Art as Opinion
Marcos Ramirez ERRE
Kate Bonansinga
The University of Texas at El Pasos unique positioning on the United States-Mexico border empowers its one-year-old Stanlee and Gerald Rubin Center for the Visual Arts to emerge as a leader in the exhibition of new art that addresses and dissolves boundaries, be they aesthetic, social, geographic or political. Since I began my tenure as the director of galleries at UTEP in 2000, I have made myself aware of artists who tackle these issues, especially those who directly address U.S.-Mexican relations in innovative ways.
Marcos Ramirez ERRE was one of the first artists to come to my attention, primarily because of two important projects that he produced for inSite, the periodic, binational art event in San Diego/Tijuana. In 1994, ERRE brought the economic periphery of the border to center stage when he built Century 21, a replica of a typical, provisional dwelling found in the poor communities that comprise Tijuanas outskirts. He installed this structure on the formal plaza of the Centro Cultural Tijuana in the heart of the city, juxtaposing the monumentality and permanence of Mexicos institutional architecture with the temporality and flexibility of seminomadic residential structures. Also for inSite, in 1997, ERRE built Toy an Horse directly on the border at the heavily trafficked San Ysidro crossing between San Diego and Tijuana. The artist modeled this gigantic wooden structure after Homers description of the Trojan Horse in the Iliad, down to its capacity of thirty people. One head faced Mexico, the other the U.S. Both Century 21 and Toy an Horse were temporary and have since been dismantled.
Marcos Ramirez ERRE
Installation view, Stanlee & Gerald Rubin Center for the Visual Arts, University of Texas at El Paso
Though ERRE has addressed political, social, economic and aesthetic boundaries for years, this is the first time his art has been exhibited in Texasa territory about 1,000 miles long, or, roughly, half the length of the U.S.-Mexico border. In his recent work, the artist applies firsthand experience of the polarities that characterize border communities to more general and philosophical comments about political injustice and cultural miscommunication on a global scale. The four pieces that comprise his exhibition in the Rubin Center are about warjust one possible result of misunderstanding and disagreement between cultures. Four Pilots of the Apocalypse, the centerpiece of the show, consists of four video projections of excerpts from Hollywood movies about military combat edited and sequenced by the artist, who deleted scenes with recognizable actors. Each video is projected from a wood and aluminum helicopter-shaped sculpture centered on each wall. The walls act as image-filled screens, each only about ten feet away from the screen across from it and from the helicopter that is the source of its imagery. The viewer feels compressedboth physically and visuallysurrounded by hard-hitting depictions of battles as interpreted first by Hollywood moviemakers and again by ERRE. The whirring of helicopter blades and music from Richard Wagners Zweiter Tag: Siegfried further pervade the space.
ERRE bases Four Pilots on the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse as described in Revelations, the final book of the Bible. As the story goes, four men, each riding a horse of a different color, appear to the Apostle John. The first horse is white; its rider holds a bow that symbolizes conquest. The second horse is red; its rider grips a sword for war. The third is black and identified by the scales of famine. The final horse is pale; its rider is Death.
Four Pilots was first unveiled in January 2005 at ARCO, Europes largest contemporary art fair held annually in Madrid. The Rubin Center showing is the second in the works short history and the first in the States. Destruction and ill will characterized the public introduction of Four Pilots, immediately actualizing its artistic message. ARCO 2005 made international headlines on its opening day when Basque separatists exploded a bomb directly in front of the convention center where the fair was taking place. This was coincidental but not surprising since, as ERRE contends, violence that results from oppression and misunderstanding is all too common in todays world.
The Multiplication of Bread also references a Biblical event, Christs miraculous feeding of the multitudes with a single piece of bread. ERRE certainly had this in mind when he created the piece,1 the focal point of which is an anonymous and semi-destroyed desert village that lies below a grid of missile-shaped baguettes. Confronting each other at opposite ends of ERREs model village are two light boxes, one of which illuminates a photograph of the blue eyes of a Caucasian boy, the other the eyes of brown-skinned girl who looks like she could be Arab. Both subjects are, in reality, Mexican, further validating ERREs point that stereotyping based on appearanceor anything else for that matteris rooted in unfounded cruelty and prejudice, especially in our increasingly globalized community.
Marcos Ramirez ERRE
Installation view, Stanlee & Gerald Rubin Center for the Visual Arts, University of Texas at El Paso
Below each photograph are quotations about the power of love. The girls photo is paired with a passagea Pharsi translation of the Koran. The boys photo connects to the words of Martin Luther King Jr. These statements are laid out to resemble eye charts in type of progressively smaller point size from top to bottomnonfigurative icons of the visionaries whose words they convey. Placed at regular intervals along the wall forty-eight inches above the floorabout the eye level of a childare single words in both English and Spanish that describe unpleasant emotions or states of being: miseria (misery), ignorance, hambre (hunger), stupidity, envida (envy), cruelty, rage.
In this piece, as well as several of his past works, ERRE addresses the power of language, the difficulty to clearly convey thoughts and feelings in words and the struggle to communicate between cultures. The specific event that spurred the creation of Multiplication of Bread was the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. In a post-invasion humanitarian gesture, the U.S. military dropped bundles of food from helicopters to nourish innocent Afghani citizens. The bundles were labeled in English, creating confusion. Many Afghanis mistook food bundles for undetonated bombsand, tragically, vice versa.
Also critical of U.S. foreign policy is The Reading Project, a billboard-sized aluminum sign produced for this exhibition but based on the plans for an older work, Mexico Illuminated, which was to be a citywide exhibition in Reading, Pennsylvania in 2003. Comprised of reflective white letters on a green background, the piece is almost identical to highway exit markers, but rather than identifying the names of the streets bisecting the next few off-ramps,The Reading Project identifies cities bombed by the U.S. and their distances from Reading. The piece was censored by the city; the photograph presented here is a computer-generated representation of what one of ERREs interstate signs would have looked like had it been installed as originally planned. ERRE also produced an edition of thirteen-by-forty-five-foot signs that, except for their scale, are identical to this large piece.
The fourth and final piece, New Rulers, is exhibited here for the first time. In it, the words of Buddha, again presented as an eye chart, appear on a bright yellow background. Surrounding the print are four, four-foot aluminum rulers stamped with the verbiage Made in the USA. New Rulers comments on the U.S. as todays superpower and its tendency to place materialityand materialismbefore spirituality. Our values overshadow those of the spiritual leaders of the past; our rulers set the standard for how others measure their worth as individuals. Throughout the exhibit, ERRE repeatedly alludes to the significance of the number four and its relationship to symmetry and timethe seasons of the year, 1/6 of a dayjust as he does in Four Pilots of the Apocalypse.
By employing art to condemn inhumane acts of war and violence, ERRE is part of a distinguished lineage of artists too numerous to discuss comprehensively in this essay. A few examples include French artist Jacques Louis David (17481825), Spaniards Francisco Jos de Goya (17461828) and Pablo Picasso (18811973) as well as the Mexican muralist Jos Clemente Orozco (18831949). Davids neoclassical paintings promoted the cause of French revolutionaries in the late eighteenth century. Goyas The Third of May, (1808), portrays an incident that took place during Napoleons intervention in Spain, in which a French firing squad executed a token number of civilians in Madrid in retaliation for the murder of some of Napoleons troops by Spanish troops the day before. Picasso painted Guernica in 1937 in response to the bombing of an ancient Basque city by German forces acting on behalf of the Francisco Franco during the Spanish Civil War. Of this work Picasso stated, Painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war for attack and defense against the enemy.
All of these artists share compassion for the politically oppressed and a compulsion to create imagery that exposes subjugation. The historical painters mentioned here, however, largely commented on the politics ofand withintheir own countries whereas ERRE sets his sites elsewhere. He is in the privileged position of being both an outsider (as a citizen of Mexico) and an insider (since he spends almost as much time in the U.S. as he does in his home country). From this positionand in the age of globalizationERRE is critical of U.S. activities abroad, not just in the border region; disdain for what he sees as the abuse of power is poignantly expressed in his work.
1 Additionally, there is a related apocryphal story that is often depicted in Mexican retablos, the anonymous paintings on tin that were available at pilgrimage sites along the Camino Real, or Royal Road, between Mexico City and Santa Fe. In them Christ is the Holy Child of Atocha, who visited Christian prisoners incarcerated for their religious practice in Moorish Spain. During his visit, Christs small basket of bread was constantly and miraculously replenished so that the unjustly punished had enough to eat.
This essay will be published again in a forthcoming catalogue for this exhibition.