Head over heels

Contemporary art is a hard-to-crack profession that involves irregular hours, offers no pension plan and, as practiced at the moment in Mexico’s capital, may entail posing pouty princesses in palatial homes, organizing tiny bits of reflective tape or collecting runoff from the city morgue. But if you persist in making such art here, you have this consolation: The whole world seems to be watching.

For the last year, curators have been arriving from abroad, hatching theories and hunting work for a flurry of exhibitions in museums from Southern California to Rotterdam, a boom that has raised spirits and suspicions among those who make, sell and collect art here.

“Here we are, the school of Mexican guys doing things,” says artist Inaki Bonillas, pleased and perplexed. “We’re all going to Berlin, we’re going to San Diego, we’re going to New York.... “

The organizers of these ventures say they’ve come because these artists have shown such wit, energy and international perspective -- the sort of sophistication that the conventionally wise expect from art capitals like New York and Berlin. But these are artists schooled in skepticism, and some can’t help but wonder: What if it’s really just Mexico City’s turn to be the art world’s flavor of the month? Or worse, what if all this attention isn’t really about art at all?

Capturing images of self-absorption

“We’re the new Cuba!” announces photographer Daniela Rossell, her voice dripping skepticism.

Rossell, 29, is one of perhaps two dozen artists who are getting most of the attention. On a steamy afternoon, she slouches in her studio amid secondhand furniture, stacks of paperwork and assorted photos of nude women posed with raw fruit and vegetables.

These are the photos that got Rossell noticed by museum and gallery people in Spain and New York, among other places. But her newer photos -- a few of which sit over there on the old couch -- have far more people talking. These shots, just printed in book form by a Madrid-based publisher, show some of Mexico’s most privileged citizens, many of them Rossell’s friends and relatives, at play in their vast and fanciful homes. The book is called “Ricas y Famosas.”

The images are meticulous in their documentation of the good life and the astonishing props that people choose to help them live it (stuffed lions, for instance, and a hundred-foot turquoise Eiffel Tower). Now Rossell is caught up in a thinking-class controversy over whether she has skillfully indicted the self-absorption of Mexico’s nuevo rich, betrayed her friends and family, or both.

“She’s from that class,” said one local curator, “and she’s documenting their own decadence.”

Rossell won’t quite say that. She began, years ago, by photographing houses, then superimposing names on their facades to more explicitly express the owner’s identities. Then, she recalls, “I began to think about this whole idea about using mass-produced objects to make yourself unique.” Soon, she was shooting environmental portraits of family members.

“As I started getting into it,” she says, “something curious happened. A lot of people started offering to be photographed, and it started a ball rolling. A lot of people helped me out.”

She says now that her project was intended as an investigation of this social landscape, not an indictment, and that “when we were doing it, it was very much about fun. It was cathartic, to me and them.”

But now that the images are in print, it’s all more complicated. Some of her subjects, Rossell admits, “feel they are getting attacked personally.” And one element in the controversy is the fact that the images are being seen, and judged, by so many people outside Mexico -- people who might forget that Mexico isn’t the only country on Earth where a coddled upper class sequesters itself from blue-collar realities.

Rossell says she really doesn’t understand the inner workings of the art world, but she acknowledges that international exposure has put her career on a different trajectory. Her publisher is in Madrid. As for dealers, she nods significantly toward the laptop in the corner.

“I don’t work with a Mexican gallery right now. I work with a New York gallery through that little iBook over there,” she says. “I think in the past, I would have been a miserable, ambitious artist.”

Toward a more universal outlook

Whether you credit the Internet or the passage of North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994 or the end of the PRI party’s seven-decade domination of national politics in 2000, says art dealer Jaime Riestra, it seems clear that for the first time in a long time, Mexico is in on some of the art world’s most interesting conversations.

“The artists are moving from problems that are more local to more universal problems,” says Riestra, director of the Galeria OMR in the Roma district. But as he watches the march of the foreign curators, he wonders if that’s all they’re thinking about.

“There’s the National Geographic point of view and the aesthetic point of view. Sometimes, I feel they’re looking at us anthropologically,” Riestra says.

For many in Mexico City, the greatest illustration of that worry was “An Exhibition About the Exchange Rates of Bodies and Values” at New York’s P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in the summer. Curator Klaus Biesenbach’s choices included videos of the city’s wandering homeless (from artist Francis Alys); gruesome crime scene photos (Enrique Metinides); a sculpture of castoff corn cobs (Ruben Ortiz Torres); and aerial shots of slums (Melanie Smith).

The show “was read only on one level, the level of danger. But there’s more to the pieces than that. They speak about the contemporary condition, about contemporary living,” says artist Yoshua Okon, who had work in the show and also has run Mexico City’s Panaderia gallery for several years.

The capital looks less hellish and more thoughtful in curator Betti-Sue Hertz’s current San Diego Museum of Art show, “Axis Mexico: Common Objects and Cosmopolitan Actions.” Nineteen artists are represented (including Rossell and Bonillas), 13 of whom live at least part time in Mexico City. None was born before 1959.

Hertz says she started campaigning for a Mexico show in December 2000, aiming to show how these artists have digested foreign influences in a way few of their predecessors ever could, and adopted methods that reach beyond painting and sculpture. For anyone who hears the words “Mexican art” and still pictures the folk-influenced paintings of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, says Hertz, these videos, photos, installations and assemblages are a wake-up call.

Meanwhile, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston is readying its own contemporary Mexican show for 2004. For the artists involved in shows like these, says ICA curator Gilbert Vicario, the worst possible outcome “is that they’ll forever be labeled “Mexican artists.” And the best is that they’ll be looked upon as somebody who changed the nature of contemporary art, somebody who through local experience has been able to transcend a national label.”

Powered by the possibilities

A few miles from Rossell’s apartment in another leafy, upscale neighborhood, a clean-cut 21-year-old is about to fire up his PowerBook upstairs at Programa, a gallery he co-directs. This is Bonillas, already an art world jet-setter. He’s just back from Brussels and Berlin, where his work will be included in upcoming exhibits. On his laptop, he punches up the details for a site-specific work commissioned by the San Diego Museum of Art.

For every source of artificial light in the museum’s upstairs galleries, Bonillas and collaborator Santiago Merino have affixed a bit of reflective tape, 2 inches square, near the door. Five rooms, 426 light sources. And since the museum uses six kinds of bulbs, the artists’ squares come in six colors. Thus, gallery by gallery, visitors see what Bonillas calls “an inventory of light.”

This theme -- the myriad, ghostly variables that lurk behind every moment of creation and art appreciation -- drives much of Bonillas’ work. He made his first publicly displayed work at age 18, when he and some collaborators took turns having their way with an empty room.

“I was thinking about the possibilities you have when you make a photograph,” Bonillas says. And so he set out to illustrate variations on that theme: One notebook, he filled with images shot at identical settings, but processed by 24 labs. In another, he documented the same subject, shot in 84 combinations of exposure light and time. And so on.

Since then, “I haven’t stopped working,” he says, adding that instead of going to college, “I decided to use Programa as my school.” Since 1998 he has averaged five group shows and two solo shows per year, mostly in Mexico, but also in New York; Toronto; Bordeaux, France; Milan, Italy; and Tirana, Albania.

He has taken pictures of tourists taking pictures. He has photographed a clock every three minutes for five hours. For a music store display, he recorded the whirring sounds of 10 camera shutters, then set up a listening station. Of these projects, he has sold four or five works, “but if you think of selling your work,” says Bonillas, who, like Rossell, is a child of a well-to-do family, “there are several things changed.”

Bonillas’ work is resolutely abstract. In the words of one local dealer, “it’s almost mathematical,” its social implications deeply buried or absent. But he too has been thinking hard about the implications of international attention.

In fact, he says he turned down a chance to be part of the P.S. 1 exhibition because the dystopian context bothered him. These foreign curators, Bonillas says, seem to be in too much of a hurry.

“In two weeks,” he says, “they pretend to discover everything.”

A compact scene on the move

To an outsider, Mexico City’s art scene does seem remarkably compact. Most of the action happens in a handful of government-controlled museums and a handful of galleries in the Roma and Condesa neighborhoods, where dealers cater mostly to buyers from other countries. For most of the ‘90s, Okon’s Panaderia, a bakery-turned-gallery, served as a sort of clubhouse for many of the most adventurous artists, displaying their work and bringing in foreign artists for brief residencies as well.

But the landscape is changing. Earlier this year, Okon decided to close the gallery and spend more time teaching and making his own art. Meanwhile, an ambitious new venture has taken shape in a well-guarded space behind the massive Jumex fruit juice distribution center at the ragged industrial edge of town known as Ecatepec.

That’s where Jumex executive Eugenio Lopez (who also owns West Hollywood’s Chac Mool Gallery, and whose father is Jumex’s top executive) has taken over more than 15,000 square feet of high-ceilinged interior space and redone it as a state-of-the-art exhibition space. In this space, which opened in March 2001 and is run by full-time director and curator Patricia Martin, Lopez displays favored works in a contemporary art collection that has surpassed 1,000 pieces, about 30% of them by artists associated with Mexico.

On one wall hangs New York photographer Gregory Crewdson’s “Untitled (Garden),” a dreamscape of a dazed female gardener, compulsively working the soil that covers the inside of an otherwise commonplace suburban home. On another wall hangs Mexican-born Gabriel Orozco’s “Atomists: Making Strides,” in which the artist subjects scenes of a soccer game to a sort of geometric charting. On the screen in the video room (where cartons of Jumex juice stand at the ready on the tabletop), Mexico City artist Daniel Guzman can be seen in extreme close-up, singing along with a Neil Young recording on a video titled “Momentos Irrepetibles.” Martin calls this “probably the country’s largest collection of contemporary art.”

So far the collection is little known outside artsy and elite circles. Though it’s open by appointment on weekdays, total attendance from February through mid-August was just 1,800. But plans are in the works for a second space in the center of the city. And already, curators elsewhere say, the Jumex collection has served to raise the city’s art profile and boost artists’ hopes for domestic sales.

Tobias Ostrander, who moved here from California about 18 months ago to serve as contemporary art curator at the Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporaneo, is one of those who credit the Jumex collection with raising Mexico City’s profile. Another is dealer Monica Manzuto of the 3-year-old Kuri Manzuto Gallery. But both Ostrander and Manzuto say two other elements in the Mexico’s surging popularity are inescapable.

First: the Orozco effect. To some degree, this Mexicomania may be a matter of curators looking for another star to follow the path of Orozco (born in Veracruz in 1962), whose mixed-media works have won him solo museum shows in London, Paris, Amsterdam, Milan, New York’s Museum of Modern Art and, in 2000, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. (Orozco declined to participate in the San Diego show, curator Hertz says, because he preferred to be viewed as an international artist, not just a Mexican one.)

Second is the movies: “Y Tu Mama Tambien” and “Amores Perros,” which both premiered to great success in the U.S. last year, offered a wide and wild view of life in Mexico. When the Mexican daily Reforma asked curator Klaus Biesenbach what moved him to mount the harrowing show at P.S. 1, he had to confess: It was “Amores Perros.”

Facing a fundamental quandary

It’s nearly 10 p.m., and the usual crowd of Mexico City art mavens is assembled at the Panaderia, including Bonillas and Ostrander. The occasion is a gallery farewell, and director Okon has commissioned artist Teresa Margolles (another veteran of the P.S. 1 show) to stage a happening between its blank white walls.

Inside stand about 150 people. Outside, a chorus of car horns erupts. A roaring concrete mixer has veered off the road in front of the gallery. And rolled up to the gallery’s loading bay. And dropped a chute.

As the crowd watches, wet concrete pours forth and creeps toward the gallery’s bare walls, more than a foot deep. And not just any wet concrete. A gallery aide reveals a sign explaining that this gesture is titled “Fin” (The End), and that the cement has been mixed with 100 kilos of water taken from the Mexico City morgue -- specifically, the chamber where corpses are washed after autopsy.

From the audience, there’s applause and laughter. Margolles, a former student of forensic medicine, is a known quantity. For the exhibition in New York, she installed “Vaporization,” which was a room full of mist from spritzed, but disinfected, morgue water.

You could view this spreading pool of goo as a universally pitched exploration of death. Or you could view it as modern take on the same Mexican preoccupation with mortality that fuels countless dancing folk-art skeletons and Dia de Los Muertos rites. Or you could dismiss it all as an empty spectacle.

But if you stand in the gallery among the dozens whose exit has been blocked by the ooze, what it means is only part of your quandary. There is also the question of how exactly to get out of the building.

In this city’s art scene these days, it seems, whether you’re one of the audience or one of the artists, that next step is going to be tricky.