Spend your weekend thinking
February 8th, 2008 by Felicia Feaster in Visual Arts 
(Photo by Philipp Scholz Rittermann: Gabriel Kuri, “Untitled (superama),” 2003 /Courtesy High Museum of Art)
I have to admit I didn’t go into TRANSactions at the High Museum — which opens tomorrow, Feb. 9 — especially revved up for incredible art. The show’s subhead is Contemporary Latin American and Latino Art, a phrase that doesn’t exactly get my art-going juices flowing. Shows organized around topics that vast and potentially formulaic tend to trigger my “issue art†gag reflex. I love political art and I love art about race, but art grouped into huge subsets of gender or sexual orientation or ethnicity can turn out to be grown-up versions of an “After School Specialâ€: art to help you reach packaged, superficial epiphanies along the lines of “oh, I didn’t know Latinos had feelings, too …â€
TRANSactions had the additional burden of one of those fussy, “academic†titles (half caps, half lowercase) that can really stick in my craw. But the show is actually a knockout despite those red flags. For anyone interested in contemporary art or just life in 21st-century America, it’s a must-see. It deals with things all of us should care about, from the Wal-Martification of our globe to the frothing fury the word “immigration†inspires in some Americans. There are a hundred points of entry into the show, from sports culture to feminist art, to hip-hop and consumer culture. Though it originated at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, as the High Museum’s Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art Jeffrey Grove pointed out during a tour of the show, Atlanta’s growing Hispanic community gives the two cities a shared interest in examining the Latino point of view.
By the way, if you have the chance to check out the show with Grove as your cruise director, try to do it. He’s giving a talk about one work in the show, “Paternity Test,†Thursday, April 3, at the High. His waggish energy and unique take add a fresh dimension to the stodgy gallery-talk tradition.
The show boasts emerging artists and some big names such as Alfredo Jaar and Ana Mendieta, whose photographs of her body’s imprint in beach sand gradually dissolved and filled with water are a profoundly moving testament to feelings of insignificance.
Mexican artist Gustavo Artigas’ video “The Rules of the Game,†despite a slightly comical “hook,†inspired a sense of real pathos. The artist had two boys sports teams — a Mexican soccer team and an American basketball team — play their games together on an indoor court. Yes, it’s a metaphor about two different cultures going about their lives side by side but utterly apart. But there was something poignant in the way the kids accepted their trophies after the game, and something in the simple fact of their coming together on the playing field that suggested a happier multicultural future will replace the ugly divisiveness of our own time.
I share Jeffrey Grove’s appreciation for the witty woven tapestry created by Gabriel Kuri. Kuri has translated his sales receipt from a Mexican Wal-Mart into a wall hanging, creating a funny homemade document of the temple of mass-produced, machine-made, anti-handicraft.
I also loved James Luna’s ode to the freak show half-man/half-woman in “Half Indian/Half Mexican.†In three black and white photos, the artist plays to stereotyped views of what “Mexican†and “Native American†should look like in the way he styles and shaves his hair.
Also included is an astounding frieze-like drawing of Tijuana by Hugo Crosthwaite. Crosthwaite lived in Atlanta for a year (he’s now living in the epicenter of hep, Williamsburg, Brooklyn), and another of his epic drawings, “Atlanta,†is showing at Mason Murer Gallery Feb. 15-March 9. Crosthwaite will deliver a lecture at 10:30 a.m. on Feb. 16. I cannot wait to see the drawing in person.
April 12th, 2008 at 3:58 pm
My favorite piece in the show has got to be Gabriel Kuri Untitled (superama), 2003. An everyday object captured on a grand scale draws your attention to it magnificently: the mundane magnified. And what does this magnification show us? The very mundane things a person from Mexico would buy at a Wal-Mart, Cheetoes being obvious among them; cheap American commodities that can be bought in bulk at an “everyday low price.” The implication of Wal-Mart, indeed its success, is built around a cultural attraction and fixation on abundance. The artist’s choice of specifically a Wal-Mart receipt makes itself an example of the tendency in “low-culture” for cheap excess that is often embraced in Hispanic culture (a theme carried out throughout the exhibit). Creative Loafing blogger Felicia Feaster suggests that Kuri’s use of the woven Wall-Mart receipt creates “a funny homemade document of the temple of mass-produced, machine-made, anti-handicraft.” I agree with Feaster in that the piece contrasts handmade art with mass-produced commodities, however, her assertion is short-sighted and the piece’s implications are far from funny. Feaster’s comment assumes weaving is universally a “handicraft” and that it would be conceivable for someone to create this sort of tapestry in the comfort of one’s home. As a result, Feaster misses the broader context this piece directs the viewer towards. There is nothing home-made or handicraft about Gobelin. Gobelin refers to a tapestry style and manufacture created by the Gobelin family in France in the 15th century. The Gobelin family manufactured works depicting traditional scenes and many of the activities of the French aristocracy. Many of the works were purchased for Louis XIV. In Kuri’s choice of technique, we again see a reference to culture of excess, but in this case it is historical and inherently Western in inception.
What we begin to see in visual content of this piece is a Wal-Mart receipt, a contemporary reference to the tendency in “low-culture” to desire cheap excess, combined with a technique that points at the historical root of this urge that is not genuinly Hispanic, but a colonial imposition of European ideals that is in part responsible for the crisis of identity among other issues within Latino and Latin-American culture.