Marcos Ramírez ERRE
Artpace San Antonio
- Kate Green -
Marcos Ramírez ERRE, The Body of Crime, 2008; installation detail; originally commissioned and produced by Artpace San Antonio
Tijuana-based Marcos Ramírez ERRE’s recent Artpace residency project, The Body of Crime, uses video, sculpture and photographs to stage a fictional crime scene that implicates all of us in the Mexico/U.S. border drug war. The exhibition’s theatrical yet efficient critique of the tendency to ignore our role in what we can’t see rivals that of the artist’s two best known public works, both produced in the 1990s by inSite, an organization that commissions artistic interventions in Tijuana/San Diego. In 1994, in front of an iconic municipal building in downtown Tijuana, Ramírez built Century 21, a provisional shack like the type seen all over the city’s outlying neighborhoods. Among other things, the piece dramatically highlighted the disparity between the city government’s image of itself and the individual urban experience. Three years later, the artist sited Toy an Horse, an oversized wooden pony, a few miles north directly on the charged border between Mexico and the United States. Though fashioned after the fabled horse that helped the Greeks infiltrate Troy, ERRE’s creation was double-headed: globalization has unleashed people and problems on both sides of the border.
For the artist’s exhibition in San Antonio, the frontera serves as a conceptual rather than a physical anchor, while also providing the backdrop for the show’s central work: a narrative video projected large-scale on one wall. In the nine-minute piece, tension builds as a black Suburban drives along a dusty border road and parks in a secluded spot near a similar-looking vehicle. Yet before the expected illicit activities can take place, one driver guns down the other. Soon we realize that the victim, the perpetrator and the lead investigator of the crime scene are one in the same: each role is played by the artist. We are all part of the solution and the problem.
Several other related elements in the exhibition encourage a more direct engagement with the idea of personal responsibility. One particularly compelling gesture is an installation that recreates the video’s crime scene in the middle of the gallery. Here visitors can explore a shot-up black Suburban, hear narcocorrido music pumping through the car’s shattered windows and walk through a field of spent shell casings numbered as evidence by the “police.” Wandering among the wreckage, I was unsure whether I was part of the crime or trying to solve it; whether I was to enjoy or revile the soundtrack of melodic ballads glorifying drug lords.
ERRE also encourages such ambivalence in a photographic triptych on a nearby wall. The portraits, which at first appear to be of three different men, are variations of a single person: the victim, the perpetrator and the investigator from the video. Each is labeled with a single word etched into its frame. Yo (I) is the victim who confidently charms the camera, tu (you) is the perpetrator who coldly poses for a mug shot, and el (him) is the investigator who stoically stares into the distance. From the evidence at hand, if ERRE were to combine these three images into one picture of who is responsible for violence along the border, it would fittingly be labeled nosotros (us).
Kate Green is a freelance curator and writer based in San Antonio.