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 Vallarta Living | Art Talk | June 2006 
Tijuana Transforms Into a Cultural Hotbed
 Elisabeth Malkin - NYTimes
| | Reflections of class hierarchies in Tijuana, Mexico: "The Housekeeper Series" (1999), by Alida Cervantes. (Sandy Huffaker/NYTimes) |
Tijuana, Mexico — In this city of perhaps two million, a junction of the first and third worlds where unequal economies flourish symbiotically, a vibrant new art movement has emerged.
Of course, the border with the United States has long informed the work of Tijuana's artists. But the city used to be mainly a jumping point to a better life in California. Now a steel wall at the city's northern edge cuts the journey short, and for many migrants, Tijuana has become its own destination.
From painting, conceptual art and photography to video and music, the city's artists now seem riveted not so much on border conflicts or a dream destination as on Tijuana itself: an experimental laboratory for people with hybrid identities and a growing global awareness.
"Artists today are as avidly concerned with the city itself as they are with the fence," said Rachel Teagle, curator of a new exhibition just across the border at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. Titled "Strange New World: Art and Design From Tijuana," the show documents Tijuana's cultural fervor with 130 works from 41 artists.
It's not that these artists ignore the barrier that separates this city from prosperous San Diego. That might be unreasonable, given that many Americans long to extend the wall along the entire length of the border to keep Mexicans out.
So Marcos Ramírez's contribution to "Strange New World" is an off-site highway billboard for motorists driving south toward the border. It depicts a gray-haired man in camouflage — a reference to the Minutemen, as some American vigilantes patrolling the frontier call themselves — looking toward the wall and the cluttered Tijuana hillside beyond. (The model is actually Mike Davis, a Southern Californian urban theorist.) The billboard exhorts: "Don't be a man for just a minute, be a man your whole life." Only the back of his head is visible.
Mr. Ramírez, known in the art world as Erre, said of his piece: "The fact is that man migrates. We all have to continue moving, and we will continue moving."
Much of this Tijuana-born artist's oeuvre transcends the city. "My work is about the shock of cultures, not just the United States and Mexico," Mr. Ramírez said as he drove an ancient BMW through Colonia Libertad, a neighborhood abutting the border wall. But he seems to relish confronting the border's paradoxes head on: in a less-than-veiled allusion to infiltration of the border by immigrants, he built a giant two-headed wood and metal horse, playfully titled "Toy an Horse," in 1997, directly on the border demarcation.
Tijuana's shantytowns perch on mountains of old tires; those wishing to leave build temporary shelters from cast-off garage doors and factory pallets, and mechanics construct tin men from discarded mufflers to advertise their talent. So many of the artists explore Tijuana's identity as a recycling point for American discards.
Jaime Ruíz Otis searches for materials in the Dumpsters outside the maquiladoras, assembly plants for goods exported to the United States. His "Trademarks" engravings begin with discarded industrial cutting boards bearing the imprint of mechanized stamping.
Inspired by the street mechanics' muffler men, Mely Barragán has produced aquatint engravings of heroic sculptures. After photographing vendors who assemble pushcarts from found objects, Julio César Morales scanned the images into his computer, outlined the forms of the carts and exploded them into their component parts for an installation.
Some artists examine Tijuana's class hierarchies: Alida Cervantes, for example, painted portraits of housekeepers who have worked for family members for years.
As the artists draw inspiration from the hardscrabble city around them, it is almost inevitable that their work is tinged with social activism. "There's a sustained eagerness to experiment, to find new forms, to find new ideas to develop utopian solutions to the many ills in the city," Ms. Teagle said in an interview.
The artists' collective Torolab is developing what its founder, Raúl Cárdenas, calls emergency architecture for Tijuana, where neighborhoods spring up overnight in unexpected places. "You do your beautiful master plan and you are ready to build your city, but the city is already there," Mr. Cárdenas said.
So he set out to develop a solution for nine women living in a Tijuana shantytown. In the first stage, they described where they would like to live. Their needs were modest, beginning with a safe place for their children to play outside. In response, Mr. Cárdenas designed a simple compound, but still has not raised the money he needs to build it.
For his documentary film "Maquilapolis," the artist Sergio de la Torre trained maquiladora workers to use digital video cameras so they could record their own lives. In his own photographs of factories, Mr. de la Torre strips the vast sheds of any human element so that they become abstract shapes against desert and sky.
In a city with virtually no galleries, collectors or arts financing, there is little of the kind of infrastructure that nurtures an art movement. Mr. de la Torre joined with two other artists, Shannon Spanhake and Camilo Ontiveros, like him graduate students at the University of California, San Diego, to create an artists' space, Lui Velazquez. It takes artists to Tijuana for residencies and is now setting up a film and video archive and a registry of local artists.
"Artists have become part of the dialogue, part of the process of change," said Ms. Spanhake, a former New Yorker who has planted tiny gardens in Tijuana's multiple potholes. She once sent two chickens wrapped in Mexican flags walking across the border into Arizona to attend a Minuteman rally.
Mr. Cárdenas of Torolab outfitted five people who regularly travel back and forth across the border with global-positioning equipment and tracked their location, speed and fuel consumption for five days. The collective compiled the data and then projected it as moving lines and circles onto a map of the region.
In the exhibition catalog, Ms. Teagle described the resulting video as "a poetic drawing," one that records "the intermingled spaces and lives that populate the strange new world that is Tijuana." |
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