at the Hammer Musuem, Los Angeles, 2004) can finally begin to understand the origins and complexity of contemporary Mexican art on its own terms.
