A cut-and-paste festival

This dusty commercial center of southern Peru may be clogged with traffic and plagued with unemployment, but it has its charms. The gracious central square is bordered by a massive cathedral and a cohesive complex of Spanish colonial buildings, all made of native white volcanic stone. A couple of blocks away, a gateway in a forbidding wall leads to a splendid convent that once housed hundreds of well-to-do nuns and their maids. Tourists who venture farther afield can visit a vicuna reserve a few miles north of town, or see giant condors in Colca Canyon, about 60 miles to the northwest.

But those who leave Arequipa by the southwest road enter a region that doesn’t turn up in guidebooks. It’s a desert where poor people subsist in tiny block houses guarded by mean-looking dogs. Towering poles bring electricity to the area, but water is scarce and the only visible way to make money is to produce bricks. Ragtag crews of men and boys cut blocks of earth, dry them in the sun and fire them in outdoor kilns that are perpetually dismantled and rebuilt as the loads come and go.

Most travelers passing through this terrain probably dismiss the odd brick structures as piles of rubble, if they notice them at all. Not Pierre Mertens, a Belgian artist who lives in Antwerp and got his first look at the kilns on a trip to Arequipa early last year. A conceptualist known for bridging the gap between art and society in works staged outside the gallery scene, he saw the bleak but eerily beautiful landscape as an opportunity.

“I was fascinated with those ovens,” Mertens says. “They were like ruins, but they were making stones to build new houses.” At the same time, the site symbolized “the desperate situation of Peru,” he says, where “nobody believes in the future and everybody works simply to survive.”

Soon he was taking pictures and grappling with a big idea. The kiln fields would be the perfect site for an international art exhibition that would “explore questions of cultural identity, social boundaries and global politics,” he thought. At the same time, a major art-world event would boost Arequipa’s economy and polish its image.

Like Italy’s Venice Biennale, Germany’s Documenta and dozens of other contemporary art festivals that have cropped up all over the world, his show would present specially commissioned works by celebrated artists. Prominent museum directors, curators, collectors and critics would attend the opening and a program of lectures and panel discussions would unfold as the show proceeded.

In mid-September it appeared that Mertens had realized his dream. E-mail messages to the art press announced “Ruins of the Future,” an exhibition that he had organized with Marjan van Mourik, a Dutch art dealer who formerly owned a contemporary art gallery in Rotterdam and now runs a children’s health foundation in Arequipa.

Billed as “the first Peruvian international exhibition of contemporary art,” the exhibition consists of nine installations by “leading contemporary artists of the 21st century” who “were asked to produce special works of art.” The lineup: Jeff Koons, Joseph Kosuth and Claes Oldenburg of the United States; Anish Kapoor of India; Mario Merz and Niele Toroni of Italy; Thomas Hirschhorn of Switzerland; Richard Long of England; and Christo, who was born in Bulgaria and lives in New York.

Images of their works, installed around the kilns, include a huge white porcelain “Puppy” by Koons, a mammoth bow and arrow by Oldenburg and mysterious, concave, oval-shaped structures by Kapoor. With works such as these, it seems that Peru has arrived on the international circuit of contemporary art extravaganzas.

Except for one thing: The artworks only exist on the Internet. “Ruins of the Future” is a virtual art exhibition, conceived as a parody of the very thing it pretends to be.

Hunting through the fine print

Mertens and Van Mourik, who plays the role of the show’s promoter, contend that high-profile contemporary art festivals rarely live up to their pretensions. A product of what they call the “incestuous Western-dominated” art establishment, these exhibitions are publicized as global surveys, but even the artists who represent non-Western countries usually live in the U.S. and Europe. The roster of names doesn’t change much from show to show. Like his creation, Mertens says, the exhibitions “simply illustrate the curators’ ideas.”

The press release announcing “Ruins of the Future” doesn’t raise these issues. Neither does it explain that the artworks can only be seen in cyberspace, but the truth and the philosophy come out in the artist’s statement and other material on the Web site: www.targetfound.nl. Among other clues, descriptions of the pieces ostensibly created for Arequipa and installed in the “ruins” are a little hard to believe.

Did local workers really produce Koons’ giant porcelain dog in the kiln near the sculpture? Did Christo and his wife, Jeanne Claude, really do a Peruvian rerun of the yellow umbrellas they erected in California’s Tejon Pass in 1991? And doesn’t that Oldenburg bow and arrow look exactly like “Cupid’s Span,” the work that he and his wife, Coosje van Bruggen, installed last year at Rincon Park in San Francisco?

“All this is a lie,” says Mertens, who has simply merged low-resolution Internet images of existing artworks with his photographs of the kilns, creating a sort of collage. He took more liberties with other works. Long, who often arranges stones in lines or circles, supposedly tore down one of the kilns and used the bricks to make a pathway leading over the horizon. Panels of text in Kosuth’s installation are said to be “dictionary explanations of Inca signs,” but they are Mertens’ inventions, adapted from another Kosuth work.

Mertens is amused that art magazines have listed the exhibition as a real event and that he and Van Mourik have received queries from people who want to see the work in Peru. But he set up the show so that “the lie can be unmasked,” he says. “If you really look at our Web site and read the whole thing, everything is explained.”

Well, not quite everything.

Mertens did not ask the other artists for permission to use images of their work. That would have been contrary to the spirit of the piece, he says. “If I, a 50-year-old man, want to be a 17-year-old girl, I can create that virtual identity for myself and contact others in that identity. I don’t ask permission. That isn’t the Internet; the Internet is anarchy.”

He would not agree to letting someone else poach his work, “so I would never ask this of another artist,” he says. “My art is mine. I have to decide what I will create and where it will be.”

‘Borrowing’ from other artists

So far, none of the artists has objected, Mertens says. Those who were contacted by The Times did not respond. For now, at least, it seems that they are either unaware of his work, unconcerned about it or willing to take it in stride as creative expression -- or as part of the tradition of art about art. From European Old Masters’ creations “after” their mentors to Andy Warhol’s remake of the “Mona Lisa” in his 1963 painting “Thirty Are Better Than One,” art has a long history of propagating other art.

“This kind of plagiarism or dipping one’s cup into the canon of art for one’s own critical project is a fairly well-established art practice,” says Rachel Greene, the author of “Internet Art,” a soon-to-be published book, and executive director of Rhizome, a nonprofit online artists’ platform that recently forged a partnership with the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York. And the Internet has made it easier, she says, “because cutting and pasting is such a fundamental command.”

Slovenian artist Vik Cosic completely duplicated the Web site of Documenta 10, held in Kassel, Germany, in 1998, thereby appropriating the “official art,” Greene says. In a similar vein, L.A. artist Michael Mandiberg’s Web site, www.AfterSherrieLevine.com, reproduces the same 1936 photographs by Walker Evans that artist Sherrie Levine rephotographed in 1979. Mandiberg calls his project “a comment on how we come to know information in this burgeoning digital age.”

What interests Greene about Mertens’ project is “the critique that the artist is getting at,” she says, “which is to say that art travels in an incredibly global way, like capital, from rich centers to poor regions. By enacting that in this Peruvian landscape, he is making a comment about how official art travels and pointing to how these so-called international art festivals repeat the same sets of artists. I think that’s an important critique.”

Benjamin Weil, curator of new media at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, counts Mertens among many artists who “present Web sites of something that supposedly exists but doesn’t.” Take The DogIsland.com, he suggests. The creation of Xiao Min, a Chinese artist who lives in Tallahassee, Fla., it advertises a fictional island where “over 2,500 dogs are already enjoying a better life” and others are invited to join them.

“We tend to be very gullible,” Weil says, and the Internet is well suited to artists who want to exploit that human weakness. But Mertens has taken an unusual approach by creating “a catalog for a show that doesn’t exist, which is very interesting,” he says. “A lot of our experience as consumers of art is based on catalogs and reproductions.”

Mertens, who studied art at St. Lucas Institute in Brussels in the early 1970s, calls himself a contextual artist and typically chooses locations that provide provocative settings for critical inquiries. In his earlier days, he placed his work in schools, nursing homes and public buildings. After turning to the Internet, he created a virtual real estate company that is said to be selling major art museums.

“Ruins of the Future” evolved from Mertens’ ongoing critique of the art establishment, but it developed serendipitously. The artist, who is also a psychotherapist and the volunteer president of the International Foundation for Spina Bifida and Hydrocephalus, met Van Mourik in Europe through their medical work. After his foundation donated equipment to her clinic, Paz Holandesa, they began to talk about organizing a medical conference in Arequipa.

Mertens went to Peru last spring to explore the idea. The conference didn’t get off the ground “for a lot of reasons,” he says. But he saw the kilns and discovered that he and Van Mourik also shared an interest in art.

“Now I combine the two passions of my life, art and health,” says Van Mourik, who is writing a book about Mertens’ work and hoping to pursue other art projects.

Both she and Mertens would like to stage a real international art exhibition in Arequipa, but they are pleased with “Ruins of the Future.”

“What fascinates me is that fantasy becomes reality in this virtual space,” Mertens says. “The Internet liberates dreams from their practical limitations.”

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‘Ruins of the Future’

Where: www.targetfound.nl/Ruins%20of%20the%20future/index.htm

Ends: Jan. 6, but then moves to www.pierremertens.com and www.pierremertens.be