The Border
What we as a society define as borders are better described as margins: places in which dissimilar cultures meet, occasionally merge and potentially clash. In the case of the United States and Mexico, "the border" is a territory thousands of miles long and hundreds of miles wide. It encircles in its ambiguous girth my own home in San Antonio, which is hundreds of miles from the nearest physical crossing. I say ambiguous not to imply that this zone is in any way abstract, because for millions of people, the border condition is a reality that characterizes daily life. For othersthose who continue to look down rather than at a map of our region to locate Mexicothe notion of a clear line that separates us from "the other" will forever prevail. I suppose such attitudes depend on how people interpret multicultural catchalls like plurality, which I see as one of the many whitewashedif not synonymousways of stating and accepting marginality, both within our society and in reference to our nearest southern neighbors.
All semantics aside, how does one even begin to critically address contemporary art produced in and about the U.S.-Mexico border region? The easiest way is, of course, to line up artists according to racial, ethnic or cultural characteristics. But I believe this does a great disservice to talented artists on both sides of the border and in the culturally hybridized zone in between. It also feels like a sort of strange, aesthetically based affirmative actiona practice that disregards qualitative issues, which are central, after all, to what we as critics, consumers and collectors of contemporary art supposedly care about.
So how to begin? I decided, at the suggestion of curator Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro, to invite Mexico City-based Thomas Glassford to edit a special section on The Border for this issue of ARTL!ES. As an artist born and raised in a border communityLaredoand based in Mexico for some fifteen years, Glassford is well qualified to take on cross-cultural conundrums in a manner that has not been already exhausted; in other words, I knew he could give ARTL!ES something new.
Initially, Glassford seemed most interested in border exotica, its extensions and those who harness and obliterate related stereotypes in order to reclaim a sense of empowerment. While such things are touched upon in his piece Demographic Extensions or Simply Homeland Insecurity, I feel he hit a higher, more pertinent and profound note by providing us a personal glimpse into the mindset of one artistan individual propelled in all imaginable, cardinal and cultural directions at once but who also manages to function within American and Mexican societies (and everything in between) with ease.
This chameleon routine should produce a mental state that in itself could be deemed as indelibly marginalized, but I suppose Glassfordlike the many contemporary artists who choose to live and work outside their native countriesis disproving this fallacy of logic by the day. Reclamation artor, rather, exotica rendered mootis more thoroughly addressed by Glassford in VISUAL SPACE, where he uses music and foodtwo promiscuous cross-pollinators of popular cultureas signifiers of an already inherent cultural hybridity that render the border ineffectual; while we may prevent people from physically crossing the border, culture rides on an invisible tide.
Glassford invited eminent writer/curator Victor Zamudio-Taylor, a native of the California-Mexico border region, and independent writer and curator Claudia Arozqueta of Mexico City to contribute to his section. Arozqueta's Border Scenes: Testimony, Social Art and Activism along Mexico's Northern Border is a tightly focused investigation of art-as-activism, with eyes trained on the living (and dying) conditions of those trapped in the U.S.-fueled maquiladora system and the related and seemingly unending femicide in Ciudad Juárez. While Arozqueta's presentation of endemic violence, specifically along the Mexican border, begs further investigation, Zamudio-Taylor's Whipped Cream & Other Delights, Or If You Are Mean Enough To Steal From The Blind, Help Yourself manages to accomplish what so many writers and artists have failed at in the pastto practically crush perceptions of the U.S.-Mexico border as a sort of provincial proving ground while traversing its anomalous, or liminal, space. Zamudio-Taylor makes a strong case for reinterpreting our own border zone's perceived provinciality as indicative of a universal condition mirrored in countless places the world over.
In the remainder of the features section, Tony Jones of The School of the Art Institute of Chicago muses about San Antonio and Blue Star 20, which he recently curated, photographer Dave Anderson takes on the Minutemen in PROJECT SPACE, Kate Bonansinga addresses the work of Marcos Ramirez ERRE at UT El Paso and Ito Romo generously offers us a chapter from his 2001 opus, El Puente/The Bridge (University of New Mexico Press). While these pieces are all connected to the border in various ways, they appear here serendipitously; all were submitted rather than commissioneda coincidence that drives home the timeliness of the discussion at hand. And, finally, poet D.F. Brown gives us a warm and moving remembrance of the late Jim Love. In our next issue, Regine Basha, Adjunct Curator of Arthouse at the Jones Center, will edit a special section on Sincerity.
Till then,
Anjali Gupta
Editor