Barry Stone
SOFA, Austin
Through April 24

By S.E. Smith

Barry Stone, Nikki Sixx and Ink Polygon, 2011, Sumi ink and media on paper. Courtesy of the artist.

Distortion is a prism. A clean tone passed through a distortion pedal explodes into harmonics, and as anybody who has spent some years of their life listening to Sonic Youth would know, these harmonics possess a shamanlike quality. They gloss the material world with an inward glow, one that, like an animal's, is intelligent and aware but difficult to grasp directly. Instead, the wash of noise promotes reverie and a kind of wisdom arrived at by associative thinking.

Barry Stone’s Hum produces in the viewer the meditative quality of taking in a heavy dose of amp-shredding fuzz. Its nine pieces (ten including “Not for Teacher,” Stone’s dirgelike refashioning of Van Halen's “Hot for Teacher” that plays in the background) demonstrate a skilled and subtle resonance, both in their cultural references and in their relation to each other.

The show’s deliberate arrangement is a large part of Hum’s success. Each piece reverberates formally with those surrounding it, even though the works themselves comprise a wide range of media, including photography (which Stone teaches at Texas State University), collage and sumi ink. Hum opens with a triptych of two black-and-white photographs coupled with a full-color pint, on the right starting with a picture of a doorless Camaro, its back seat stuffed with blankets. The image is compelling even without an explicit narrative. Sharp, nearly affectless, full of material but absent of rhetoric-- it gives little away because it has little to give away.

Following Camaro Z28, Spring, TX, Mountain Distortion mirrors its clean lines but repositions the viewer. The photograph is framed as an oval, hinting at filmic keyhole fade-outs and stylized landscape renderings. Mountain Distortion shares a documentary quality with Camaro Z28, Spring TX, but with an uncanny degree of manipulation. It is a distortion, after all, but it is almost impossible to detect how the image of the mountain has been altered. Viewed together, they create a sense of uncertainty. In their correspondences, the two pieces buzz as if subject to a sympathetic vibration.

Hum often references popular culture and art history directly, with a decided bent toward the ’70s (from Judy Chicago to Bruce Dickinson), but these images appear as components of an interior landscape rather than quotations, or heaven forbid, commentary. Stone’s The Dinner Party, Spring, TX is a photograph of the original exhibition poster for Judy Chicago’s much-debated feminist installation. Photographed at an angle, the framed poster is distorted by glare reflecting a window or door in the room where it hangs, making the image of the triangular table seem to melt away or sublimate. What could be annoyingly clever or intellectually opaque about such treatment of these materials is instead personal and oddly warm. “Warmth” might be a strange quality to note in an exhibition that uses cultural references to investigate personal subjects, but Hum proves that a private image system is not necessarily an exclusive one.

S.E. Smith is the founding editor of OH NO magazine. Her work has appeared in Fence, jubilat and elsewhere.

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New Art in Austin
Austin Museum of Art
Through May 22

By Michael Bise

Robert Melton, Hungry Heart, 2010, HD Video, Variable. Courtesy of the artist.

I’m not sure if it’s a good thing that New Art in Austin: 15 To Watch at The Austin Museum of Art can be broken down into a gold, silver and bronze medal winner, while much of the rest of the work flounders between sturdy mediocrity and I’m-not-even-trying-failure. Ever the optimist, I’ve chosen to read the successful exceptions as a positive sign.

The standout body of work in the show is Anna Krachey’s series of unmanipulated film photographs that appear on first glance to be the work of a Photoshop geek circa 1999. Red Vs. Green (A Diptych), 2010, consists of two different photographs of a stop sign from the same perspective-- one with a green cast and the other with red. It requires a little patience to realize that the color difference has not come from digital enhancement, but rather from two different colored light sources. Another photograph, Four Corners, depicts a sheet of metallic paper that catches light in such a way that it turns the white ground upon which it lays four different colors on each corner of the paper. The key to the enjoyment of Krachey’s pictures lies in the fact that, although she never gives away her techniques, visual concentration is ultimately rewarded in the revelation that her images exist in the three-dimensional world of actual objects. Krachey’s work can be hit-or-miss, as I noticed from her installation last year at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, but all her pictures at AMOA demonstrated visual intelligence and technical sophistication.

The next gallery over, but a hundred miles away in visual rigor, is Elizabeth Chiles’ series of pedestrian photographs of tree canopies in the cities of Austin, New York and London. The images are so boring, technically mediocre, and conceptually void that juror and Menil curator Toby Kamps resorts to the following statement in his catalogue essay for their justification: “The final photographs in Theatre were made near the Brooklyn grave of Samuel Morse, painter, inventor of the…telegraph code, and pioneer of photography in the United States. [Chiles’] Romantic questions had catalyzed a Romantic quest – to create a group of images that branched (pun intended) into the why-are-we-here questions at the heart of art, science and philosophy.” Chiles’ vague images and Kamps’ mushy reading of them participate in the questionable notion that quality and meaning exist only in the artist’s subjective interpretation, and that precise formal logic or aesthetic system-building as methods of imparting meaning are clubs in the hands of intellectual thugs.

Fortunately, Robert Melton’s three short videos of minor domestic disasters require no supplementary texts. Melton has a real sense of cinematography and his small, richly colored setups seem larger than life and take on a genuinely cinematic quality. The best of the three is Last Resort (2009), which opens onto a scene with a raging but contained circular fire against a typical beige wall. The fire diminishes slowly in size and intensity, and it isn’t until very near the end that we realize that a smoke alarm has been on fire, and that what we assumed was a dying flame is the video being played in reverse. Rather than dissipating the energy, the discovery of the backwards “gimmick” causes us to imagine the fiery chaos that must have occurred just before the video began. We’re able to insert ourselves into the narrative, a key to successful filmmaking. Melton should raise some money, abandon the art world, and make a movie.

It wouldn’t be fair if I didn’t point out the emperor-with-no-clothes installation that is J. Parker Valentine’s exercise of what Kamps calls an “in-depth study of the morphology of form.” Her work in the AMOA exhibition consists of pseudo-encyclopedic notations in charcoal of abstract and figurative marks that she picked up “examining modernist art in a London conservation lab.” Drawn on brown MDF and paper, the drawing are laid flat, stood upright, curled and occasionally obscured by other objects on saw horse-like tables. Inert and despairingly brown, Valentine’s carefully unkempt installation encourages an essentially text-based reading. Valentine’s found marks, styles and objects seem combined not for their visual effect, but for their historical significance. Kamps argues in his essay that Valentine not only knows how “to tell a compelling story of modernist abstraction,” but that she also manages to “create a living version of it.” Simply looking at Valentine’s installation is an experience of rapidly diminishing returns and offers little in comparison to artists like André Masson, Jackson Pollock or Joan Mitchell, to whom Kamps’ essay compares her. In fact, Valentine’s attempt to categorize the strategies of modernist mark-making fall far short of similar attempts by lesser artists like David Reed or Brice Marden.

If Valentine’s work suffers the fate of visual insignificance at the expense of rhetoric, the visually sumptuous but conceptually hamstrung work of Miguel A. Aragon suffers the opposite fate. A printmaker, Aragon calls his process “burned residue embossing.” Using graphic images of cartel violence gathered from Mexican news media, Aragon strips the images of color, laser cuts them into cardboard, and using ash, puts the boards through a printing press. This process results in a series of snow-white and ash-grey images that hover on the edge of abstraction and representation. Their beauty lies in the evident embossing, the ambiguity of the images and the subtle coloration of the ash after moving through the press. Unfortunately juror and AMOA interim curator Andrea Mellard’s essay (and, I suspect, Aragon’s own discussions of his work) revolves almost exclusively around the content of the source imagery. The artist’s family still lives in Juarez, where the daily fear of cartel violence must be visceral, but the success or failure of his prints has little to do with the barely-visible images. This is not to suggest that the content of the work should be abandoned or that Aragon’s process is in need of revision, but Mellard’s didactic justification of the work does a disservice to its visual strength. As soon as the viewer reads the explanation on the wall label, they cease to experience the power and imagination of the work and turn instead to a kind of pitying sentiment for the artist and his victimized family.

Juror and Director of the Rubin Center for the Visual Arts at the University of Texas El Paso, Kate Bonansinga pulls out the big, black Clement Greenberg hat from which she attempts to fish some reasonable explanation for the inclusion of Nathan Green’s work. Green creates small abstract paintings and rickety painted sculptures from wood and other scraps taken from his job as an art handler. In her essay, Bonansinga performs the obligatory rehearsal of Greenberg’s fundamental characteristics of the picture plane and Michael Fried’s ideas about what constitutes theatricality in the visual arts. Bonansinga states that Green’s work, in opposition to these modernist philosophical hallmarks, is essentially anti-modernist. This is perhaps true enough, but it goes no distance toward explaining Green’s simplistic use of color, random composition, or haphazard installation strategy. Green’s installation of garish paintings and semi-sculptural structures recalls Frank Stella’s almost bipolar descent from the rigor of his early Black paintings and the precision and sophisticated color of the Protractor series to the mess of his “maximalist” period. Green takes everything that is undisciplined and slapdash in late Stella, leaves behind the careful execution, and emerges with little more than art historical scraps. Unlike Jonathan Lasker or Tomma Abts, who continue to explore the possibility of rigorous abstraction after the bomb, Green’s work exhibits no need to be taken seriously.

With the notable exceptions of Krachey, Melton and Aragon, our gold, silver and bronze medalists respectively, New Art in Austin: 15 to Watch offers little to visually investigate. What it does offer is a great deal of justification for artworks that, while not egregiously awful, seem a long way from meriting serious consideration in a museum exhibition. More than a few artists in the show take on projects of artists before them and find themselves outmatched. One of the more trivial bodies of work in the exhibition consists of ceramic chimera by Debra Broz. Broz, who owns a ceramic restoration company, relatively seamlessly fuses leopards and birds, bunnies and fangs in what amounts to a slightly sophomoric quotation of Jeff Koons’ ceramic and porcelain sculptures and Meyer Vaisman’s late-‘80s turkeys. Like Broz, Leslie Mutchler also “likes stuff.” She combs Crate and Barrel, Ikea and Pottery Barn Catalogs and collages elements from the consumer objects within into tableaux that recall the Death Star from the early Star Wars films and the circular, revolving hallway from Jupiter One in 2001: A Space Odyssey. As precise as her collage techniques are, and as much as she would like to open a discourse on consumerism, Mutchler’s works in the exhibition do little beyond trading in on sci-fi nostalgia, reminding us of the infinite evil of Darth Vader and the HAL 9000.

One feature of the exhibition that communicates more than any one artist’s work is the tiny, low-to-the-ground table with supplementary reading materials set up in one of the galleries. That this is a distraction speaks volumes about the exhibition's inability to hold the viewer’s attention. The jurors’ reference-heavy essays equally suggest their seeming awareness of the fact that without very narrowly circumscribed contexts, many of the works in the show fail to hold much interest as objects in themselves.

Michael Bise is an artist living and working in Houston.

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International Artist-in-Residence, New Works: 11.1
Artpace, San Antonio
Through May 22

By Lana Shafer

Kelly Richardson, Leviathan, 2011, Three channel HD Video with audio, 20 min. loop. Originally commissioned by Artpace San Antonio. Courtesy of Birch Libralato Gallery. Photo credit: Todd Johnson.

A landscape of glowing swamp water, skeletal remains of saber-toothed tigers and an homage to 57 jazz musicians are the subjects of the works in Artpace’s current exhibition of artists-in-residence. Selected by Heather Pesanti (Curator at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York), the artists in New Works: 11.1 are Kelly Richardson (Toronto, Canada/Newcastle, England), E.V. Day (New York, New York), and Devon Dikeou (Austin, Texas).

Leviathan, a high-definition triple-channel video by Richardson, is a 20-minute loop of footage shot on Caddo Lake in Uncertain, Texas. The video displays the area’s indigenous bald cypress trees in their swamp environment. However, Richardson digitally enhances the composite image by color grading the water with undulating ribbons hued a glowing yellow green and replacing expected nature sounds with an ominous soundtrack. Utilizing the format of a triptych, the landscape is presented from a single vantage point, like a painting set into motion. Richardson’s manipulation of the video suggests several foreboding plot lines: the birth of primordial life, the emergence of an evil aquatic creature, or a post-apocalyptic Earth. The title itself (Leviathan) alludes to several textual references including a serpent sea monster from the Bible who is the gatekeeper to hell, Thomas Hobbes’s 1651 philosophical treatise, and a 1989 sci-fi film of the same name. These references become particularly relevant in the wake of environmental atrocities including the 2010 BP oil spill and, most recently, the earthquake and impending threat of nuclear disaster in Japan. Employing postmodern intertexuality, Richardson draws on the tradition of Leviathan as myth and metaphor encouraging the viewer to meditate on the possibilities of the implied narrative.

Day’s sculptural installation CatFight also takes cues from prehistory, focusing on the remains of two saber-toothed tigers created from casts of fossils discovered at the La Brea tar pits in Los Angeles. Day reconstructs the skeletons in an archetypal catfight, a humorous play on the cliché of catty girl-on-girl fighting (as well as society’s fascination with it) and on gender roles as a whole. Suspended from the ceiling with a myriad of monofilaments and adorned with silver leaf bling on their teeth and claws, the dueling saber-tooths create a climactic tableau that can be circumambulated by the viewer. Hinting at a Debordian spectacle, the stop-action scene appears like a cinematic image or even a clip from a reality TV show. Day also includes several snakes on the floor surrounding the fight as audience members, or consumers, of the representation. Fabricated out of aluminum and positioned upright, fangs exposed and ready to pounce, the snakes serve as masculine counterpoints to the feminine drama. While Day runs the risk of creating a one-liner by using literal cats to signify a human catfight, the beauty and complexity in the form of her work, paired with the conflation of lowbrow cultural motifs, scientific intellectuality, and sociological inquiry provides much on which the viewer can ruminate.

Dikeou’s Mamas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys, the most conceptually rigorous of the three installations, exposes the oversights of historical classification through the lens of American jazz. As an artist, curator, collector, editor and publisher of zingmagazine, Dikeou has her hand in every aspect of the art world’s systems of recognition, which she questions and re-presents through her artistic practice. In the exhibition, Dikeou commemorates 57 jazz legends with photographs of gold plaques bearing their names. Upsetting the expected hierarchy of museum display, household names like Miles Davis and John Coltrane land alongside those who have fallen into obscurity, such as Illinois Jacquet and Sonny Simmons. Positing Simmons—a personal friend of Dikeou and a great forgotten jazz musician—as an authority, his photo-plaque is blown up to a monumental size (17 x 12 feet) that dwarfs the others, while a vocal track by Sonny recounting his thoughts on the other musicians permeates the space. Additionally, signaling her skepticism of the seemingly limitless amount of information available online, Dikeou undermines the Internet as an authority with the inclusion of two perfectly-rendered graphite drawings by San Antonio artist Chad Dawkins of the HTTP 404 Internet search error message. She has also created CDs, available for free, featuring The Sonny Simmons Quintet. Much like relational aesthetic artist Liam Gillick’s “platform” sculptures and Andrea Fraser’s exhibition tours that include the viewer as a participant in the critique of institutions, this installation implicates the beholder in the creation and dissemination of history and points to the curator’s power to insert figures into the art world.

Although the three residents employ divergent approaches, media and subjects, connecting threads can still be drawn. Both Day and Dikeou deal with modes of institutional display, such as those of natural history and hall of fame museums. Leviathan and CatFight work particularly well together; both works reference prehistory, the natural world and the dialectic they have with humanity. Each artist’s work can be enjoyed and celebrated on its own; however, the dialogue they have when exhibited together makes for a rich and successful installment of Artpace’s International Artist-in-Residence program.

Lana Shafer is a freelance writer and an art historian based in Austin, Texas.

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Nowhere Near Here
Houston Center for Photography and Fotofest, Houston
Through April 23

By Rachel Hooper

Mimi Kato, Scene 2: Partially cloudy, precipitation 30% (detail) from the series One ordinary day of an ordinary town, 2010. Courtesy of the artist.

For this survey of lens-based artists living and working in Texas, invited jurors Toby Kamps and Michelle White did not hold themselves to a specific theme or focus. Instead, as the title suggests, the two Menil curators embraced an all-inclusive spirit and chose many artists who came to our state from all over the US and the world. Although the subjects of the works span the globe, almost all of the photographers are based in Houston and Austin, the two most prominent art communities in Texas.

The exhibition has a slightly different feel at its two venues— the installation at Houston Center for Photography being the stronger of the two. The group at HCP coheres very well; the most obvious connection is the strange geometries that each artist finds in unlikely places. David Politzer's study of the subculture of giant pumpkin farmers, Heavyweights (2010), tells a compelling story of the farmers who grow the fruits from seed to competition. I would have liked to see the photos that show the farmers at work placed more prominently, however, as I feel they show the pumpkins’ enormous scale and the labor that goes into the farming. The striking and odd beauty of Walker Pickering's road trip photos makes an indelible impression at HCP, especially in the serene and dramatic light and shadows of Hole and Overlook (both 2009/2010).

The exhibition’s two video artists, Kelly Sears and Clarissa Tossin, take a much more conceptual approach. Sears' animation He Hates to be Second (2008) digs into images and text from the early 1960s in a beautiful, tightly edited short that highlights the sublimated disquietude and violence of the decade. Tossin's video of the white marble of Brazil's supreme court building being continuously cleaned on loop calls to mind Jeff Wall's Morning Cleaning, Mies van der Rohe Foundation, Barcelona (1999) and Inigo Manglano-Ovalle's Always After (The Glass House) (2006). Like these other projects, Tossin’s work raises questions of class and race in the constant maintenance required in the upkeep of modernist structures. But in Tossin's take, the act of cleaning is itself aestheticized by dynamic arcs of water flying through the air in regular rhythms and the repetitive circling of the floor polisher.

With some uneasy juxtapositions and branching hallways, the larger grouping at Fotofest headquarters felt a bit disjointed. Despite these difficulties, there were some standouts in the exhibition. Portraits by Logan Caldbeck, Adam Boley and Nancy Newberry were my favorite discoveries, as I felt a very real connection with their subjects who seem to show their true selves. The more abstract of Chris Akin’s "visual haikus," such as Times Square (2010) were striking; with others I questioned whether the artist was seeing something that I didn't. Among Santiago Forero's self-portraits, the picture of him standing on a stump is particularly lovely. I did get weary of the repetitive trope of the artist standing with his back to the camera in every image, but the curators made a good decision to break up his work in small groups between the two sites. By contrast, Otis Ike and Ivete Lucas' groupings were too small. Their video was charming, as was the house around it, but I could not see how the self-portrait or two other photographs fit with the project as a whole.

There were some distracting display issues upstairs at Fotofest as well. Wura-Natasha Ogunji's three stop-motion videos would have benefited from a more immersive presentation. If the screen were larger and the sound were on headphones or in an isolated room, it would be easier to see the magical effect of the characters flying or walking on water and to experience the soundtrack without the distraction of other works. Mike Osborne's most powerful images, such as Man in a Convenience Store Window and Glass Building, I-45 (2010) cast Houston as a slightly ominous film noir setting, but I did not understand why his otherwise technically flawless work went unframed. Nearby, Mimi Kato's digital photomontages showing scenes of a Japanese town, what the artist calls “one-person theatre,” were displayed well. Though the work had a great concept, it was hard for me to differentiate easily between the characters and understand the narrative because the artist plays all the parts.

As impressed as I was with Nowhere Near Here, I have to admit that I set out to review this statewide photography survey with a sense of melancholy about the state of the arts in Texas. Shortly after the opening of this exhibition, one of its major funders, the Texas Commission on the Arts, was shut down by the state government. Art Lies, the only contemporary art print magazine based in Texas, also recently announced that it will cease publication. The high quality of the work in Nowhere Near Here is evidence of how artists are currently thriving across the state, but how will they adapt to potentially diminished publication and exhibition opportunities? Although the future is uncertain, I can only hope that talented artists will continue to find fertile ground here in Texas.

Rachel Hooper is associate curator and Cynthia Woods Mitchell Fellow at Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston.

N.B. Rachel Hooper and David Politzer are both employees of the University of Houston.

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Glenn Ligon
Whitney Museum, New York
Through June 5

By Jess Wilcox

Glenn Ligon, Rückenfigur, 2009, Neon and paint, 24 x 145 inches (61 x 368.3 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase with funds from the Painting and Sculpture Committee. Photograph by Ronald Amstutz. © Glenn Ligon.

The subtitle of Glenn Ligon’s midcareer retrospective at the Whitney, AMERICA, draws attention to the continually disputed ground of national identity and brings to mind the furious debates about the politics of representation of the 1990s, an era marked by the so-called culture wars. One benefit of the retrospective’s timing is that while some hot tempers have cooled over the past two decades, recent events have made clear that many of the central questions raised in this period have not yet been resolved, but rather cloaked in new terminology with distinct threats that rearticulate the Other.

Notes on the Margin of the Black Book (1991–93), the artist’s literal and contextual reframing of Robert Mapplethorpe’s controversial publication of photographs of sexualized black men, proves as complex as ever. Framed commentaries from artists, critics, scholars, politicians and others that express a wide array of perspectives and opinions are juxtaposed with the stark black and white photographs. Ligon’s subject position as author is not easily simplified into categories such as black, gay, or artist and presumed liberal defender of free speech. This slipperiness—which supposedly comprises interest groups characteristic of ‘identity politics’—thus highlights the fluctuating grayness of identity in relational context.

With the long view offered by the survey format, the exhibition’s highlight is the opportunity to closely follow Ligon’s investigation of the opacity and politics of language. The perpetual conundrum of language—how context renders meanings distinct, yet language’s inherent iterability continually unfixes itself from one context to another—rises to the fore. Throughout Ligon’s work, modes of transmission a speaker’s voice, repetition, quotation or medium alter connotation.

The earliest works in AMERICA are paintings smeared with pale colors and scrawled with excerpts from gay erotica written in pencil—making explicit the sexual desire in the expressive palette strokes. Here begins the exhibition’s narrative of Ligon’s journey with language, which he later states as an ambition “to make language into a physical thing, something that has real weight and force to it.” What these never-before-exhibited paintings reveal is how the physicality of painterly abstraction informs his mature, celebrated work with language. In contrast to pioneering conceptualist Lawrence Weiner, who also uses language as material, albeit in its most abstracted manner as a dematerialized component, Ligon always insists on reflecting on real world fleshiness and essentially interpersonal conditions of language.

Ligon articulates that language has power to bring to mind associative connotations as well as explicit denotations perhaps most elegantly in his well-known oil stick paintings that obscure themselves in the process of making. In them, excess pigment builds up, increasingly concealing and blurring the stenciled text of quotes by astute observers of race relations and political oppression such as Ralph Ellison, Jean Genet, Zora Neale Hurston, and in another series, Richard Pryor. In one work, the repetition of Jesse Jackson’s verse “I am somebody” reads in a plethora of ways: as a wishful incantation, a practical mantra, the fading echo of generations of black Americans throughout history, or redundancy’s ability to make plain language strange and drain it of meaning.

Past criticism of Ligon’s work as literal has been shallow, overlooking the textures and mosaics of language, ignoring rich interpretations, and reducing original sources and context to singular meanings. The exhibition’s thorough and chronological presentation fights this tendency, as language thickens through accumulation and use of materials such as stylized typography, silkscreen, coal dust and neon tubing.

An encounter with a particularly sticky black on black painting, White #14 (1993-94), serves as a metaphor for how Ligon’s oeuvre produces meaning. Initially inscrutable under lights reflecting off the rippled surface, the painting requires that the viewer change perspective to read its constituent parts. Taking time to examine multiple points of views, single words and phrases emerge: “mask,” “whiteness,” “problem,” “property,” “all the colours,” and the fortuitous “not impossible to analyse,” which could also serve as a key. Upon investigation it can be discovered that this excerpt of a Richard Dyer text ruminates on how whiteness is unmarked and functions as the social norm, rendering it difficult to represent. Perhaps this knowledge will lead to reading Dyer’s essay, or perhaps the viewer will walk away with the observation that this statement is hazy, only visible obliquely. This obstinate murkiness throws itself in front of clear communication, entangling matter and message. Since language is not transparent, discourse about identity and representation is enriched by its unforgiving material re-presentations by an artist such as Ligon.

Jess Wilcox is an independent curator based in New York City.

Abstract Possible and Crisisss, Mexico City

By Maria Elena Ortiz

Alfredo Zalce, Mexico se transforma en una gran ciudad, 1947, Etching on paper,42.1 x 54.2 cm. Courtesy of the National Institute of Bellas Artes, National Museum of la Estampa, Museo de Bellas Artes, Mexico City

Stemming from a desire to create grand narratives, political artwork and abstraction are two of the problematic legacies left behind by the failed utopian projects of modernism. Since in our contemporary culture political art usually points to a situation rather than take action, it can be interpreted as conceptually empty, whereas abstraction can often be dismissed as just a systematic approach. Two recent exhibitions in Mexico City, Crisisss. América Latina, arte y confrontación 1910-2010 curated by Gerardo Mosquera at Museo de Bellas Artes and Abstract Possible: The Tamayo Take, curated by Maria Lind at the Museum Rufino Tamayo, reconsider the validity of these notions in contemporary art. With curatorial parameters that explore the impossibilities and potential of modes of categorization, both exhibitions offer ways in which to address the political and abstraction in our culture.

Crisisss. América Latina, arte y confrontación presents an overview of Latin American art that starts with artworks produced after the Mexican Revolution by acclaimed artists such as Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros, and concludes with recent work from artists such as Javier Téllez and Cildo Meireles. With almost 200 pieces from 104 artists, this exhibition does not attempt to present us with an encyclopedic study of a region. Rather, it gathers works that are politically confrontational. For Mosquera, who is also one of the artists in the exhibition, politics represents a shared interest for artists in different countries in Latin America. “The political” is therefore used loosely to create an ambitious exhibition that ultimately points to the lack of aesthetic cohesion that a term such as Latin American art implies.

One of the most notable works in Crisisss is Joaquin Torres-Garcia’s The Inverted Map (1936). This masterpiece of Latin American art shows an inverted map of the Southern America to represent the region’s struggle for recognition at an international level. A work by Cristina Lucas and Gerardo Mosquera is another play on a regional map. In Untitled (masculine sex) from 2007, each Latin American country’s name is substituted by the way in which people from each of the countries refer to male genitalia. Not all Latin Americans use the same slang word for penis. In Mexico, a penis is called the verga; in Puerto Rico the organ is referred to as a bicho (in other parts of Latin America, bicho means “little bug”). This delightful piece succeeds at exposing cultural and linguistic diversity. Other parts of the exhibition come across as more antagonistic. In one of the rooms, Cildo Meireles’ soda bottles from Insertions into Ideological Circuits: Coca Cola Project (1970) are juxtaposed against the documentation of El Siluetazo (1983). In Buenos Aires, this action by Rodolfo Aguerreberry, Julio Flores and Guillermo Kexel exposed the brutality of the military dictatorship in Argentina. While Meireles’ work is concerned with the struggle to be part of the circuit of the market, the difficulties faced by artists in Brazil and Argentina can hardly be described in similar terms. This comparison points to the lack of cohesion that artworks can have, even when framed under the narrative of “political.”

Unlike Crisisss, Abstract Possibleʼs theme is not restricted to a geographical region, but to other several modes of classification within one category. Each artwork falls into one of Lind’s three curatorial sub-themes: Economic Abstraction, Formal Abstraction and Withdrawal Strategies. One example of Economic Abstraction that falls outside the purview of Latin American art, Walid Raad’s Let´s be Honest, the Weather Helped (1998) is a picture of the recent history of war in Lebanon. This work is a set of photographs in which Raad documents sites where he found bullets. Each site has different colored dots that correspond to the amount and the place of origin of each bullet; Raad discovered that each of 17 different bullet manufacturers used different colors to mark their tips. The piece addresses contemporary dynamics of war that are characterized by speculative capital and networks meant to be untraceable. Artworks in the subcategory of Withdrawal Strategies at times lack a coherent narration or do not arrive to a conclusion. Liam Gillick and Anton Vidokle’s A Guiding Light (2010) is a video which documents well-known artists and curators (artists Boško Blagojeviç, Noah Brehmer, Nadja Frank, Shuddhabrata Sengupta, and Danna Vajda, critic Tim Griffin, and curators Anna Colin and Shama Khanna) having a discussion about an exhibition as a rehearsal. A Guiding Light seems like a sitcom that wanders between research and self-critique. In Withdrawal Strategies, Lind considers how artists abstract or complicate the very notion of contemporary art. Indeed, the use of multiple ways of cataloguing artistic practice makes this exhibition successful at creating a curatorial abstraction.

Abstract Possible and Crisisss investigate aesthetics dependent on the construction of grand narratives to pose questions about the possibilities and difficulties of abstraction and political work. In Crisiss the vast number of works and their apparent contradictions point to the need for more research and study on the archetype of Latin American art. Abstract Possible suggests possible ways to discuss the role of abstraction not only in visual art, but also in culture popular culture. On the one hand, Crississ showcases the failure of an all-encompassing category, while on the other, Abstraction Possible plays with an overused category to make sense of contemporary debates in art.

Maria Elena Ortiz is the Curator of Contemporary Arts at the Sala de Arte Publico Siqueiros in Mexico City.

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