Lãƒâ³pez La Fronterathe Border Art About the Mexicounited States Border Experience
ART; Cultural Boundaries Fade in the Hybrid World of 'La Frontera'
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May 29, 1994
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DON'T go to the Neuberger Museum expecting a fiesta. Although the title of the electric current exhibition, "La Frontera/The Border: Art Near the Mexico/U.s. Border Feel," might hold the promise of 1, the show reflects the harsh reality of life there.
"La Frontera" comes from San Diego and is a joint project of the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Centro Cultural de la Raza. Much of the art focuses on San Diego'due south relationship with its sis city, Tijuana, but much attention is also paid to the long frontier Texas shares with Mexico. The San Diego exhibition was curated past Patricio Chavez and Madeleine Grynsztejn.
Concluding year the Bronx Museum of the Arts was host to "Chicano Fine art: Resistance and Affirmation, 1965-1985," featuring some of the same artists hither. That evidence is an apt frame of reference for "La Frontera," which includes Mexican, Mexican-American and non-Mexican artists. Information technology might be seen every bit an updating of issues articulated in the earlier survey.
The negatives, however, seem grimmer just correspondingly, where humour is present, information technology seems sharper.
A prime case of bitter satire is "The Reading Room," a project past the grouping chosen Las Comadres. The centerpiece is a tableful of reading cloth related to the bug of the border. Tables with background material on a detail evidence have become a constant at art exhibitions these days. Simply flanking the tabular array are brilliant yellow caution signs in both English and Castilian with silhouetted figures of families presumably crossing a highway. Merely the images on the signs are different: on the Spanish sign the figures are skeletons, as if death is their sure fate.
Along the same lines is Yolanda M. Lopez's "Things I Never Told My Son About Being a Mexican." This mural-size wall piece is a collection of newspaper articles and advertising logos that make fun of Mexicans.
Ms. Lopez's directly approach in her mural is echoed by what Felipe Almada does to some other staple of Mexican art, the altarpiece. Enshrined at the eye of "The Chantry of Live News" is a statuette of Bart Simpson. It grows increasingly clear while viewing the exhibition that its major weakness is obviousness, a quality enhanced by many of the works being oversize installations. Satire becomes a casualty equally it loses its punch.
The evidence is redeemed past a work in which the political content is more relaxed, where traditional art making comes into play. "Guernimex" by Ray Smith is about the aforementioned size as Picasso'southward "Guernica," and events in contemporary Mexican politics are substituted for the Spanish Civil War, which inspired Picasso.
Raul Guerrero is apparently chronicling "Aspects of Night Life in Tijuana." From his series by that title, the panoramic painting "Club Guadalajara de Noche" recalls, both in style and in mood, French paintings from the end of the last century that capture bourgeois life. In his colored pencil drawing, "El Chuco," Luis Jimenez depicts a rawer nighttime life, and a neon sign above the drawing flashes its title. Also jaunty -- but abstract -- is the sculpture that James Magee has fashioned out of metal studded with fake jewels and wire mesh. It is chosen "Street Strut."
Plump gourds are the master ingredient in Thomas Glassford's sculptures; they come with a lot of metallic attached and seem to exist in bondage.
Exotic color seems in curt supply in the show. Information technology is here just employed ironically as in Mel Casas's "Humanscape No. 149: Sarapeland." Lush pigment articulates the stripes of a flowing blanket; wisps of pigment course its fringe. But earlier a viewer tin go overly beguiled, the stripes are seen as furrows of the ofttimes unyielding farmland of Mexico.
Carmen Lomas Garza contributes mannerly paintings in a naive or folk style that asks to be taken at face value. She presents incidents of family life, including a birthday party and a tamale-making party.
In "Sweeping Away Fright," candles and rosaries aid a woman who is sweeping a broom over a prostrate friend. A male child sitting outside the house, visible through a screen door, is apart from this vanishing world of superstition.
Two sculptural installations, freighted with political content, are astonishing but in different ways. Eugenia Vargas has suspended from the ceiling what seem like myriad clear plastic bags, each filled with muddy water and a shoe. Both the dirt content and the kind of shoe in each handbag varies. The work is untitled, and in that location is little to go on except what is said about Ms. Vargas in the exhibition catalogue: that she has used the Rio Grande as the site of functioning pieces. This sculptural installation would then seem to be a terse and constructive memorial to immigrants who take been doomed trying to cross that river.
David Avalos and Deborah Small evoke what might wait someone able to cross that stream. They create a room full of Mexican knickknacks but too including prints of scenes from American Colonial history.
It is dominated by a bed that is actually bales of hay covered with striped blankets. Abreast the bed is a big bowl of chili peppers, and soap operas play on the large television. Although the installation mimics the comforts of a promised land, the edginess that the bulk of the evidence spells out in capital messages lurks sublimely.
"La Frontera/The Border" is at the Neuberger Museum on the campus of Purchase College through June 26. For more information telephone call 251-6133.
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