The Border Realigned

SAN DIEGO--”Axis Mexico: Common Objects and Cosmopolitan Actions” is an ambitious survey of recent art, most of it made in Mexico City in the past two or three years. But the sizable show is almost as much about a new alignment for the San Diego Museum of Art as it is about one in the country just across the border.

The once-sleepy outpost in Balboa Park has been steadily coming to life since a new administration took over three years ago. This exhibition marks the major debut of its recently appointed curator for contemporary art, Betti-Sue Hertz. Other cultural agencies in San Diego have for years made their proximity to Mexico a productive linchpin for their programs, but “Axis Mexico” represents this museum’s first big push in that direction.

If there’s anyone left who still thinks the most exciting and provocative Mexican art today uses established School of Paris traditions of painting and sculpture to assert a national cultural identity, “Axis Mexico” will come as a shock. Since the mid-1980s, a series of events has broken the hammerlock of state-run culture that was once the norm in Mexico and that officially embraced European Modernism with a south-of-the-border twist. That bland current of middle-class escapism is thankfully over.

“Axis Mexico” smartly opens with a terrific new video, “El Bodhisattva,” by Calimocho Styles--a duo composed of Eduardo Abaroa and Ruben Ortiz Torres. (Calimocho is a made-up word, “Cali” suggesting the two Californias and “mocho” slang for ordinary folks.) The concept is simple, the effect radical.

On a wall-mounted flat-screen monitor, pointedly suggestive of a painting, “El Bodhisattva” shows a mesmerizing sequence of commercial figurines seamlessly morphing into one another before a glittery curtain of glass beads--Buddha, Hello Kitty, a Tyrannosaurus rex, the Hulk, a Venus, Bart Simpson, a Ninja Turtle.

The silent video remakes pop star Michael Jackson’s famous 1991 music video “Black or White,” whose climax used the latest technological magic to make a pale redheaded girl meld into a Rastafarian man with dreadlocks, who becomes an Indian woman with a caste mark on her forehead, and so on through numerous ethnic transformations.

But the moral and spiritual wisdom of “El Bodhisattva” lies in its eradication of pop culture’s sentimental brand of multiculturalism. Instead, in the gifted hands of Calimocho Styles, Jackson’s escapist fantasy of global unity through essential sameness is replaced by an immersion into the transcendent spectacle of cultural chaos. The video, with its funny, monstrous, hypnotizing array of the shifting faces of commercial imagination and faith, is wildly beautiful.

It also vividly represents the transformative speed of contemporary life. Jackson’s decade-old video, directed by a big Hollywood name (John Landis) with exclusive high-tech access and a $4-million budget, can now be improved upon by a couple of artists with a computer and a better, more resonant idea.

For a decade, Ortiz Torres has been a leading figure in forging a new understanding of the artistic possibilities inherent in cultural confusion, and this dazzling collaboration with Abaroa marks another step.

“Axis Mexico” reaches this high level only once more, in a 1997 video with accompanying research artifacts by Belgian expatriate Francis Alys. (Alone among the show’s 46 works by 19 artists, it isn’t a recent piece.) “Patriotic Tales” is wonderfully subversive.

A stationary camera fixes its gaze on the base of the monumental flagpole in Mexico City’s central square, as if doing surveillance. From the left, a man enters the frame leading a sheep on a leash. They walk in a circle around the flagpole. When they reach where they started, a second sheep enters and follows them. The scene repeats, over and over, until the man is leading a line of nearly two dozen sheep around his makeshift maypole.

As a sociopolitical metaphor, an image of sheep circling a flagpole is obvious. What’s wholly unexpected is the viewer’s reaction. Every time another sheep enters the scene--nine, 16, 21!--you find yourself rooting for it not to break ranks, which would ruin the slowly building scene.

Alys makes palpable the often unexamined conflict between human urges for independence and conformity.

Some selections in the show are disappointing--notably the Minimalist monoliths made from audio speakers by the often provocative Santiago Sierra, who takes the notion of “art work” literally. Here he hired two blind street musicians to play for pay for four hours in a gallery. The installation, which includes massive and obviously expensive recording equipment that dwarfs a photograph of the impoverished performers, is uninvolving.

Some pieces feel like student work. The team of Marcela Quiroga and Georgina Arizpe have made hundreds of fake driver’s licenses in which they appear in costume with false names--trivialized, Cindy Sherman-style photos that “question” identity. Another team--Inaki Bonillas and Santiago Merino--make pastiches of 1970s Light and Space art, putting up bits of colored reflecting tape on gallery walls that ostensibly chart ambient light in art-filled rooms.

Others may not climb to the heights, but they are surprising. Gustavo Artigas’ “Spontaneous Combustion” is a witty take on the strange expectations around contemporary art and exhibitions today. A long, low white platform ends in a podium with microphone. At the other end, the residue of a performance is left on the narrow stage, in the form of smoky ash, skid marks and other dregs. A nearby photograph shows a figure engulfed in flames--inspiration made baroque, or the artist as Evel Knievel.

A floor sculpture made by Jaime Ruiz Otis from automobile tire treads apparently scavenged from Tijuana roadsides or salvage yards is also compelling. It makes razor-sharp fun of Richard Long, the British Conceptual artist who gathers rocks and sticks on romantic country walks and spreads them on the floor as earthy sculptures.

Only one painter is included, but her work is impressive. Fernanda Brunet uses Pop art references to abstract ends. Splashes of color, reminiscent of Roy Lichtenstein, are carefully outlined and filled in, like an Andy Warhol paint-by-numbers work. The result is explosive yet controlled patterns, whose densely worked color at first glance resembles magnified skin. Slowly the patterns encapsulate paradise and hell, suggesting everything from jam-packed petals in a chrysanthemum bouquet to Dante’s roiling inferno.

There may be just one painter, but the show is nonetheless haunted by painting. In Carlos Arias’ immense wall hanging of tangled, woven and knotted white thread, the industriousness of a spider meets the showmanship of an artist. The work’s resemblance to an unpainted canvas (and its recollection of Eva Hesse) is subsumed within elegant domestic craft.

More often, though, the work that yearns for painting feels old-fashioned and listless. Cameras are a common culprit.

Gonzalo Lebrija’s dull photographs record landscapes reflected in the red enamel paint of automobiles. Domingo Nuno makes eye-numbing digital collages (more than 30 are on view) incorporating images from cartoons, pornography and advertising. Claudia Fernandez photographs painted details on the sides of buses, unsuccessfully trying to inject new life into Aaron Siskind’s 1940s technique of photographing urban walls and graffiti to make images that recall abstract paintings.

Daniela Rossell’s baroque photographic images of young women from wealthy Mexican families don’t have much to do with painting. But the similarity of their upper-class subject matter to the far more nuanced work of Tina Barney deflates much of their interest.

Conceptual art and its fear of painting often lead to weak work that wants to have it both ways--to replace painting, but not be it. One serious curatorial misstep reflects the disjunction.

Each artist is introduced by big, bilingual text printed high on the wall, like civic platitudes chiseled into the entablature of a public building or supertitles at the opera that translate foreign-language lyrics from another time and place. Here, under the educational guise of helping out the hapless museum visitor, the voice of institutional authority above prescribes what the audience should think about the art below--art that’s meant to be open-ended and without predetermined answers.

Worse, what it tells you is often wrong. Calimocho Styles, for instance, does not “elevat[e] ubiquitous objects to the level of high art, only to bring them down again as kitsch,” despite the wall text. What makes these artists important is precisely that they get rid of such foolish categories altogether.

In addition to “El Bodhisattva,” video’s obsession with painting finds one hit and one miss. The latter is Monica Castillo’s tepid portrait of a ballerina with paint cans strapped to her ankles, wrists and waist, so that paint splashes her body when she moves; it’s goofy and diverting, but Jackson Pollock she’s not.

The former is Sylvia Gruner’s eight-panel “abstract mural” in gray, projected on a gallery wall. A lone swimmer traverses television’s dreamy electronic fuzz, swimming up and down, back and forth, over and over. Gruner’s meditative ritual is weirdly liberating.

“Axis Mexico,” San Diego Museum of Art, 1450 El Prado, Balboa Park, (619) 232-7931, through March 9. Closed Monday.