Press Release - Alfredo De Stefano: |
So how do the artists in "Mexican Report" assert their identity? Though they slide in political references when they can, most often their works attempt a truce between present-day art world mores and the impetus of their country of origin. Such brokering leads to some very compelling work, but the negotiations don't come easily.
Perhaps exhibitions based on nationhood have become quaint. Pictures from one country are likely to look a lot like pictures from nearly any other country (except, perhaps, Japan, whose loopy island insularity manages again and again to elude generalization). I suspect "Mexican Report" will go down as one of the last shows of its kind simply because it's modified by the adjective "Mexican." The images on their passports just aren't the important ones for contemporary artists anymore.
Instituto de Mexico brought on Mexican curator Santiago Espinosa de los Monteros from Mexico City to assemble the show's 50-some artists and survey what's happening south of the border. He chose a solid group of up-and-comers, a few creative class elders and a handful of foreigners who call the country home. Certifiable art stars -- Gabriel Orozco, subject of a 2004 Hirshhorn retrospective, and the country's hottest conceptual artist-in-residence, Belgian expatriate Francis Alys -- are missing. Though edited for its Washington iteration, the exhibition occasionally suffers from lack of focus, but that's a minor qualm in light of the interesting problems it raises.
The best of de la Monteros's selections assert a nationalist agenda while operating comfortably in the international art milieu. Case in point, and perhaps the best piece in the show: Ambra Polidori's poetic video "The Abduction," on view at Curator's Office. (If you've got time for just one show, make Curator's your stop. Five videos by four artists are screened; together they total 25 minutes of some of the smartest work I've seen in Washington recently.) Polidori's work operates on two levels. As a formalist art object, it posits video as landscape painting, broadcasting a stream of images shot from the inside of a car tracking the desolate dirt roads of a destitute countryside. Set to a mournful string soundtrack, the piece offers a somber sequence of images revealing mountains here and run-down buildings there. Add to this visual information the work's back story -- it chronicles an area known for its snuff film studios, an area where countless women and young girls die -- and the video becomes a sorrowful comment on a pernicious national problem. The piece reads as both a Mexican product and as a contemporary riff on the landscape tradition.