COVER STORY : ‘Perennial Illusion’ Fills In Some Modern Gaps Left by ‘Splendors’

Prediction is a risky business, although some auguries claim better odds than others. One that is surer than most is this: Of the scores of satellite exhibitions scheduled to orbit around the mammoth “Mexico: Splendors of 30 Centuries,” a smallish presentation at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena will be among the best.

What makes the odds for this presentation so much better? Easy. It differs sharply from most all the rest, which are emphatically endowed with a celebratory, sometimes even promotional air. They simply want you to be bowled over by a dazzling spectacle.

Celebration is nice-- if everybody involved agrees that what’s being advanced is affirmative and good. Among art’s great virtues, however, especially modern and contemporary art, is its capacity to raise provocative questions you might not have considered before. The exhibition at Art Center is marked by considerable doubt. And when artists doubt the official story being told by assorted culture czars, and being swiftly swept along by untold imperatives, economic and otherwise, you can be relatively sure that an exhibition of their work will have a certain edge.

The show, which continues through Oct. 26, is pointedly called “The Perennial Illusion of a Vulnerable Principle: Another Mexican Art.” Guest curators Guillermo Santamarina and Maria Guerra open tiny fissures in complacent walls of certainty, as their exhibition of conceptually based art casts a skeptical eye on the idea of national character--the central idea “Splendors” means to celebrate. “The Perennial Illusion” doesn’t claim that no such thing exists for Mexico, only that it doesn’t necessarily exist in the ways we usually think it does. Prying open critical thought vivifies the entire enterprise.

An exceptional videotape by Ruben Ortiz is most articulate in laying out the difference. (It was produced in collaboration with Aaron Anish.) “How to Read Macho Mouse” is a montage of clips from movies, cartoons, television shows and advertisements, both Mexican and North American, together with some original footage. The tape careens furiously along, its lively, sometimes breakneck speed punctuated by the occasional lengthy bit of dialogue. In its fast-paced wake is left the wreckage of innumerable collisions between cliches of Mexican life and of paternalistic U.S. attitudes toward it.

Yet, “How to Read Macho Mouse” is not a tired indictment of the Superpower Bully and the Third World Victim. Instead, the tape shrewdly exploits the great leveling power of its medium--TV. The assumption of a hierarchy--the United States dominating Mexico, whether socially, culturally or politically--is tipped over on its side. Upending the cliche of the United States as smiling ogre instantly evaporates the equal and opposite cliche to which it is bound, that which casts Mexico in the doomed role of abused and helpless child. The noxious effects of power are revealed to be mutual, finally as debilitating for the ridiculous and spiritually vacant oppressor as for the oppressed.

“How to Read Macho Mouse” is unusually engaging because it blurs artificial borders. It doesn’t simply try to replace one autonomous image of Mexico (or of the United States) with another. And that, in effect, is what the huge “Splendors” show tries to do.

Whatever national identity Mexico is believed to have (and that of course depends on whom you’re talking to, and when), “Splendors” means to replace it with one that is--well, uniformly splendid. Ortiz, however, shows that the presumption of autonomy in today’s world is both arrogant and foolish. What marks the show at Art Center more profoundly than one might expect, given that it’s part of a festival of a national culture, is its decidely inter national feel.

All nine artists in the show are Mexican. Seven work in Mexico City, Ortiz and Augustin Gonzalez-Garza work in Los Angeles. None have yet developed a significant reputation, and all are grappling with their own artistic identity. Because all 17 works in the show were made this year, they inevitably reverberate against the “official” story of Mexican art told in the show coming to LACMA.

The national character described by “Mexico: Splendors of 30 Centuries” is almost exclusively represented by the art of the ruling classes, from ancient to modern. “The Perennial Illusion of a Vulnerable Principle” follows the trail, including work that is bluntly totemic in form (Francisco Castro Lenero), vaguely Catholic in iconography (Silvia Gruner, Gonzalez-Garza), allusive of a European regency (Gruner, Diego Toledo), conversant with modern industrial forms and processes (Juan Manuel Romero, Carlos Aguirre, Gabriel Orozco) and cognizant of the exigencies of time (Marcos Kurticz).

But these artists aren’t recapitulating traditional motifs. Instead, they are working from a gap left in the “Splendors” show, which takes Mexico into the modern era, ending with the “classics” of Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo and the other Modernists. Stopping at World War II, it avoids the postwar crisis of modernity, into which the artists shown at Art Center were born.

Modernity, of course, is identified with School of Paris art--for Mexico, profoundly so. To recognize this important fact you don’t need to know of Diego Rivera’s Cubist period in France, or of Rufino Tamayo’s expatriate adoration of Matisse, or of the bond between Surrealism and Catholic mysteries, or of the otherwise peculiarly out-of-date injunction, still not uncommon today, that truly serious young artists in Mexico ought to study in Paris.

All you need to do is walk down Mexico City’s Reforma, the great, monument-studded urban spine that organizes the city into a grand promenade of Parisian boulevards.

Or, in the Pasadena show, look at Toledo’s “Acquired Awareness,” in which cheap, faux -French tapestries are festooned with chains.

Rather than the School of Paris, the art at Art Center is most plainly informed by the postwar precedent of Germany’s Joseph Beuys. Sometimes the bond is immediate and explicit. Romero’s sculpture “Bulbo” uses an electrical generator in an attempt to jump-start life in two lowly potatoes, while Gonzalez-Garza’s ritualized triptych creates its enigmatic images through the unseen decay of rotting foods.

Aguirre suspends sheets of tin from clamps affixed to tree branches, which in turn are clamped to a beam suspended from the ceiling; images, words and encrustations have formed on the tin, as if residue collected from the surrounding atmosphere. And Orozco builds a large, double archway from industrial ventilation ducts already transformed into streetside grills for cooking--a formal doorway to survival.

Most often, though, the connection to Beuys is philosophical, crossing traditionally separate paths of rationality and of feeling in a deliberate attempt to short-circuit both and generate some sparks. Gruner’s “Between the Arrow and the Target”--the simplest and most haunting work in the exhibition--operates in this way.

On one glass shelf lies a severed braid of black hair; on another rests a pair of pomegranates, punctured and linked to one another by a plastic tube. These specimen-like objects speak from a core of pleasure and pain, violence and liberation, eroticism and decay. The iconography is distinctly Mexican (the art of Frida Kahlo being the most obvious source), its organization distinctly not.

The strongest work in “The Perennial Illusion of a Vulnerable Principle”--that of Gruner and Ortiz--is marked by a sophisticated, cosmopolitan refusal of easy expectations. Even these, however, like the rest of the show, feel youthful, not yet fully formed. (A small brochure accompanies the show, but it carries no biographical information at all on the artists.) In fact, that’s central to the exhibition’s lively charm. Something notable is plainly afoot.