The notion also applies to the recent works of Francis Alçs. Until recently, Alçs's work was a subtle analysis of the condition of artists and the purity of the creative act. The series The Liar and the Copy of the Liar (1994) speaks of the hesitation of artists, rather than being a critique of the all-encompassing notion of copyright. The piece Alçs designed for the Lima biennial of 2002, La fe mueve montañas (Faith Moves Mountains), is related to and demystifies Sierra's acts. It is also perhaps one of the first interventions that tackles the commotion of the September 11, 2001 attacks: a dislocated remake set in a dusty Lima suburb sharing a teleological approach to the mystic of "voluntary labor," as imagined by the "estheticians" of the 1960s' Chinese Cultural Revolution, plus the spectacular clean-up operation organized by firefighters and volunteers at Ground Zero.

Magali Arriola is probably right when she declares that the key to the change in the configuration of the Mexican art world is the notion of excess, which conceals the modernist notions of monstrosity and deviation. This idea is perhaps very hard to apprehend living in Mexico. Even so, it can easily be found in a comparison between the notions of "monstrosity" that marked the modern art discourses of George Bataille, Sergei Eisenstein, and André Breton, and the excess of signs generated by the icon of Aztec "bloody condition," the Coatlicue of the National Museum of Anthropology, or by the vehement murals of José Clemente Orozco, if not by Frida Kahlo portraying herself masturbating or embracing one of her female lovers. Because of their terrorist strategies and their violent charge, the works of Francis Alçs, Santiago Sierra, Miguel Calderón, and especially Teresa Margoles, question the levels of permissibility of art. They may be inconceivable in countries that could be ironically termed more "civilized"(although the term to be used here should be "police state-controlled") and are drowned by the weight of civil coercion and the power of lawyers.

The works of Teresa Margoles, like those of the former group SEMEFO (Servicio Medico Forense [Forensic Medical Service]), that took the acronym from the state's morgue-run system, to which she used to belong, are products that are proportional to the level of corruption of the authorities that offer its raw materials, corpses and body fluids from the morgue. The rascuache baroque, bordering on gore of Miguel Calderón and his insistence in representing street violence; Santiago Sierra's actions on the limits of the legal; Carlos Amorales's "sporty sacramental plays" the ludic, fascio-pedophilic, coprophagous configurations of Miguel Ventura, or the demented reconfigurations of "morphed" and "coatlicuazed" contemporary idols of Rubén Ortiz Torres and Eduardo Abaroa-that take us back, also, to the waltz of the idols choreographed by Sergei Eisenstein in October (1927)-are all actually unthinkable at any other latitude. In this sense, art still functions in Mexico as transgression, and in the recent reconfiguration of the relationship between audience and museum space, the museum, the gallery and the alternative space are established as "free territories" in an otherwise culturally rarified ambience.

It would not be the least of the paradoxes, then, that these works now provoke an international curiosity that can be confused with the changes sweeping the country after the expulsion of the PRI and the election of Vicente Fox. What is happening here is similar to what occurred in the latter years of the Soviet Block when hidden, but active, artists were suddenly "rediscovered" only because their existence was a proof of the disaster of a whole system. The same can be said of the current focus on Chinese artists and China as the country undergoing the most spectacular post-Cold War transition to a market economy.