Refreshing Look at ‘Relations’ Between Mexico and Ireland

Have you ever thought about possible similarities between contemporary social life in Belfast, Ireland, and Mexico City, the huge metropolis that is the largest city in the Western Hemisphere, if not the world?

Have you wondered about the ways in which powerful artistic histories dating back to Celtic manuscript illumination and pre-Columbian ritual sculpture weigh heavily on, respectively, Irish and Mexican imagination today?

Or about how traditional Catholicism, once a principal artistic patron in Ireland and in Mexico, might play an unexpected role in shaping cultural perspectives in our modern secular art world?

Probably not. Ireland and Mexico would seem miles apart--not just geographically, separated as they are by thousands of miles of Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico, but in countless other social and cultural ways.

Independent curator Trisha Ziff, however, has given a surprising amount of thought to these and other possible but rarely considered connections between Irish and Mexican culture. The quirky result is a book and traveling exhibition whose twinning of the two unlikely bedfellows generates a pleasing double-take. The show, with the wryly appropriate title, “Distant Relations,” opened last week at the Santa Monica Museum of Art.

If the assembled paintings, sculptures and mixed-media work doesn’t quite pack an overall punch that matches the compelling oddity of the curatorial idea, the show is nonetheless refreshing. Original thinking is a rare enough commodity at any time; today, it has taken on a particular, high-voltage charge in the museum world, which so often seems stuck in the mud of crowd-pleasing banalities, on the one hand, or the tiresome repetition of established academic cant on the other.

You won’t find much of either in “Distant Relations.” Ziff has identified a variety of pointed yet unanticipated cultural parallels between the two modern nations. A reverence for ancient artistic traditions is one, while a common principle religion is another.

By themselves, however, parallels like these are not enough to establish a firm foundation on which to build a compelling exhibition. Obviously, lots of places could claim similar interests--Italy, say, or Spain.

More uniquely, and more important to the specific premise of the show, is the uneasy relationship between each of these two countries and its immediate and more powerful neighbor. Ireland and Mexico have long labored in the deep shadows cast by the towering supremacy of nearby England and the United States, respectively. And England and the U.S. are the two nations that virtually defined the shape and patterns of industrial revolution, on which the modern world was built.

Irish artist Philip Napier has contributed the most hauntingly beautiful work in the show--”Apparatus V” (1995)--and it resounds poetically against this difficult plight, with its ghostly and conflicted past. An old mechanical bus sign, the kind that spells out station names in clattering patterns of white or yellow dots against a black background, has been programmed with changing street names on an Irish bus line. The words flow back and forth between the Irish and English languages, like never-ending changes in the tides of time.

Slievemore, Hyde Park, Park Center, Crumlin--audio speakers flanking the bus sign broadcast a quiet, stuttering voice that struggles to read the ever-changing litany of place names, almost like a public eulogy or memorial for soldiers lost in distant battles. As the old-fashioned sign erases one name and replaces it with another, only to erase that and move on to the next, a cycle of domination and resistance, assertiveness and repression, relentlessly unfolds.

Napier’s wall sculpture works its way under your skin in a way that Javier de la Garza’s paintings, with their flat-footed illustrations describing the persistence of history at the expense of contemporary experience, or Alice Maher’s, with their line drawings of ostensibly meaningful women’s hairdos, can’t seem to manage. (It doesn’t help that Maher employs neutral colors and the graphic look of scientific schemas, in a manner familiar from Terry Winters’ well-known paintings of the 1980s.)

Like De la Garza, Mexico’s Silvia Gruner tackles pre-Columbian art as an immediately recognizable signifier for past glory, which inevitably limits the possibilities for contemporary movement into the future. But her photographs are disappointingly sketchy. I’m more curious to see the videotape from which the display of video stills apparently was taken.

The six Irish artists--Napier, Maher, Willie Doherty, David Fox, Frances Hegarty and John Kindness--make up half the show, and since little of their prior work has been seen before in L.A. it offers something nominally new, if not often challenging or inspired. In an interesting twist curator Ziff has also included work by three California Chicano artists--installations by Daniel J. Martinez and Amalia Mesa-Bains and paintings by John Valadez--whose well-known work is frequently seen here.

Aside from Napier, though, it’s the work of Mexican-born Ruben Ortiz Torres, who divides his time between Mexico City and Los Angeles, that is unusually compelling. Together with collages and an excerpt from his marvelous 1995 videotape, “Frontierland,” which wanders through the mutable landscape of popular culture, he is showing 22 modified baseball caps from a series he’s been making since 1991.

The baseball caps are ordinary souvenir-style hats, the kind sports fans buy to express public allegiances. Ortiz alters them in subtly destabilizing ways.

The “X” in Mexico, for example, is enlarged and stitched in red, yellow and green stripes, fusing a national name with an Afro-centric symbol for Malcolm X. The team-name “Aztecs” on a cap from San Diego State University is subsumed beneath the added name, Tenochtitlan, identifying the Indian empire. A “Fighting Irish” cap from Notre Dame melds a dancing leprechaun with a Spanish Colonial dedication to--who else?--San Patricio.

Like Napier’s bus sign, Ortiz’s savvy caps use a popular language of public signs to record a difficult legacy of shifting allegiances. But the baseball caps also assert a paradox at the core of our essentially hybrid, modern cultural existence. There’s no way to isolate a discreet Mexican-ness, African-ness, Irish-ness or American-ness in his work, while it’s also virtually impossible to ignore its Mexican, African, Irish and American realities.

* “Distant Relations,” Santa Monica Museum of Art, 2437 Main St., (310) 399-0433, through Nov. 17. Closed Mondays and Tuesdays.