Jonathan Markovitz

Department of Sociology
University of California, San Diego
jmarkovi@weber.ucsd.edu

 

La Frontera/The Border: Art About the Mexico/United States Border Experience. Organized by the Centro Cultural de la Raza and the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. The exhibit will be on display at the San Jose Museum of Art from October through December 1994. This review is based on the showing in San Diego in May of 1993.

 

The first thing to note about La Frontera/The Border: Art About the Mexico/United States Border Experience is that the exhibit’s title is a bit misleading. The various pieces of work in the exhibit make it perfectly clear that there is no such thing as “the . . . Border Experience.” Instead, while it is possible to draw out some common themes, the exhibit represents an extremely diverse multiplicity of “border experiences.” But even this phrasing would make for a somewhat misleading title, because one of the central concerns of the project is to problematize the notion of “border” in a variety of ways. Borders between Mexico and the United States are only one set of oppositions which are interrogated, and to some extent (I’ll conclude this review by questioning to what degree), broken down. The various art works in this exhibit also challenge the borders that divide: art and criticism; production and reception; public and private; religion and entertainment; communication and imperialism.

 

One of the outstanding works in the show, Yolanda Lopez’s “Things I Never Told My Son About Being A Mexican,” is a collage made up of various items from popular culture. Newspaper articles are interspersed with a bag of “Batman tortilla chips” and a Wonder Woman comic book the cover of which shows Wonder Woman eating cafeteria-style rice and beans. According to the accompanying blurb, the work “highlights the otherwise subtle and persistent means by which the mass media defines Mexican American Identity. . . . [It] exposes racist subtexts in seemingly neutral expressions of contemporary popular culture.” This description is worth examining, since the collage itself presents the various items to us without any accompanying commentary, and it is not clear how we would know that the work “exposes” racism if the blurb did not tell us so. The blurb in fact is part of the larger apparatus by means of which the exhibit attempts to construct its audience.

 

The first thing to note in this connection is that while the collage as a whole is clearly about Mexican-American identity, many of the individual artifacts are not. Many people looking at the Wonder Woman comic would not, for example, pay any attention to the food’s cultural history. Identity is “highlighted,” therefore, only by juxtaposition of the various elements. Seen together, the different items yield a common theme. But this theme is racism only to the extent that a prior agreement or orientation toward Lopez’s collage has been established among the audience–only to the extent that racism has already somehow been designated the object of attention.

 

One of the ways this prior orientation is established is through reviews of the exhibit, nearly all of which have focused on racism, imperialism, or border-zone policing practices. Then, for those few who manage to come in to the exhibit without having seen any of the reviews, there are plaques on display at the museum’s entrances which mention the same constellation of concerns. And finally, in addition to placing a descriptive/prescriptive blurb beside Lopez’s piece, the exhibitors have surrounded it with other pieces which depend on similar aesthetic strategies and are described in similar terms. My point here is that the piece only “works” as a statement on the racism of popular culture if (and because) the viewer has absorbed certain lessons in how to view it. This is as it should be: an exhibition of emergent artistic practices must fulfill the pedagogical function of training a suitable audience. But in this case the organizers’ desire to establish “racism” as the audience’s primary term of reference may have the effect of prematurely foreclosing some alternate readings.

 

These questions aside, there is much to applaud in the Frontera exhibition. Lopez’s collage in particular succeeds in challenging some deeply entrenched oppositions, or conceptual borders. To begin with, the artifacts she has collected will tend to disrupt any presumed border between high culture and low, art and trash. Moreover, while individually the items might be examples of “naturalized” racism, collectively they can represent a syncretic appropriation of racist notions. In this sense, the piece is simultaneously an indictment of domination, and a gesture toward something different. There are other examples of “border crossings” within this piece, but I want to stop here, because I think that the notion of artistic syncretism is particularly useful for an understanding of the work adjacent to Lopez’s, Cesar Augusto Martinez’s “Amor a la Tierra en el Sur de Tejas,” or “Love of the Land of South Texas.”

 

Martinez’s piece appears to be a simple landscape–pretty, but not terribly interesting. On second glance, however, the work takes on an entirely new dimension. It turns out that the piece is painted on a “No Trespassing” sign, an the accompanying text tells us that the sign is from the border. The text goes further to say that “by painting over a No Trespassing sign, Martinez presents the despair of immigrants who come with hope to an unwelcoming land.” While this may be true, Martinez is surely representing something other than, and beyond, despair. The land is clearly unwelcoming, but Martinez seems to be saying that it makes its appeal to him anyway. Moreover, by transforming a hostile border sign into an artwork (an object that has already furthered his professional reputation), Martinez has managed to turn the very symbol of his unwelcome and alien status to his advantage on this side of the border. I do not want to trivialize the despair that the blurb refers to, and I’ll note that many of the other works in the exhibit make it perfectly clear that lots of people are not able to cross the border at all, and that many of those who do are forced to suffer extreme hardships. But it is precisely for this reason that Martinez’s work most clearly marks a moment of artistic syncretism. If it is only because of the problems of domination that Martinez needs to appropriate a border sign, then the work is syncretic in that it moves beyond appropriation and into creation of new forms and possibilities for cultural transformation. In the process of appropriation, Martinez has posed a serious challenge to the notion of borders.¹ The work makes it possible to see the border not as a line marking containment, but as just one more piece of canvas. Repressive politics or transformative art? Martinez poses the possibility that the border might be both at once.

 

David Avalos deals with a similar set of issues in his “San Diego Donkey Cart.” This piece focuses on tourism in border towns as a way of putting into question the prevailing norms of U.S./Mexican relations. The work is, in Avalos’s words “a simulacrum of a Tiajuanan Donkey Cart.” These hand-drawn carts with photos of “friendly Mexicans” are popular border attractions. Avalos’s sculpture substitutes a drawing of a “border patrol agent arresting an undocumented worker” for the traditional photo. The result is that “Tiajuana and San Diego’s tourist trade is thus juxtaposed with the socioeconomic reality that underlies it and upon which it depends for its survival.” This is perhaps the one work in the exhibit best suited for a discussion of syncretism as a process.

 

The “original” border town donkey carts were already simulacra, appropriations of Mexican culture for the purposes of a U.S.-dominated tourist industry. (Donkey carts were used for transportation before they were used for tourism). Moreover, construction of the tourist cart relied on a previous Northern appropriation and construction of Mexican identity, in the form of the stock figure of the “friendly Mexican.” Avalos’s work is merely the next step in the process–a further re-construction. But the exhibit is quick to note that the process did not end here.

 

Avalos’s original donkey cart was a life-sized sculpture commissioned as a public work, and placed in front of a San Diegan federal court house in 1986–a site from which it was quickly removed. A judge ordered it confiscated (a further act of “appropriation?”) because of the “threat that it posed to public safety.” The work that’s in the exhibit is, therefore, a reproduction of Avalos’s original simulacrum. Avalos, however, refused to allow the judge’s actions to go uncontested, and enlisted the aid of the ACLU to fight for the cart’s release and reinstatement. The case was ultimately dismissed, but Avalos has now gathered the judge’s statements along with magazine articles and various court documents into a booklet that has become an intrinsic part of the current exhibit. Appropriation and transformation are unending. The “original” donkey cart now provides the occasion for a whole series of discussions that problematize U.S./Mexican borders, public/private distinctions, and individual/government relations.

 

This last of these oppositions is important because it is bound up with the categories of “tourist” and “friend.” Avalos’s work clearly links both of these generalized individuals to their respective governments. “Tourist” becomes “U.S. tourist,” and “friend” becomes “Mexican friend.” This was of course, always the case, but forced recognition of the nationality of both categories (even in Mexico, tourists can see “U.S.” as an invisible norm) denies the presumed innocence of the former. Moreover, “friendship” is high ighted as an economic, rather than as an emotional relation, one which Mexicans must take up as a strategy of survival.

 

Though the exhibit includes far too many works for me to discuss or even describe, the three I’ve mentioned exemplify the kinds of border-crossing gestures that comprise it. Virtually everthing in the exhibit is concerned to transgress or transform boundaries and to resist all efforts at containment. The question I’d like to end with, however, is this: What does it mean to group all of these works together, and contain them within the “borders” of museum walls?² What is the relationship between the exhibit’s various critiques of socio-cultural borders, and the borders of the institution in and through which the exhibit has its existence? There is an effort here to produce what bell hooks calls a space of “radical openness;” but is it not the case that this openness is brought to a kind of closure after all by the physical and social limitations of the museum’s space? These are not trivial questions, yet nor are they easily decidable. We must bear in mind that cultural syncretism is an ongoing process whose effects, or lack thereof, cannot reliably be extrapolated from current arrangements. Whatever its institutional position, the cultural work on and of the border represented by the La Frontera exhibition warrants our closest attention.

 

Notes

 

1.I don’t want to go too far here. Undocumented workers provide cheap labor which is essential for many United States industries. Despite political posturing and an ever increasingly abusive immigration system, employers rely upon, and are secure in their ability to maintain access to, this labor pool. In a very real sense then, border crossings (and appropriations of border markings) challenge very little.

 

2.One piece of art that is referred to in the exhibition’s catalog was, in fact, never contained by museum walls. “Arte Reembolso/Art Rebate” by Elizabeth Sisco, Louis Hock and David Avalos was more explicitly interactive and public than a museum would allow. The artists applied for an NEA grant, and used the money to print up certificates for undocumented workers to sign. Attached to these certificates were $10 bills (which were also NEA money). When workers signed the certificates, they received the money. The idea I think, was to give back some of what was due, and to point out that, rather than an economic drain, these workers were actually vital parts of the U.S. economy. Needless to say, the NEA was not very pleased with this use of their funds. The resulting debates (in the mass media and within government circles) are ongoing. This piece, however, was commissioned to appear in conjunction with, and not as part of, the exhibition.