Mexico joins global club

For “Made in Mexico,” the new group exhibition at the UCLA Hammer Museum, Francis Alys has contributed an extraordinarily humane and provocative work he made a decade ago. Alys, a Belgian expatriate long resident in Mexico City, has been instrumental in creating international interest in new art in Mexico.

The installation is titled “The Liar, the Copy of the Liar.” It begins with small paintings that the artist based on commercial signs he encountered around the sprawling city. In one, presumably meant to advertise men’s clothing, the image of a young man dressed in business attire is partly overlaid atop another very similar image.

What gives the sign a kick is the disconcerting way the two pictures were pieced together. Isolated against a field of solid color, one man seems to bury his face behind the jacket lapel of the other man’s suit. It comes across as a surreal game of hide and seek.

Presumably, the original painter started with one image of a businessman on his sign and, when it came time to paint the second man, he merely let the pictorial chips fall where they would. The suits, shirts and ties were the sales focus, after all, not the faces of the young men; the clothing shows just fine.

Alys made his small copy of this strange vernacular image, then took the copy to different sign painters -- rotulistas -- around Mexico City. He hired three of them to paint larger copies.

Juan Garcia, Enrique Huerta and Emilio Rivera made versions that differ radically from one another in style. There are stark differences in the touch of the artist’s hand, the color choices, canvas shapes, the subject’s facial features, their emotional states -- even the suggested nationalities of the young businessmen.

The new versions also differ from the painting Alys asked them to copy. That makes you wonder how much Alys’ own copy might differ from the original sign he saw on the city street (it is not part of the installation). Consciously or not, Alys surely must have made alterations. It’s human nature.

The one ingredient that remains identical in all four painted versions is the odd composition, with one man hiding his face behind another man’s jacket lapel. Suddenly, this composition becomes less surreal than simply expressive. Alys’ exceptional project embodies a poignant dialogue between concealment and exposure, anonymity and identity in the modern metropolis.

“Made in Mexico” brings together 42 works by 19 international artists. Not all the work is up to the level of “The Liar, the Copy of the Liar,” but there are a considerable number of first-rate things. (Especially notable are Thomas Glassford’s bizarrely beautiful lighting fixtures, which merge industrial and domestic design in unanticipated ways, and Santiago Sierra’s video documentation of the social abuse regularly faced by the indigenous population.) The show focuses on the cosmopolitanism of the federal district, rather than on art produced in regional capitals like Guadalajara or border cities such as Tijuana. Most of the chosen artists live and work in Mexico City.

Eight are Mexican-born. Eduardo Abaroa (a funny model of a prehistoric animal encrusted with Hostess cupcakes), Claudia Fernandez (pedestrian architectural photographs) and Daniela Rossell (staged photographs of super-rich young women) have been seen in gallery and museum exhibitions around Southern California, and Gabriel Orozco was the subject of a survey at the Museum of Contemporary Art in 2000. Four are resident aliens -- Alys, Glassford (U.S.), Sierra (Spain) and Melanie Smith (Britain).

The remaining seven are nonresidents. Most, like L.A. artist Sharon Lockhart, traveled to Mexico City to produce their work. (Lockhart is showing photographs of workers taken at the city’s great National Museum of Anthropology, which were at Blum & Poe Gallery in 2001.) Japan’s Yasumasa Morimura has never set foot in Mexico.

Morimura always engages popular imagery in his photographs, so the hassle of travel is unnecessary. He is represented by a kitsch self-portrait in geisha-style art-drag, all dressed up as Frida Kahlo (surprise!). Decorated with an elaborate floral frame, it’s not enough to keep a viewer from groaning and moving on.

The contribution by German artist Andreas Gursky, a monumental photograph showing urban trash spread out as far as the eye can see, was unfortunately withdrawn from the tour. (Presumably the 2002 work is his only one with a Mexican subject.) Probably the two glaring omissions for this sort of survey are Sylvia Gruner and Ruben Ortiz Torres, two gifted artists who have made more compelling work in the last decade than several of the artists here.

Ortiz Torres even splits the show’s three geographical categories on his own, being of Mexican birth and having long divided his time between Mexico City and Los Angeles. His exclusion might suggest the show’s East Coast orientation (it was organized by Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art). Perhaps that’s why “Made in Mexico” feels a bit flat. Most of the artists, and a good number of specific works, have been seen in assorted Southern California venues in the last 10 years.

It’s not entirely clear how bringing them together illuminates much. A show titled “Made in Mexico” might immediately put you in mind of traditional handcrafted products -- a folkloric notion that Alys twists like a pretzel. Given massive poverty and abundant cheap labor in Mexico, handmade manufacture doesn’t just linger in an era dominated by industry and commerce; it remains tenacious as an integral activity.

Alys’ marvelous installation finds its ancestry in classic Conceptual art from the 1960s. The most pointed example is several terrific series by John Baldessari, who employed commercial sign painters to execute canvases that formerly would have been made by artists. This is notable because Conceptual art stands as the marker for aesthetic legitimacy today. “Made in Mexico” doesn’t directly say so, but essentially it records Mexico’s full-scale entry into the international fold of post-Conceptual art.

Conceptual art was not just an American or Western European phenomenon. Five years ago, the Queens Museum in New York organized an indispensable survey that demonstrated how it evolved internationally, beginning in the late 1950s and flourishing through the 1970s. The sprawling show ranged far and wide, between Czechoslovakia and China, Brazil and Ivory Coast. The catalog made glancing mention of a few events in Mexico City, but not one of its more than 135 artists was Mexican.

Mexico’s modern artistic identity, centralized in the capital city (like so much else), was insular. It embraced a concept of Mexican-ness, which fused pre-Columbian and folk art traditions. But it took its cues for modernity from the School of Paris. After World War II, the decline of Europe and the rise of the United States became a kind of official artistic blind spot in Mexico, given tensions with its immediate neighbor to the north.

So, when 32-year-old Gabriel Orozco nailed a plain plastic lid from a yogurt cup to the wall of uber-hip Marian Goodman Gallery in New York 10 years ago, it was like Martin Luther nailing his 95 theses on the door of the castle church. A Mexican artist had rigorously asserted the ineluctable primacy of Conceptual art for the contemporary world.

In the Hammer show, Orozco is represented by a 1995 sculpture based on the design of a chessboard. (From a local collection, it was included in his MOCA survey.) Like his other work it pointedly invokes artist Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), the French chess fanatic and godfather of Conceptualism. It makes a blunt declaration that Mexican art has dumped the old School of Paris in favor of the newer school of French art theory -- a historical development emphatically affirmed by the rest of the exhibition.

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‘Made in Mexico’

Where: UCLA Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., Westwood

When: 11 a.m.-7 p.m. Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays; 11 a.m.-9 p.m. Thursdays; 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Sundays; closed Mondays and July 4.

Ends: Sept. 12

Price: $5; free on Thursdays

Contact: (310) 443-7000