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Thus, this undeniable fascination for contemporary Mexican art has to do with a new kind of exoticism, a combination of ideological "morbidity" and allure for those extreme cases of a political/cultural anthropology, proving the wealth of globalization, its discourses, and strategies. Perhaps this could be seen as an investigation of the creation of a "perverted modernity" and its monstrous re-creations of the urban landscape. It permeates the works produced in the last few years: from Francis Alÿs ambulating through Mexico City with a gun or Daniela Rossell's prim photographs of Mexican "princesses," to Minerva Cuevas's altruist project, Miguel Calederón's pseudo-anthropological eccentricities, Betsabée Romero's automotive deviations, and Melanie Smith's chromatic investigations. It also includes the projects on urban configuration by Claudia Fernández, Pablo León de la Barra, and Carlos Ranc. Even artists and scholars from elsewhere have been drawn into Mexico's examinations of "perverted modernity." Recently, the French scholar Yves Belorgey extended to Mexico a research project on the residues of architectural modernism in several countries around the world that stem from sociological, urbanistic, and philosophical explorations on the fractures of modernity. In addition, the creation of art collectives in Mexico City and especially Tijuana-ToroLab, Nortec, and the video and virtual works of Fran Illich-operate in this intersection. The projects developed in these collectives are at the same time field research and museological reflections and are clear examples of an inescapable displacement of artistic practices.
We would have to consider to what degree contemporary art, especially in its Post-Situationist aspects, is in the avant-garde of social phenomena. Is it much broader than imagined or at least than that imagined by the culturally conservative groups, committed -as Cuauhtémoc Medina forecasted in a recent conference-to the defense of a hierarchical system of art? Is it a system of art grounded on "aesthetic" values inherited from a modernity that was erected on the notion of "universalism" derived from the sacred languages of the search for primitivist "purity," thus neglecting from that point to consider a possible evolution of the arts?5 This break is generational and cultural before being social. As Jean Claude Kaufmann asserted recently in a critical analysis of the political situation in France that can be easily applied to other identity crises of the notion of democracy:
[Contemporary societies] are not divided socially, as in other eras, but culturally and irrevocably. On the one hand the modern, open to the passionate questionings of the times . . . a youth impregnated with multiculturalism, dreaming of devouring the future, awestruck by the city lights even when it claims to be 'socially excluded' and trying to affirm itself through violent acts. Logically, the mass media and power are watching them, because the results are spectacular, and respond to the ability to be channeled towards positive ends. On the other hand, the shameful suffering of all those who can't understand this mess, their silent retreat into their cheap abodes. The new counter-revolution of white hairs . . . The excluded are the quiet wretched of modernity, the 'obsolete' ones, from neighborhoods where nothing ever happens, and whose forms of entertainment make society laugh. Those who adorn their yards with Snow White's dwarfs, [and] can't seem to understand that there is a second level.6
The non-hierarchical practices of contemporary art, which in Mexico have taken the place of the shortcomings of defective and outdated school systems and socialization mechanisms, are the territory where this generational fissure becomes clearly manifest.
For the kids who learned English not because it was imposed on them by "Northern imperialism," but because it was the lingua franca of techno music and the Internet, and because it was the means to access information, contemporary art is the territory for action that allows this generation to navigate in a flexible, horizontal, hyper textual system without any apparent borders. They are an urban minority, or perhaps one on the way to radical urbanization, whose presence, nevertheless, is quickly being affirmed despite resistance and incomprehension.
Notes
1. Interviewed by ICQ, 24 March 2002.
2. Ibid.
3. A multimedia center and part of the megalomaniac Center for the Arts project of the Carlos Salinas de Gortari administration; in existence since 1994. But, with its limited museographic capacity and a program devoted to research, the center has not managed to gather any proposals that were more "savage" or less technical (although it did sometimes work as a "producing house" for pieces exhibited at the Alameda Art Laboratory).
4. Ginger Thompson, "Migrants to U.S. Are a Major Resource for Mexico," The New York Times, March 25, 2002.
5. Cuauhtémoc Medina, "La más indirecta de las acciones: bastardía de orígenes, traición a la patria y oportunismo militante del juego curatorial post-mexicano," lecture at La Esmeralda, 18 October 2001.
6. Jean-Claude Kaufmann, "Les noveaux barbares," Le Monde, 26 April 2002, p. 12.
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