The vibrant pulse of  Mexico City’s cultural renaissance didn’t miss a beat during La Semana de Arte (Art Week) (February 4-9, 2020), tenaciously ticking throughout the city from the mega blockbuster Zona Maco fair to the edgier Feria de Arte Material, and onto neighborhood streets enlivened by a heady stream of  exhibitions. Besides the fairs, Mexico City’s new-millenial status as an international art hub was evident in the growing community of young expat artists and gallerists drawn to  warm sunshine, an inexpensive lifestyle and, most important, an openness to diversity. Add to this the fluid and bustling mix of international galleries with emerging and well-established Mexican venues and you have a juggernaut; a brisk global marketplace enticing collectors and art aficionados of every stripe.

The annual Material Art Fair, in particular, allows one to view all these elements afloat in a cultural petri dish of sorts; to watch an evolving art organism spread its tentacles from this indigenous landscape to New York, Berlin, London, Stockholm, Tokyo and beyond. This cultural mashup was much on display in an eccentric performance that took place on the  sun-drenched  Plaza de La República. Paloma (2020), by Estonian artist Kris Lemsalu (b.1985), in collaboration with her American husband, musician Kyp Malone and Mexican designer Barbara Sánchez-Kane, was organized by arts performer and producer Michelangelo Miccolis.  It featured a  bicycle-propelled figure of a giant paloma, a bird-symbol of peace made with  Acapulco chairs and lilies, set against the  Monument to the Revolution. Malone’s amorphous instrumental accompaniment to the plaintive refrains of Mexican singer  Luis Pablo, spirited this fantasy dove from the summit of the plaza down to the Frontón Mexico, the Material exhibition space. Lemsalu and Sánchez-Kane, dressed in lavender suits embellished with plastic eggs, followed behind strewing lily petals towards an appreciative crowd.

Hoping to create a niche for lesser known Latin and international artists, Brett Schultz, Creative Director of the Material Fair, and his current partners, Isa Castilla and Rodrigo Feliz, have grown the shoestring project begun 2014. It took guts to time this exhibition to run simultaneously with Zona Maco and  insist on affordability. But so was it great marketing strategy to welcome international well-recognized  gallerists to participate, giving them a venue for their own emerging artists that large numbers of collectors were unlikely to otherwise see.

And no other fair looks like Material. Counter to the  generic-fair labyrinth of white cubes, Material occupies the Frontón México, an Art Deco jai alai arena imaginatively reconfigured to echo street markets, a procession of open stalls  where vendors hawk everything from vibrant embroidered wearables to car parts. Three levels of scaffolding— a series of  Piranesi-like catwalks, ramps and stairs— support exhibition booths flanking narrow walkways around the perimeter of each floor. These simultaneously  open and intimate spaces foster easy hands-on camaraderie, something  reflected in the exhibition’s focus on the physical connection between the artist and the art object. Hence the Material title.

This casual and playful ambiance encourages easy visual conversations between the emerging and the arrived. For example, textile artists Cecy Gómez (b.1992) and Yann Gerstberger (b.1983) recall their ethnic roots as ancient craft and modernist art respectively. Muy Gallery,  a recently formed initiative promoting the works of  Native artists, represents Gómez who preserves the weaving traditions and mythologies of her Tsotsil-Mayan community in a direct, naive style. Nevertheless, her unique fabric works —made on cloth from traditional skirts worn by indigenous women, and with natural plant dyes—convey contemporary feminist and ecological themes. Works by French artist Yann Gerstberger (b.1983) represented by the well-established gallery, OMR,  are by contrast elegantly conceived in the visual language of early modern abstraction. For his enormous tapestry, Untitled (2020), he hand-dyed burrs of cotton mops, glued them to vinyl and combined them with local  fabric finds to create imagery steeped in Yoruba  ritual and Nigerian folklore.

Mexico-based galleries accounted for twenty-five percent of the exhibitors. Other stand-outs among these venues included LuLu gallery, a small gem co-founded by Chris Sharp who selected a series of gorgeous paintings by Argentine-born artist Santiago de Paoli (b. 1978). De Paoli’s small luminous canvases consist of sensuous, erotic and eerie abstract figures recalling early modern isms, but dwell in a surreal world of their own. Stepping from here into the installation by Irak Morales (b.1981) crossed the line between sensual eroticism and porn. Represented by Neri/Barranco, a Mexican project billing itself as a “nomadic gallery with no physical space,” Morales’s work comments on pulp porn as, he said, “a young Mexican man’s source of sexual information in the 60’s.” His multi-media installation, “Deme 3×5, con tode y pallevar!!!” (2020) included cut-outs  from vintage pornographic  comic books, some shaped as pork-chops suspended from the ceiling as mobiles, others plastic-wrapped around  Mezcal  bottles, or collaged within the frames of religious altarpieces.

Political commentary was most notable in an interactive project by Mexican artist Erick Beltrán (b.1974) at Labor gallery, known for controversial art. Visitors to his installation, Nothing But the Truth (2020), were invited  to write down a lie in an open notebook. Throughout each fair day these lies were compiled, printed as giant posters in a  variety of typographies, and plastered to every inch of exhibition wall. Writ large lies, little and grandiose, merged and, like our daily confrontations with distorted social and network media news, they read as new alternative truths.

Gabriel Orozco’s (b.1962) work, Tracing Money (2020) at the internationally  well-established gallery Kurimanzutto politicizes the graphic form and symbolism of money.  Orozco made prints from layered banknotes— double exposed transparencies merging the currency images of different nations into single blurred composites. Along with drawings, this extensive installation contrasts paper bills as historical and cultural symbols; their ephemeral qualities disturbingly underscoring the existential fluidity of money as a global vehicle of power.

Exhibiting international galeries represented works by Mexican artists and those from their own countries.  New York’s Thierry Goldberg Gallery  featured paintings by Mexican artist Maria Fragoso (b.1995) and included a  triptych featuring an extended family crowded around a typical Mexican dining room, La Peor es Nada (The Worst is Nothing) (2017), unmistakably alludes to the Last Supper. In it Fragoso meshes a comical depiction of loving and dysfunctional family life with the tradition  of Mexican mural painting.The pull of one’s culture is also embedded in works by the team of Lina Mazenett (b.1989)  and David Quiroga (b.1985), Colombian artists represented at Instituto de Visión in Bogatá, a gallery that seeks to trace the Mexican roots of conceptual thinking in Latin America. The artists’ jewel-like reliefs replicating Aztec designs are made of green circuit boards mimicking the brilliant patina of fine jade.

Yngvild Saeter (b.1986), the solo artist featured at Stockholm’s Andréhn-Schiptjenko gallery, makes much scarier outsized jewelry-inspired sculptures from motorcycle parts that she reconstructs, paints and embellishes with feathers, chains, metal spikes and metal rivets. Saeter says these works relate to the euphoric life/death moment she experienced during brain surgery when she momentarily “died,” then revived. She recalls that mystical lapse as a vision in which she was surrounded by motorcycles. Thus did the  biker cult fuel her art: otherworldly helmets, masks, breast plates and shields, the regalia of punk or gothic vampires, perhaps, but like the artist’s strange ordeal, as alluring as they are terrifying.

Milan-based gallery Clima featured the startling work of Italian artist Matteo Nasini (b. 1976) who also channels the dream world, but  from a clinical perspective. His installation of sculpture and tapestry sources data from encephalograms taken while a subject is dreaming. Using a variety of hi-tech software he translates these data into sound, tapestry, and porcelain sculpture using a 3D printing process. Nasini’s intriguing practice eerily suggests that our thoughts have a hidden structural armature, that they are not as ephemeral as we think, and that we can somehow render them immortal as sculptural form. If this boggled your mind, and if you needed a break from cerebrally processing the riotous visual party of this art fair, you would happily aim for  Aria McManus’s (b.1989) Relieviation Works (2017). McManus, an artist and product designer, created an installation for Los Angeles-based gallery AA/LA: a seemingly mundane office environment with hidden healing mechanisms including  a calendar with deliciously edible date pages, and an illuminated name plate radiating the physical and mental nourishment of sunshine.

Coincidentally,  the current Whitney Museum exhibition in New York, Vida Américana, which explores the  impact of  Mexican muralists — Clemente, Orozco and Riviera—on American art, bows to both Mexico City’s vibrant art moment and the art historical importance of its cultural heritage. But it’s perhaps more important that the city is today a magnet for contemporary art and artists, not because of cheap space, sunny days, and hungry collectors, but because of the rationale driving such efforts as the Fiera de Arte Material: from its architecture to its openess to diversity, it represents a metaphoric ideal for a much needed world without walls.

The post La Semana de Arte: Mexico City’s Art Week appeared first on artcritical.

Since “Pacific Standard Time,” the comprehensive survey of art in Southern California from 1945 to 1980, organized in 2011 at multiple venues, documentation of artists from that innovative and experimental period has been on reset. The early 1970s, in particular, were a watershed, as young artists emerging in the wake of the game-changing 1963 Duchamp retrospective at the Pasadena Art Museum, turned to conceptual and performative practices the boundaries between them blurred. Some, like Ed Ruscha, extended the notion of object making into specific sites of investigation, the surreal nature of Southern California itself chief among them.

Raul Guerrero was born in 1945 in Brawley, California, and is currently living and working in San Diego. He was an active part of the groundbreaking scene of the early 1970s, and has continued in the decades since to contextualize the hybrid culture of Southern California.

In his second solo show in New York City, and his first at Ortuzar Projects, we’re introduced to over 20 years of Guerrero’s ongoing trajectory, from 1971 through 1993. That he began his career at a unique moment in Southern California isn’t lost on Guerrero—this is the time of Chris Burden’s most notorious performances, the 1972 Womanhouse of Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro, and the work of David Hammons, Bruce Nauman, John Baldessari (his first teacher) and Doug Wheeler. Al Ruppersberg, Jack Goldstein, Vija Celmins, William Leavitt, and James Welling were all Guerrero’s peers.

In conversation, Guerrero often uses the phrase, “by coincidence,” usually in appreciation of the fortuitous events that marked his journey and aesthetic.

“Since I was a child, every summer my family and I would travel north and work as migrant workers,” he says. “All the accoutrements we’d need for the summer, the pots and pans, everything, were loaded into the back of my father’s flatbed truck. As we’d go over the 101 Freeway, from the back of the truck I’d gaze out at the Capitol Building, and think, ‘Wow, this is Hollywood.’  We’d stop and cook our meals right by the side of the road, and join the encampments by the Merced River, and suddenly there’d be so many other people, Anglos, Oakies, African Americans, gypsies, Mexicans, and Mexicans from Texas. My aspiring family eventually became middle class, and at 16, I’m lying under a vineyard, wondering, what I’m going to do with my life? I hitchhike down to Mexico City and 4 years later I’m in Chouinard Art Institute. On the first day of class, I found myself sitting next to Jack Goldstein. Can you imagine? He looked just like Paul McCartney, and we became close friends.”

At the Chouinard, which later became part of CalArts, Guerrero understood Duchamp’s work instantly and found it liberating, the essential foundation of his aesthetic philosophy. Not only was he drawn to the concept of the assisted readymade, but also to the subliminal power of a single, iconic object or image. This, for Guerrero, resonated with another influence—Carl Jung’s theories of archetype and the collective unconscious.       

Among the 46 pieces in the exhibition, the earliest are Guerrero’s Moroccan watercolors from 1971, shown here for the first time. These come with the intriguing backstory that sparked their creation. At the suggestion of his friend and mentor Ed Kienholz, Guerrero sold all his belongings and headed to Europe. “By coincidence” (again) he managed to meet everyone right away: sitting next to Francis Bacon at dinner in London, he meets Lee Miller, (Man Ray’s model and muse), and meets his idol, Richard Hamilton, and this is just the first week. He ventures down to Morocco, and soon was living on a few dollars a day in El Ksar Seghir, a small village outside of Tangier. The series of watercolors are intimately sized, as they were created to be postcards for his girlfriend. He shares the dazzling ambiance in beautifully patterned, detailed, and hallucinogenic pieces in which teapots, tiles and other domestic objects with their exotic symbols and arabesques vibrate in talismanic bands of energy—reverberations from the local hashish.

After that summer, Guerrero returned to LA blazing. In just a few years he made significant bodies of work in photography, sculpture, performance, installation, and video. Each of these directions could have fuelled a lifetime of work. Guerrero is a gifted and emotional photographer, as evidenced by his California Sur Photographs from 1972. (He cites the Mexican movies of Luis Bunuel as a childhood passion.) These photos were his personal documentation of a two week road trip through Baja with artist friends. The compositions are effortless. Throughout his photographs, Guerrero’s utilization of light is mysterious, otherworldly, and exquisitely tender, as in the ethereal portrait, for example, of his elderly grandmother, who seems to hover between the tangible and spiritual realms.

Another standout in his multifaceted career is the assisted readymade: Rotating Yaqui Mask(1974) is a seminal, declarative work. Guerrero describes this piece as a formal exploration of, and direct response to, Duchamp’s “Rotating Glass Disc,” but the personal choice of the Yaqui mask can be unsettling. For me, the psychic energy released from the mechanized spinning of this ritual object multiplies seismically in a fearsome way, the context feeling both taboo and dangerously displaced. Similarly, in his movie “Primitive Act” of 1974, Guerrero is squatting and naked among rocks and shrubs, reenacting the primitive discovery of fire.

Seeking a more subjective, and pliable medium, since the 1980s Guerrero has focused on oil painting. Among those on view are four selections from his Oaxaca series from 1984 plus La Mujer of the Puerto from 1993. The Oaxaca series was done on location and, like the Moroccan watercolors, he entrenches himself in the history and culture of this particular place. Guerrero treats stylistic representation like a local language and adapts a flat colonialist style relevant to his theme. Like many of the painters he admires —Walter Robinson, Neil Jenney, Lisa Yuskavage and Alida Cervantes — Guerrero opens the door to Kitsch and pulp desire. As if he is writing a detective novel, heembeds layers and clues in his post-conceptual approach.

Much of Guerrero’s process involves honing his attention and allowing his emotional responses to connect him not only to his own history but to that of the culture at large.He interprets his painting Vista de Bonampak (1984) for me:  “I want to capture not only what represents the place for me, but also a critique of the culture, so after visiting the archeological ruins of  Bonampak, once a Mayan city near Chiapas, Mexico, I imagined a jaguar, coveted within Mayan culture for ferocity and strength, stumbling on the scene of the murals, depicting men dressed as jaguar knights, in jaguar skins, capturing enemies for sacrificial purposes who are also dressed in jaguar skins.  Although I might question who is the most vicious creature in the jungle, I also want to make paintings that are interesting and beautiful.

“There’s a lot that can be said about the brutality of the system, especially with our current president, but I prefer images that don’t delve into it overtly.”

After 40 years of structured study of North America, Guerrero has a new theory:  “Because we’re living on a continent that was occupied by indigenous people through millennia, and their voice has been suppressed, their culture, especially in the artworld, is changing things subliminally by gaining a voice though artists, one way or another. It’s a philosophical and cultural virus that’s spreading. For example, John Baldessari grew up in National City, like I did, ten miles from the border. Now, here’s a major artist, he goes to Mexico and is exposed to all this stuff that you see coming out of Mexico that’s really interesting, but in fact it’s all indigenous culture.

“If you dig tacos, you’re being affected by an indigenous culture. You’re consuming part of that philosophical virus. It’s full of indigenous material: tortilla, beans, corn, the way it’s prepared—it changes the way you see your reality. What that reality is I’m not sure, but somehow that essence, that philosophy, is expressing itself nonetheless into the culture unbeknownst to us.

“In this encounter between culture and things,” he says, “your sense of reality is shifted. Artists like Baldessari, who’s making art about culture on a large scale, has had his view shifted, and then he turned all these other guys on at CalArts. Bizarre, right?”

Guerrera is planning a trip to the Amazon sometime later this year.

The post A Multifaceted Career: Raul Guerrero talks with Mary Jones appeared first on artcritical.

LESLIE MOODY CASTRO: Can you explain your choice of title, “Ex-Voto”? Specifically, how do the story of The Barragán Archives and the work The Proposal operate in tandem with one another?

JILL MAGID: The Barragán Archives, which I began in 2013, is an extended, multimedia project examining of the legacy of Luis Barragán. At the core of the project is the question of artistic legacy: how it is constructed, manipulated, accessed, and controlled. In ideal circumstances, artistic legacy is shared, as a gift. The Proposal is a climactic artwork within The Barragán Archives project that includes a genuine diamond produced from the cremated remains of Luis Barragán, set into an engagement ring, and offered to Federica Zanco, Director of the Barragan Foundation, in exchange for the return of Barragán’s archive to Mexico and the public.

“Ex-Voto” ran concurrent to The Proposal’s exhibition in Switzerland, and its title refers to the series of four works I am showing within the exhibition. Collectively called The Miracles, each Ex-Voto is a cast tin horse painted by a professional ex-voto painter that I hired in Mexico City, whom I provided with images and texts. Ex-voto literally means, “from the vow made,” or “according to the promise I made.” The Barragán Archives is the result of many years’ worth of research and engagement, meaningful relationships, and forged partnerships and the ex-votos I made offer gratitude to those inspiring collaborations, our shared commitments, and to what I believe to be their miraculous outcomes.

A votive offering is a gift for the dead, intended to be buried with them, and not to be recouped by the living. An ex-voto, like a legacy, remains in the realm of the living.

How is this exhibition either mimicking the process of an ex-voto or acting as a metaphor for it?

To make The Proposal, and to do the necessary work and research of The Barragán Archives (of which this work is a part) required, I collaborated and partnered with many people and institutions, including the Barragán family, art organizations, non-profit organizations, government bodies, lawyers, professors, architects, and more. I wanted to make a work that would thank these partners, these bodies, for their collaboration and for our various relationships that grew from our collaborations. Together, we expanded our understandings of legacy and how it can be lived, and activated. Traditional ex-votos offered a beautiful form for gratitude, and they inspired my own versions of them.

You’ve talked about this project in terms of a love triangle in your exhibitions “Woman With Sombrero,” at Art in General in 2013, Yvon Lambert in 2014, and MAZ in 2014. Can you describe this role?

It is important to me that my work goes beyond metaphor, engaging the law and structures of control in both its finished form as well as through the process of creation. I believe that an understanding of how artistic legacy is constructed, shaped, manipulated, and shared is an important cultural issue. I don’t see art or an archive as a fixed or dead body, but as something alive and that continues to give. That’s not inevitable: to do so, it must be kept alive by remaining accessible, with the possibility for continual engagement. 

An artist’s work is complete at their death, but their legacy is in its infancy. I’m trying to understand Barragán and his legacy. And my effort to understand myself in relation to them is part of the work of The Barragán Archives, which I explored in the exhibition “Woman With Sombrero,” and others. While I was not permitted to see Barragán’s professional archive at the Barragán Foundation in Switzerland, I was given full access to his personal archive at Casa Barragán in Mexico City. Much of the first few years of the project grew from my research and hands-on exploration of the personal archive, and my inability to access the professional archive.

You have traditionally worked with systems of surveillance and loopholes in laws, as in the Failed States project (2012). Why did you decide to focus on Barragán and his legacy?

My work has continued to center around themes of access, power and the law since I first started showing in 1999. Before The Barragán Archives, I’d mainly engaged with government institutions such as CCTV operations, police, and secret services. With The Barragán Archives, I entered into a new territory of privatized power. I wanted to understand what it meant for an artist’s legacy to be controlled by Vitra, a corporation. To do so, I needed to engage with copyright law, intellectual property rights, and fair use doctrine.

I’ve explored questions around artistic legacy within my work before. Auto Portrait Pending (2005), is a work that confronts my own legacy, by way of my physical body and its relationship to the art market. To make the work, I signed a contract with a company to become a diamond when I die, which will be set in a gold ring. Until the diamond′s creation, the artwork exists only of the empty ring setting, the corporate contract, and a series of documents. While The Proposal takes on a similar form — a diamond with attendant paperwork — it does so in a very different context, with a different intention. The Proposal is a gift, intended to inspire another gift: the repatriation of Barragán’s archive to Mexico and its free accessibility to the public. 

There have been some criticisms of the project. Can you speak openly about this? And was it simply fascination that led to a genuine offer of the ring to Ms. Zanco?

Yes, I am always looking for opportunities in my work to directly engage systems of power, and to find the human core within a seemingly impenetrable system. In this case I found a powerful artist’s legacy that is constricted by corporate power.

Yet The Proposal is created and offered as a gift. It is both an artwork and a potential tool of negotiation. The ring avoids the market completely by not being for sale; it is non-transactional and therefore opens up the possibility of lasting relationships created by the act of gift exchange. The ring may only be exchanged for the return and public access to the archive.

Gift-giving is the transfer of property rights over particular objects. Property is not a thing, but a relationship among people through things. In order to remain alive, an artist’s legacy must be shared, experienced, and open. Offering the ring to Ms. Zanco is an opportunity to bring Barragán’s legacy out of private control and back to the commons.

What would happen after the archive is returned to Mexico? Where would it live, is there a plan?

As stated in The Family Agreement, a contract between the family and myself, about The Proposal:

The Artwork will exist in two periods: the proposal period and the engagement period. The Artwork will be displayed during both periods, as described in The Agreement.

The Artist will offer the Ring to the Archivist, in Switzerland, at the first exhibition of the Artwork. This offer will initiate the proposal period. In order for the Archivist to receive the Ring, she must agree to relocate the Archive from the Barragan Foundation, in Birsfelden, Switzerland, to a publicly accessible site or institution in Mexico. The Archivist may accept the Ring and the terms of the offer at any moment.

If the Archivist accepts the offer, the Family, the Archivist, and other relevant parties will negotiate the terms of the Archive’s relocation.

As you see from the contract, once The Archivist (Ms. Zanco) accepts The Proposal, she, the family and other relevant parties will negotiate a publicly accessible site in Mexico. This may be a library or a university, or similar, or perhaps even a new building built specifically for it. There are many possibilities.

The post “My work goes beyond metaphor”: A Conversation with Jill Magid appeared first on artcritical.

LESLIE MOODY CASTRO: I had the pleasure of attending your talk at SOMA, and I was really interested in how you spoke about the idea of art and the utopian, and its relationship to Cuba. Can you elaborate a little bit more on this?

WILFREDO PRIETO: Yes, it’s about the importance of art in a social universe, but the reality is that it’s not understood in every society as a Utopia as such. My experience with utopias was also shaped romantically in this sense. Cuba considers art to be a social and philosophical moment, and each of those facets has a hierarchy. I think that placing those conditions on art in Cuba makes us think a lot about understanding art in a different way. It’s not just about concepts, such as education or the existence of a cultural life, but also involves the difficulties that exist in life, and how much art can give back to our life. There is something really rich about seeing art with a different lens and focus.

What are your thoughts on utopia within the context of Mexico? How do you think your work translates in Mexico, and the distinct location of Kurimanzutto Gallery?

Much more than a context, art is something that in aspects of life comes in and makes contexts more profound, rather than relying or depending on a context. Remaining dependent on a context places different conditions, which are clearly reflected differently. Mexico is, of course, a country with an incredible matrix, including chaos and crisis, which are cultural generators. Crisis, paradoxically, generates great artists and great moments. I think Mexicans are good at tempting dialogue, confrontations with artists, and this is what I think is different about exhibiting here.

There is also something to be said about the fact that Mexico is always close to Cuba, in which it has similar direct references: cultural, historical, social, all of it. For me, it is like a school. To come to Mexico and do nothing more than walk through the streets you are continually receiving information and translating this information.

In terms of contexts, what do you think of the United States as a regional context? What are your thoughts on the proliferation of arts from Latin America and Mexico in the States?

I don’t think geography offers a different context but is enriched in other ways. Art is speaking a language, a direct, incisive message, and it does depend a bit on the context of culture of the individual who is seeing it, but not necessarily the location. I lived for a short time in New York and honestly it bored me. I think things happening there artistically, in my opinion, seemed too dependent on what the market dictated, which was creating a sense of self censorship instead of making work in which the market was encapsulated.

It has always been a place that could bring the best from other places, including Latin America. But the best of Latin America is happening in Latin America, it’s not happening in the United States or Europe. I think that’s why there’s a delay: when museums first start worrying about starting collections of Latin American art they are still two years behind in comparison to when the explosions in Mexico, Cuba, Colombia. There’s a tremendous tardiness. There’s a text by Gerardo Mosquera, which I love, that talks about the art from Latin America but not “Latin American Art” and this is also something I think is really important, to not have these things defining tags or limitations. 

Well, speaking of these relationships between contexts, people, and places: are you yourself interested in the thoughts or ideas that people project onto your work?

I think that the relationship that one has with the work in the moment is one that offers a relationship as a spectator, not a creator, as one that takes distance and can take someone to a place that they hadn’t even thought of. The work can change the path; it can offer a new route. The public is also so diverse that I think they simply enrich the language of art in a different way than say, criticism can, or any other type of communication. It’s a total adventure, though one that also has certain patrons, and the motives that come with them.

And when you are thinking of a work in a space, do you guide or think of this dialogue that can occur between the piece, the space, and even more specifically, the public?

I don’t necessarily think about the public, but certainly thinking about the space. I think space is another tool for communication. A work needs to live in a real space, which also includes a utopia — such as this exhibition at Kurimanzutto — or there can be others that really need the hierarchy of the white cube, and each one has completely different characteristics. That is to say, I believe the space, the museography, the curation, are also part of the work because they also activate communication.

Some of these tools are also the titles.

Of course, titles are very much tools. I think it is very important, when one constructs an order, that it has levels and each one of these has to be very well conceptualized when it is necessary. You see that you are activating something from a determined element. We ourselves have to move, but there is a compensation of elements that helps you make the idea in the space effective.

Speaking of space and the works, let’s talk a little bit more about the exhibition at Kurimanzutto. There is a very ephemeral piece outside the gallery itself, on the open street, titled Puñado de cobre, níquel y zinc (“a handful of copper, nickel, and zinc,” 2016). This work is almost an invisible gesture with which to open the exhibition and it will slowly become more and more invisible throughout the run of the show.

It will always be there. It will become more and more imperceptible with the soles of shoes walking over it, cars, rain, and it’s something that becomes more and more imperceptible throughout the entire month, and will also be more and more subtle, more lost within the space, but it endures. It really deals with the question of the abstract illusory conscious. The piece is also really made of illegal materials, since it is illegal to destroy money.

It is made with Mexican pesos. The coins have been turned into dust.

Yes, exactly. Yet what should be illegal is the taking this original mineral from its original location in order to convert it into money. That should be illegal. I like this contradiction as social consensus, how we have this concept that is so historically determined that now gives us what we think is a sense of clarity above the consent of its location of origin.

The post “Art in a social universe”: Wilfredo Prieto in Conversation with Leslie Moody Castro appeared first on artcritical.