After decades on the periphery, the Mexican contemporary art scene is finally establishing itself on the international art circuit. Thanks to a surge in popularity from four major Mexican exhibits in the past year–in New York, London, Berlin and San Diego–it’s now difficult to find a major metropolis that doesn’t have at least one established gallery mounting new Mexican art. Early next year, Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art will attempt to outdo the recent big shows with its survey, “Made in Mexico.” The movement has reached “critical mass,” says Betti-Sue Hertz, who curated the recent San Diego Museum of Art show “Axis Mexico: Common Objects and Cosmopolitan Actions.” The combined effects of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the end of the Institutional Revolutionary Party’s 71-year stranglehold on power and the influx of private money into the fine arts are giving Mexico’s contemporary artists newfound creative and financial freedom. They have finally begun to emerge from the shadows of great Mexican modernists like Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo.
The new wave of Mexican artists work in an eclectic mix of styles, themes and media. Yoshua Okon and Miguel Calderon have made names for themselves by staging and videotaping car thefts–effectively mocking the capital’s ineffectual police force. Monica Castillo’s video “Dancer’s Self-Portrait” follows the choreographed movements of a painted ballerina. Domingo Nuno’s manipulated computer images in the series “Shanghaied Acrobatics” reveal his childhood love of Mexican comic books and newfound interest in Japanese anime. Teresa Margolles’s installation “Tongue” features a –real one, severed from a dead teenage drug addict. Alex Hank prefers his tongue in cheek, producing “Crime,” a huge glitzy sign that he says has no particular social message. Others have turned a critical lens on the country’s huge class divides; in her glossy, wildly colorful photos, Daniela Rossell captures members of her own social class–the ultrarich–in all their tacky glory.
It may not suit everyone, but Mexico’s new art clearly has youthful energy. Whether socially conscious or simply esthetically intriguing, these works manage to be both patriotic and global-minded. Even depressing photos of harsh Mexican life carry a thrilling unpredictability, reflecting a country teeming with cultures, colors and music. Mexicanismo doesn’t even have to mean Mexican anymore–works done in Mexico by Britain’s Melanie Smith, Belgian Francis Alys and Spanish-born Santiago Sierra are included in so-called Mexican shows. Even German uber-photographer Andreas Gursky will display a recent photo of a Mexico City landfill at the Boston show.
The current contemporary-art movement really got started in Mexico City in the mid-1990s. Frustrated with the conservatism of state-run museums, Okon and Calderon opened an independent exhibition space called La Panaderia, sparking the establishment of similar galleries in Guadalajara, Monterrey and Tijuana. The use of new media–including video and digital tools–attracted younger artists and the eye of international sponsors.
Around the same time, NAFTA brought “a flood of new products and ideas” into Mexico, says Abaroa. With the signing of the treaty, average Mexicans could buy products they had previously only heard about, like foreign art magazines and the latest CDs and tapes. Jaime Ruiz Otis’s installations feature IBM stickers salvaged from local export factories. His art “wouldn’t have been possible without [NAFTA],” he says.
The change in government in 2000 provided another boost to the new movement. Though the PRI never censored art–in fact, it set up cultural institutions and doled out art grants–its near-monopoly on financial support meant it decided whom to promote abroad. The bureaucrats tended to look toward the past, organizing grand surveys like “Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries,” which featured 3,000 years of Mexican art up to and including Rivera. Under the PRI, contemporary artists like Gabriel Orozco had to leave the country in order to gain recognition. By contrast, the National Action Party, or PAN, government has so far proven willing to support new talent. It has poured its clout into major surveys of contemporary art, including “Mexico City: An Exhibition About the Exchange Rates of Bodies and Values,” which debuted in New York last summer and moved on to Berlin in the fall.
With growing recognition has come increased value. Fernando Clamont of Christie’s auction house in New York has noticed a sharp rise in sales of Mexican contemporary works, which can now sell for as much as $25,000 each. Although most buyers are foreign, the movement’s biggest patron is Eugenio Lopez, the CEO of Mexican juice company Jumex and owner of one of the most envied collections in the world. By some estimates, he sponsors as much as 30 percent of all Mexican contemporary art. Other Mexican companies like Televisa, Corona and Bancomer are following Lopez’s lead, sponsoring exhibits and expanding their own collections.
Perhaps the only question that remains is how long Mexican art will stay hot. Some worry that the current fascination is just one of the art world’s many passing fads. Others are concerned that the PAN–sensing just how globally hip Mexican art has become–is growing more controlling. But for now, Mexican artists are enjoying their popularity and freedom. As another up-and-comer, Jose Davila, puts it: Mexico City is “the New York” of Latin American culture. Actually, it’s the Mexico City. That has cachet enough.
title: “Mexico S New Wave” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-23” author: “Douglas Mathias”
Gonzalez Inarritu is a hot property in Hollywood these days, and so are many of his compatriots. His friend and fellow Mexico City native Alfonso Cuaron is in England shooting the third Harry Potter installment, with Gary Oldman and Emma Thompson. The 24-year-old actor Gael Garcia Bernal, who starred in “Amores Perros” and Alfonso Cuaron’s “Y Tu Mama Tambien,” will soon appear as Che Guevara in a movie about the Argentine revolutionary produced by Robert Redford’s Southfork Pictures. The actress Salma Hayek won rave reviews last year for her Oscar-nominated film about the turbulent life of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. These directors and actors are on the cutting edge of a new wave in Mexican cinema that has inspired comparisons with the evocative work of Quentin Tarantino and Ang Lee–and generated impressive box-office receipts around the world. “They’re successful because they’re tuned in to the most popular international filmmaking styles,” says Carl Mora, a University of New Mexico lecturer and author of a book on the Mexican film industry. “[Hollywood] producers certainly see something in them.”
And so do audiences–especially Mexican ones. Though the sheer number of U.S. blockbusters dwarfs local offerings, the biggest-grossing movies in Mexico for the past four years have been homegrown productions like Carlos Carrera’s “El Crimen del Padre Amaro” (which starred Garcia Bernal in the title role) and Antonio Serrano’s “Sexo, Pudor y Lagrimas.” Some degree of commercial success may be inevitable, given the rising number of movies being made locally: the Mexican film industry produced nearly 30 movies last year, up sharply from eight in 2000 and just five in 1995. But they are also winning praise for their no-holds-barred, brutally realistic approach. Subjects that were long considered taboo are now fair game; “Padre Amaro,” for example, tackled the philandering of Roman Catholic priests and the church’s murky relationship with drug traffickers. “Today the doors are totally open in Mexican cinema,” says Alfredo Ripstein, a veteran film producer. “We never used to be able to talk about sex or the church. It was all very repressed.”
The greater cultural freedom coincides with the fall from power of Mexico’s long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). During the party’s 71-year reign, successive governments controlled movie ticket prices and closely monitored content. The defeat of the PRI in 2000 seemed to usher in a new era of democracy and freedom of expression, and the release of “Padre Amaro” bolstered those hopes. One anti-abortion group tried to organize a boycott of the movie, and Mexico’s top cardinal, Norberto Rivera Carrera, blasted it as “garbage.” But the assault backfired: drawn by the uproar as well as the hunky star power of Garcia Bernal, millions of Mexicans flocked to theaters–making “Padre Amaro” the country’s highest-grossing film.
The newfound liberation is still fragile. Just last week President Vicente Fox’s government proposed shutting down a state-run film school and the agency in charge of movie promotion and financing as part of a broader campaign to privatize the film industry. It also threatened to sell off the storied Churubusco Azteca Studios, which is to Mexico’s film industry what Rome’s Cinecitta has been to Italy’s. The proposed cutbacks triggered howls of protest in the moviemaking community and aroused suspicions that Fox, the country’s first openly devout Catholic president in nearly 100 years, was trying to appease a church hierarchy still smarting from the “Padre Amaro” debacle. “This attack is totally absurd,” says Carrera, the movie’s 41-year-old director, who received limited government financing for the project. “It just shows how ignorant they are.”
If approved, the government spending cuts will surely accelerate the exodus of Mexican talent to El Norte. The directorial diaspora was set in motion in 1993 by Alfonso Arau’s romantic fantasy, “Like Water for Chocolate,” which set a U.S. box- office record for a foreign movie. After that, Mexican filmmakers became all the rage in studio boardrooms across Hollywood. Now they are just as likely to venture out on their own; Guillermo del Toro, the director of comic-book-inspired films like “Cronos,” moved to Austin in the late 1990s and cofounded the Tequila Gang production company with Alfonso Cuaron and “Like Water for Chocolate” screenwriter Laura Esquivel.
No one has profited more from the current Mexican vogue than Cuaron and Gonzalez Inarritu. The script for “21 Grams” was originally written in Spanish, but–bolstered by the success of “Amores Perros”–Gonzalez Inarritu decided to switch languages “so I could have Sean Penn, Benicio Del Toro and Naomi Watts.” Cuaron, too, hit the jackpot on the strength of a small-budget gem, “Y Tu Mama Tambien.” Though the 42-year-old director had already done two Hollywood films, “A Little Princess” and “Great Expectations,” it was that exquisite coming-of-age film that landed him the coveted job of directing “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.” His production budget–more than $100 million–is a far cry from the $450,000 it cost to produce his first feature, “Love in the Time of Hysteria,” in 1991. Now based in New York, he has a bittersweet take on the state of the industry where he cut his teeth. “It’s very hard to put films together in Mexico,” Cuaron said last week from the “Harry Potter” set. “What is ironic is that at a time when there’s all this attention being paid to Mexican cinema, the Mexican government is proposing to close all these institutions that support it.” Like it or not, the next generation of Mexican filmmakers may have little choice but to follow him out of the country.
