Full Description
REMEX presents the first comprehensive examination of artistic responses and contributions to an era defined by the North American Free Trade Agreement (1994-2008). Marshaling over a decade's worth of archival research, interviews, and participant observation in Mexico City and the Mexico-US borderlands, Amy Sara Carroll considers individual and collective art practices, recasting NAFTA as the most fantastical inter-American allegory of the turn of the millennium. Carroll organizes her interpretations of performance, installation, documentary film, built environment, and body, conceptual, and Internet art around three key coordinates-City, Woman, and Border. She links the rise of 1990s Mexico City art in the global market to the period's consolidation of Mexico-US border art as a genre. She then interrupts this transnational art history with a sustained analysis of chilanga and Chicana artists' remapping of the figure of Mexico as Woman.
A tour de force that depicts a feedback loop of art and public policy-what Carroll terms the "allegorical performative"-REMEX adds context to the long-term effects of the post-1968 intersection of D.F. performance and conceptualism, centralizes women artists' embodied critiques of national and global master narratives, and tracks post-1984 border art's "undocumentation" of racialized and sexualized reconfigurations of North American labor pools. The book's featured artwork becomes the lens through which Carroll rereads a range of events and phenomenon from California's Proposition 187 to Zapatismo, US immigration policy, 9/11 (1973/2001), femicide in Ciudad JuÁrez, and Mexico's war on drugs.
Contents
Prelude. The Allegorical Performative
Introduction. Remix re: Mex REMEX: Toward an Art History of the NAFTA Era
City
Nafta-Era Performance and Conceptualism's Prehistory
Mexico City, Readymade: The "PIAS Forms," Mexico's 1968, and Los Grupos
"Naco" as the Taco: No-Grupo, Maris Bustamante's La patente del taco, and Melquiades Herrera's Object Lifeworlds
Post-1994 GDPS and Labor Wars; Institutional Critique and Incorporation
The Almost Ex-Teresa Generation
Vicente Razo's Anthropological Materialism
Yoshua OkÓn's Art and Administration
Minerva Cuevas's Logocentrism
Francis Alÿs, Santiago Sierra, and the Age of CuauhtÉmoc
Teresa Margolles, Remaindered
Woman
¿Desmodernidad? Literalists to the Core!
Polvo de Gallina Negra's Maternal Prosthesis
Reallegorizing the Female Form
Lorena Wolffer's "El Derecho de RÉplica"
Katia Tirado's Pub(l)ic Niches
Silvia Gruner's Fucked-Up Ethnographies
Nao Bustamante's Inter-American Pageantry
Border
NAFTA-Era Performance and Conceptualism's Prehistory
Art and Design: The Mexico-US Border after 1965
The Border Art Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo's Open Door and Laboratory
Post-1994 GDPS and Labor Wars; Institutional Critique and Incorporation
Guillermo GÓmez-PeÑa's North American Free Art Agreement
inSITE Specificity/Tijuana, Capital of the Twenty-First Century
From Undocumentation to the Undocumentary (Alex Rivera, Sergio Arau and Yareli Arizmendi, Lourdes Portillo, Ursula Biemann, Sergio De La Torre and Vicky Funari, Chantal Akerman, Natalia Almada, _________)
Postlude. REMEX re: Mex Remix: Untoward Art Histories of the Third Millennium
Acknowledgments
Notes
References
Index
