Neither here nor there

The images blur and body-slam together like a rough cut of a kung-fu movie: A machine gun in stark monochrome silhouette. Grainy photos of airline passengers being herded off to who-knows-where. A man scaling a fence. Osama bin Laden framed by a bull’s-eye. Enigmatic phrases in Spanish, spliced together like old Chevy parts in some back-alley chop shop.

Splattered across a section of the infamous wall that keeps Mexico at arm’s length from the United States -- or is it the other way around? -- these stealthy graphic designs are meant to be glimpsed from a car whipping by at 40 miles an hour, or a plane shooting off from the international airport across the highway. Collectively, they form a visual stream-of-consciousness etched in rusty metal, a drive-by photo-montage of a city that seldom stands still for longer than an eye-blink.

But this open-air art show also is a clandestine advertisement of sorts. Although what it’s hawking may not yet be fully clear, its broader message is relatively simple: Tijuana isn’t just a dusty borderland den of iniquity for beer-guzzling frat boys and vicious narco-traffickers. Instead, it’s virtually a separate country with its own distinct and dynamic culture that’s more than the sum of its mismatched parts.

The impulse to redraw the world’s mental map of this much-maligned city is one of the driving forces behind “Tijuana Tercera Nacion,” or “Tijuana Third Nation,” an ambitious mix of outdoor art installations, musical performances and lectures on art, literature and politics that opened at the end of April and is slated to run through August. Its striking centerpiece consists of large-scale digital images reproduced on a series of huge plastic canvases, some draped across a two-kilometer stretch of the metal wall that runs past the airport on the outskirts of town, others occupying a dramatic swath of the concrete-encased Rio Tijuana canal that courses through the city.

A second exhibition, “El corazon sobre el asfalto” (“The heart above the asphalt”), which highlights the work of Spanish painter Monica Roibal, is being held simultaneously at the Centro Cultural Tijuana and the Universidad Autonoma de Baja California. Other “Tercera Nacion” events include a June 17 appearance by Carlos Monsivais, one of Mexico’s best-known intellectuals.

“Tercera Nacion” is hardly the first cultural event to note Tijuana’s unique hybrid culture or examine its splintered personality. For years, artists on both sides of the border have investigated that theme in shows at venues such as the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, the Luckman Gallery at Cal State L.A. and the Centro Cultural Tijuana, the city’s primary cultural venue. InSITE, probably the region’s best-known creative happening, is a triennial showcase in which artists from around the world are commissioned to create site-specific works in an area stretching from Tijuana to San Diego. Among the more memorable contributions was Marco Ramirez’s two-headed Trojan horse, installed at the U.S.-Mexico border crossing for the 1997 edition.

What may be most notable about “Tercera Nacion” isn’t its border-centric viewpoint or the participating artists, several of whom, such as Tania Candiani and Daniel Ruanova, have established reputations. Rather, it’s the man who conceived the event, Antonio Navalon, a well-connected Spanish-born former journalist who after a 12-year stint in New York now lives in Mexico City and represents the Spanish telecommunications company Prisa.

Backed by a phalanx of corporate sponsors, including Coca-Cola, Milenio magazine and Mexicana Airlines, which are underwriting 90% of its $1.6-million budget, “Tercera Nacion” is being coordinated by the Centro Cultural Tijuana. The event’s national visibility was boosted when Mexican President Vicente Fox came to the opening, trailed by a contingent of Mexico City media, which usually treat Tijuana as a distant provincial outpost.

A jovial chain-smoker given to dark suits and open-collared dress shirts, Navalon says that Tijuana’s geographical remoteness from Mexico City and proximity to the United States makes it “in many senses disconnected from the rest of” Mexico. In a post-Sept. 11 world, he asserts, Tijuana epitomizes a fundamental conflict between globalization and the tendency for nations or groups of people to hunker down behind their own walls. “Since Sept. 11, the world has lived in a schizophrenic relation,” he says. “The problem of the border is that it itself signifies a new reality, economic, political, cultural and in coexistence, and that naturally presents a great challenge.”

As one of the world’s most heavily trafficked international boundaries, this city of 1.2 million sits at the crosshairs of global debate about immigration, free trade, economic imbalances and cultural integration, Navalon continues. Furthermore, many of its people already enjoy a kind of de-facto dual citizenship: They cross back and forth daily between Mexico and the United States, inhabiting a bilingual, bicultural, highly permeable world that combines aspects of both cultures. “Here they don’t speak of the ‘gringos,’ they don’t speak of the ‘United States,’ here they don’t speak of the ‘Americans,’ here they speak of ‘one side or the other.’ ”

Navalon, 52, says that some of his own first impressions of the border region came from Orson Welles’ classic 1958 film, “Touch of Evil” (parts of which were actually shot in Venice Beach). At one point in the movie, a character observes that la frontera isn’t the real Mexico. “I agree,” Navalon says. “This is the Mexico that results from the cultural fusion of the border.”

If Navalon’s enthusiastic patter sometimes has the ring of a sales pitch, some here believe it’s time that Tijuana artists started drawing more attention from outside promoters and the corporate moneyed classes. Practically invented during Prohibition to service Americans seeking cheap liquor and cheap thrills, Tijuana was never known as a cultural hub.

But starting in the mid-1990s, a new generation of artists in their 20s and 30s began creating works that embraced Tijuana’s rough edges rather than trying to smooth them over. The Nortec Collective of electronic musicians pioneered a hypnotic sound that fused bits of traditional Mexican music with thumping techno beats. Photographers, installation artists, video artists, architects and designers found a wealth of material in Tijuana’s identity as a kind of vast salvage yard, where cast-off consumer goods and discarded concepts could be recycled into compelling new artworks.

What the art community here still lacks to some degree, says video artist Ivan Diaz Robledo, 27, is a promotional apparatus to get the word out. Tijuana’s elites tend not to buy work by local artists, and there is no commercial art gallery scene to speak of. The do-it-yourself approach that characterizes so much of Tijuana art-making also applies to Tijuana art-selling. “There’s a figure that has never been here in Tijuana that is the basis of production, a salesman or promoter or PR people, related to art,” Diaz says.

But for “Tercera Nacion,” Jhoana Mora, 28, a local artist with a public relations background, has stepped in to handle PR duties while contributing two of the images along the wall. She’s also busy putting together the fourth annual Esquina Norte international graphic conference and workshop, to be held Sept. 30-Oct. 2 in Tijuana.

“It’s very easy to be Mexican in Mexico City or Michoacan, where you just have contact with Mexicans,” Mora says, explaining why she has chosen to forge an art career here. Growing up in nearby Mexicali, where she learned English partly by watching U.S. television programs beamed from San Diego, Mora says that local artists are constantly required to reexamine their creative identities and the cross-border influences on their work.

Another local artist who contributed to the airport montage, Maximiliano Lizarraga Vidal, 30, says he believes that “Tercera Nacion” will help more Tijuana residents become accustomed to seeing public displays of contemporary art outside a museum context. The gray-brown hills of Tijuana, packed tight with rows of boxy concrete buildings, can present a monotonous and monolithic vision. The giant imagery of “Tercera Nacion” has added a burst of color.

“I think the people, maybe they are going to catch one image and then another, and then they are going to start to put it together themselves,” Lizarraga says. “Now people are going to start seeing other images, and they’re going to start educating their eyes, their sight.”

Not everyone here is enamored of “Tercera Nacion.” Some Tijuana artists have grumbled privately about not being included in the show. Others have faulted it as an outsider project rather than an organic one rooted in Tijuana’s own soil.

Lighting up yet another cigarette, Navalon considers the criticism. “In Tijuana, 90% of the people are foreign,” he says. “I believe that with globalization in the 21st century, the country of origin of people is important, but it’s not determinant. What’s determinant only is the universal values that accompany us. Like art.”