The Incurable-Image: Curating Post-Mexican Film and Media Arts 9781474403368

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The Incurable-Image

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Edinburgh Studies in Film and Intermediality Series editors: Martine Beugnet and Kriss Ravetto Founding editor: John Orr A series of scholarly research intended to challenge and expand on the various approaches to film studies, bringing together film theory and film aesthetics with the emerging intermedial aspects of the field. The volumes combine critical theoretical interventions with a consideration of specific contexts, aesthetic qualities, and a strong sense of the medium’s ability to appropriate current technological developments in its practice and form as well as in its distribution. Advisory board Duncan Petrie (University of Auckland) John Caughie (University of Glasgow) Dina Iordanova (University of St Andrews) Elizabeth Ezra (University of Stirling) Gina Marchetti (University of Hong Kong) Jolyon Mitchell (University of Edinburgh) Judith Mayne (The Ohio State University) Dominique Bluher (Harvard University)

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Titles in the series include:

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Romantics and Modernists in British Cinema John Orr Framing Pictures: Film and the Visual Arts Steven Jacobs The Sense of Film Narration Ian Garwood The Feel-Bad Film Nikolaj Lübecker

American Independent Cinema: Rites of Passage and the Crisis Image Anna Backman Rogers The Incurable-Image: Curating Post-Mexican Film and Media Arts Tarek Elhaik Screen Presence: Cinema Culture and the Art of Warhol, Rauschenberg, Hatoum and Gordon Stephen Monteiro www.edinburghuniversitypress.com

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The Incurable-Image Curating Post-Mexican Film and Media Arts

Tarek Elhaik

>I

EDINBURGH ~~

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Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cuttingedge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: www.edinburghuniversitypress.com © Tarek Elhaik, 2016 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12 (2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ

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University Press A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 0335 1 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 0336 8 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 1111 0 (epub) The right of Tarek Elhaik to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

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Contents

List of Figures vi Acknowledgments vii Introduction: States of Curation 1 1.  Curatorial Work 21 2.  The Incurable-Image 56 3.  Roger Bartra: Intrusion and Melancholia 76 4.  Post-Mexican Fugue (Farewell to ¡Que Viva Mexico!) 103 5.  The Incurable Park: Fundidora 125 159 6.  Untimely Futures Epilogue 183

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Bibliography 186 Index 193 ,;

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Figures

1.1 Eduardo Abaroa, La Destrucción Total del Museo de Antropología, 2012 35 1.2 Eduardo Abaroa, La Destrucción Total del Museo de Antropología, 2012 40 1.3 Eduardo Abaroa, La Destrucción Total del Museo de Antropología, 2012 44 1.4 Silvia Gruner, Don’t Fuck with the Past, You Might Get Pregnant, color photograph, 1994 49 1.5 Silvia Gruner, In Situ, video (15 minutes), 1996 49 1.6 Silvia Gruner, detail from the group show Time Capsule Art in General, 2003 50 2.1 Rubén Gámez, La Fórmula Secreta, 1965 57 58 2.2 Rubén Gámez, La Fórmula Secreta, 1965 4.1 Mexperimental poster 109 4.2 Adolfo Patino, La Muerte del Maguey, gelatin print, 1976 113 4.3 Jesse Lerner, Magnavoz, 2006 113 4.4 Jesse Lerner, Magnavoz, 2006 116 127 5.1 Detail of a police patrol car, Mexico City 5.2 Inauguration of Parque Fundidora: handshakes 139 5.3 Poligono District 148 6.1 Fiamma Montezemolo, Echo, 2014 175 6.2 Fiamma Montezemolo, Echo, diagram sequence, 2014 175 6.3 Eric Meyenberg, Études Taxonomiques du Mexique Colonial et Contemporain 178 6.4 Eric Meyenberg, Études Taxonomiques du Mexique Colonial et Contemporain 178

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Acknowledgments

I’m grateful to all the intercessors and philosophical friends who made this work viable. In Mexico City, I should like to thank the curators, art historians, visual artists, filmmakers, journalists, writers, and anthropologists who welcomed my intrusion. Special thanks to Maria Ines Garcia Canal, Olivier Debroise, Federico Navarette, Cuauhtémoc Medina, Jose Luis Barrios, Gabriella Gomez-Mont, Lourdes Morales, Ari Volovich, Rogelio Villareal, Tayana Pimentel, Frida Gorbach, and Roger Bartra for lending an ear during my fieldwork. Special thanks to the conceptually driven and anthropologically informed artists for giving permission to use their work: Erick Meyenberg, Silvia Gruner, Eduardo Abaroa, Fiamma Montezemolo, the late Ruben Gamez, and Jesse Lerner. Their images are more than mere illustrations to an academic text: they are the soul of the assemblage diagnosed in this book. Omar Marin at the Filmoteca de la UNAM and the staff at the Cineteca Nacional have been invaluable sources for preliminary archival research conducted at both institutions. In the Bay Area, a special note of gratitude goes to colleagues and friends at the Anthropological Research on the Contemporary Collaboratory (ARC) in UC Berkeley, and to Paul Rabinow in particular. Under his guidance I was able to test more than one concept before settling on the one created and elaborated in the following pages. I should also like to thank my former colleagues and graduate students at San Francisco State University. The graduate seminars on curation and the image taught at SFSU were the laboratory where this book took shape. I want to thank, in particular, Randy L. Rutsky, Aaron Kerner, Daniel Bernardi, Jenny Lau, Rodrigo Sombra, Nicole Lajeunesse, Jim Snydor, Leah Lo Schiavo, and Enrique Fibla. I should also like to thank my new colleagues in UC Davis for their warm welcome. Edith Kramer at the Pacific Film Archive has been a friend and mentor all along these years. I’m also indebted to several friends and colleagues in Rome and Naples who gave me the opportunity to experiment with earlier conceptualizations of the incurable-image. Special thanks to Iain Chambers, Viviana Gravano, Lidia Curti, Giulia Grechi, and Franco Ferrarotti. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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A book acquires form and public life through editorial curation and care. I’m therefore grateful to both Kriss Ravetto and Martine Beugnet for welcoming a media anthropologist to their series. Fernando Feliu-Moggi and Fionn Petch have been helpful in translating sections in Chapters 3 and 5 respectively. Last, but not least, I want to extend my warmest gratitude to Alexander Farrow without whom I would have not been able properly to assemble this book.

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We have to manage to fold the line and establish an endurable zone in which to install ourselves, confront things, take hold, breathe – in short, think. Bending the line so we manage to live upon it, with it: a matter of life and death.1 Gilles Deleuze (philosopher) We are taught in Mexico to look into the past in a very contrived way, and it’s a way which assumes many assumptions, not only about a notion of a “glorious past”; our archeology, our big culture, the treasures of the last thirty centuries etc . . . we are also taught to look at all these things in a very conservative way, as if it were outside of ourselves. This was the way I was taught to look at Mexican culture.2 Silvia Gruner (artist) Assemblages are composed of preexisting things that, when brought into relations with other pre-existing things open up different capacities not inherent in the original things but only come into existence in the relations established in the assemblage.3 Paul Rabinow (anthropologist)

1. Gilles Deleuze on Michel Foucault, Negotiations, p. 111. 2. Silvia Gruner, personal correspondence with artist. 3. Paul Rabinow, The Accompaniment: Assembling the Contemporary, p. 123.

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To Fiamma and Sami

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Introduction

States of Curation This study builds on a participant-observation of curatorial platforms and experimental media arts in Mexico City. It animates a trans-media assemblage that grew out of a convergence of three interconnected tableaux whose motions form a triptych: 1. the productive role played by the discipline of anthropology in shaping the contours of Mexican modernity and its avantgarde media arts and visual culture; 2. the lessons learned from the tradition of experimental ethnography and the important “Writing Culture”1 debates in academic anthropology in the United States during the 1980s; and 3. the so-called “anthropological turn” in visual studies and contemporary art from the 1990s on. Writing Culture, in particular, had opened promising conceptual and formal directions informed by radical critiques of representation, ranging from the interrogation of the ethnographer’s voice of authority characteristic of classic ethnographic cinema to shedding doubts on the very counternarratives and strategies of self-representation and collaborative tactics deployed in both indigenous media and auto-ethnographic documentaries.2 Writing Culture had also drawn much conceptual energy from film and media studies, had radicalized the subfields of visual anthropology and the anthropology of art (slowly blurring them in the process and shifting attention away from the so-called radical alterity of non-Western art and cultural forms), and inaugurated a shift towards a search for alternative forms of composition beyond the monograph and the classic ethnographic film. Today, its experimental ethos, as well as its fears and hesitations, live on in ways that have not yet been properly evaluated.3 Working creatively through the impasses of cross-cultural anthropology and media arts, these debates managed to fray detours and shortcuts for those of us who entered these conversations through the privileged hindsight afforded by the unfolding of more than twenty years, by the usual conceptual delays across disciplines, and by the errancies of previous anthropologists in multiple modernities. Some of the questions raised during the Writing Culture discussions have been fully addressed and worked through; others are still Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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open to reformulation, while some concerns have simply been discarded and laid to rest. Said differently, the afterlife of Writing Culture ought to be approached as an expansion of roads taken and not taken after the 1980s, and as the art of posing good questions while strategically and creatively designing fieldwork mise-en-scènes. This inter-medial ethos continues to have a chance for a viable and generous future while retaining a concern for the singularity of the anthropological project and its mode of producing inquiries and research mise-en-scènes in this expanded field. Indeed, one of the fascinating aspects of the debates surrounding the Writing Culture upheaval was to eschew converting this concern for anthropology’s singularity for a disciplinary border patrolling. This book’s debt to Writing Culture takes a form of a care that seeks to preserve this inter-medial ethos: a sense of disciplinary continuity, to be sure, but one that should not thwart our passionate search for innovative models for conducting and conceptualizing participantobservation-based inquiries. This is even more pertinent for those of us who work alongside media arts and the curatorial thinking that underwrites them. By the time this inquiry was initiated, the Writing Culture paradigm had already acquired an uneasy, Janus-faced situation. With the initial revolt being relegated to the background in the face of crises4 and pressing global political issues, humanitarian and culturalist agendas became the dominant horizon. For some of us, however, the point of entry into anthropology – the post-Writing Culture moment – was not so much a question of modernity versus postmodernity, or merely thinking about the futures of anthropological research after culture; nor was it also a matter of joining the chorus of critiques of orientalism and of experimental ethnographies aiming at decentering and decolonizing, through the medium of non-Western cultural forms, the categories of so-called Euro-American Modernity. For this author, another approach was needed to be worthy of the complexity of Mexican modernity as well as the post-1968 mutations of Mexican anthropology and anthropologically informed media arts. The last, in particular, quickly emerged as frankly at odds with the usual gestures of reversal that govern, with militant force, the subfields of cross-cultural media anthropology, visual anthropology, and the anthropology of art. What was urgently called for instead was an inter-medial anthropology that not only would complicate the relation between the humanities, the social sciences, and the arts but one that would commit to refashioning its understanding and uses of the very prefix “geo-.” By turning its attention away from cross-cultural geographies towards a geophilosophy5 of departures and arrivals modulated by Mexico City’s chaotic intellectual life, this book diagrams an alternate montage of territory, creative act, media arts, curation, and participant-observation-based research mise-en-scènes. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



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The inquiry was conducted during an effervescent episode in Mexico City’s cultural life that coincided, politically, with the temporary fall of the nationalist ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in 2000 and, intellectually, with the onset of the virulent and salutary “post-Mexican condition”6 provocatively diagnosed in the late 1980s by anthropologist and public intellectual Roger Bartra. Proclaimed in the wake of daring scholarly efforts aiming at stimulating a second-order Latin Americanism, Bartra’s post-nationalist ethos was opening up Mexican anthropological thought to an unthinkable outside, signaling a breakdown of the hitherto dominant regional and national research scales.7 But, where most intellectuals in the country were content to follow the usual tensions between particularism and universalism characteristic of both postcolonial theory and Mexican culture studies, Bartra’s post-Mexicanism built instead on a more pessimistic, radical, critical tradition for which passionate attachments to the nation-state’s historical identificatory mechanisms was the only thing that needed provincializing. Under his pen, the Mexicanist horizon would be relentlessly submitted to a combination of a thorough dissection and Weber’s grim diagnostic of modernity. Of course, it would be mistaken to link these shifts in intellectual and national political culture with the curatorial logic of late capitalism and the internationalism of contemporary art worlds. As Manuel De Landa, Paul Rabinow, and other assemblage workers have taught us, the external logic of assemblages differs from the internal logic of totalities. Indeed, the postMexican assemblage examined in this book indexes instead a fascinating interplay of the old and the new: indeed, a vertiginous shuttling back and forth between the aesthetics of the historical modernist avant-garde, on the one hand, and ongoing, combative symptomatologies8 of the contemporary, on the other. This “contem(pt)orary”9 condition, as the prominent Mexico City-based curator Cuauhtémoc Medina noted, needed to be curated in conceptually and formally innovative ways that secede from nationalist art, organicist modes of thinking about the body politic, and substantive humanist theories of curation. This condition and this milieu, it was specifically argued, were marked by an ungovernable “discrepancy”10 that threatened the historical interconnectedness between a profoundly nationalist “mediated community,”11 the cosmopolitan ethos and Mexicanist aesthetics of the avant-garde,12 and contemporary experimental media arts and curatorial networks. This reconfiguration put particular pressure on professionals of culture and their ­institutions – curators in particular. They were urged to conceptualize the modes in which the legacy of a staunchly hyphenated cosmopolitan–­nationalist avant-garde media culture, fascinatingly but nonetheless ideologically imagined in the post-revolutionary period of the 1920s Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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and 1930s, was to be inherited, worked through, mourned, remediated, and ultimately let go of. This state of affairs, it was further suggested, ultimately generated a malestar en la curaduría,13 a curatorial malaise whose prognosis was deemed incurable though, as we shall see, not untreatable. As a first consequence, symptom, image, and concept entered into a zone of indiscernibility. The futures of the very concept of “Mexico” became therefore hinged on debates about the neo- or post-avant-gardist status of the contemporary. To this end, the term avant-garde is employed here in more than mere epochal terms, as the historical intersections between Mexicanist revolutionary political culture and the cosmopolitical project of “forjando patria” (building a motherland) framed by the vanguard anthropologist Manuel Gamio in his eponymous classic book of 1916. Compulsive invocations of the avant-garde in Mexico are signs of an ethos and temporal mode that block any attempt to free thought from these habitual isomorphisms: between the contemporary and the historical; or, indeed, among the contemporary, the present, and the actual.14 It is in this sense that Cuauhtémoc Medina’s modernist notion of “contem(pt)orary” interestingly points to an affectively15 framed form of untimeliness that does not lend itself to curatorial practice business as usual. This other, diagnostic and therapeutic form of curation, however, ought not to be articulated through a series of artistic and exhibitionary practices that would rescue, out of the material returned by symptomatic repetition, a liberating and revolutionary authentic real that spectators would ultimately identify with. Another conception of curation, and therefore of the image, needed to be invented, one radically unhinged from a too general understanding of the symptom. Hence Mexico’s state of curation: a schizophrenic interplay of progressivist enthusiasm of/for the Mexicanist historical avant-garde and the antimodernism, anti-anthropological attitude of post-Mexican contemporary arts. Rather than returning to the ur-scene of these debates, this book proposes a conception of curation as both repair and counter-actualization, today. It does so by introducing the concept of the incurable-image: an image of thought and a sign of double untimeliness that cannot be curated in the professional sense of the term, only. In a sense, the task at hand was to follow the lead of my interlocutors, primarily in Mexico City, in their attempt to curate the incurable of the post-Mexican condition. From this perspective, the “post” would thus be nothing more and nothing less than an intense site of friendships and rivalries in which pretenders attempt to curate the discrepancy between epochal and ethos-oriented meditations on the futures of Mexico. Bartra’s “post” would then index an assemblage caught in the process of seceding from the totality of Mexican national culture, as well as discrepant experiments aiming at curating the concept, the symptom, and the  image Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



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of Mexico beyond the contempt16 of/for the contemporary. Neither the representation of a before nor an after, the “post” might be perhaps best approached as a mode of endurance specific to a symptomless image and concept of curation. Put differently, the task of diagnosing and curating post-Mexican film and media arts, as the book title suggests, begins with the milieu, indeed the medium, of the incurable-image. And for the “post” not to turn into another bad repetition, into a “neo”, as attested by the curatorial and artistic wave of neo-Mexicanisms,17 a more difficult question would have and remains to be asked: can the relations of force animating the postMexican assemblage be curated without reference to the polity framing its cosmopolitics? During a two-year fieldwork period in Mexico City, I have listened to, observed, and learned from fascinating and heated debates that soon would divide the cultural scene into various affective epicenters and institutional gerrymandering. In anti-positivist fashion, and animated by intellectual interest and curiosity, I occasionally participated and took sides, yet have tried to keep my attention alert, on the lookout for those untimely futures brewing on the side of the road, whispering in our ears the promise of emergent, intermedial forms in a permanent state of creation. Participant-observation in the art world can be quite difficult when curatorial and experimental media art practices become entangled, as they did in Mexico City, in turbulent power dynamics, in local and international institutional critiques, and in competitive alliance-making strategies whose stakes were often fueled by a constellation of “minor vices.”18 What seemed at stake underneath all of it was, of course, nothing less than the futures of the very concept of “Mexico” and the modes of existence potentially indexed by these futures. This book therefore stages carefully assembled curatorial thought experiments and experimental arts that have interceded in and remediated this turbulent milieu, all the while speculating on the post-cosmopolitan futures of Mexico. These experiments, I hasten to add, do not shelter these fragile futures from contingency and realpolitiking. They are, and will continue to be, threatened by a nationalist research pathosformel and habitual modes of linking form and affect: There is a sense, however, in which [Mexican social sciences] are entirely encompassed by national history, for the very justification of Mexico’s social scientific establishment has been tied to national development, to the formation of a national conscience, and to addressing the kind of issues that Andrés Molina Enríquez called “Great National Problems.” It is fair to capitalize this expression because it names the fetish of Mexican social science. Social sciences are supposed to respond to Great National Problems, when in fact it is the social sciences that have named and given form to those problems in the collective imagination.19 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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As an antidote to this ambivalent state of affairs, the post-Mexican works and interventions assembled here are sensed from a near future in which the fetish of Mexican nationalist anthropology and its attendant cosmopolitan modernist aesthetics are vigilantly deterritorialized through joyful, humorous, and iconoclastic curatorial and media art practices. This book takes the reader on a conceptual road trip that begins with Eduardo Abaroa’s installation The Total Destruction of the National Museum of Anthropology in which debris of the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City are exhibited following a fictitious detonation of the architectonic and curatorial icon of Mexican modernity. We then read a newspaper headline in the cultural section of El País where the artist Santiago Sierra refers to Mexico City as a “tumor-city.” We hear the cavernous echoes of a conversation among a group of curators, anthropologists, and artists who have taken on the task of pathologists and oncologists by naming themselves after a cancerous tumor, Teratoma. The reader comes across artists and curators doing collaborative repair work in the emergency rooms of Laboratorio 060, a curatorial collective named after Mexico City’s emergency phone number (060). The reader is temporarily thrown into the medical dispositif of Rubén Gámez’s watershed experimental film La Fórmula Secreta: Coca Cola in the Veins in which an uncanny autopsy is being carried out. The book spends time on the work of curators Rita Gonzalez and Jesse Lerner who refer to their curatorial platform of sixty years of avant-garde media in Mexico as Mexperimental, ventriloquizing the 1920s and 1930s ethno-technological assemblages of the Futurist Estridentista manifestos and Eisenstein’s anthropological ode ¡Que Viva Mexico!. Illustrations from Roger Bartra’s watershed experimental ethnography The Cage of Melancholy present the reader with another image of Mexico, one that stretches the imaginary of the vitalist organicist tradition prominent in Mexico, through the creation of an analogy between contemporary Mexicans and an amphibian indigenous to Mexico, the actual and mythical axolotl salamander, a non-human form of life that disturbs the identificatory logic of the psycho-historical tradition of the “Psychoanalysis of the Mexican.” The book concludes on a meditative note evoked by Erick Meyenberg’s “anthropological” installations in which spectacular and elegantly suspended LED rings illuminate the baroque former convent, renamed Laboratorio Arte Alameda. Yet this book is neither a culture studies of an experimental tradition nor an anthropological monograph on subjects within a national culture. Nor is it a cultural historiography of another alternative modernity. The practices it probes will not quench the reader’s thirst for things Mexican. By examining the conceptual interconnections between the modernist sensibility of the Mexican anthropological-national-cosmopolitan tradition, the historical Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



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avant-gardes, and contemporary art, the book’s intervention operates at the frontier of media anthropology, curatorial practice, and contemporary media arts, in and beyond Mexico. This frontier is the point of entry into the assemblage diagnosed – curated? – in this book. It is therefore as much a critical and clinical inquiry into the visual, inter-medial, and curatorial culture of contemporary Mexico as it is an ethical inquiry that evaluates the lessons learned through, alongside, and beyond the geographical site that generated the ethnographic and conceptual experiment in the first place. The Incurable-Image is therefore at once critical, clinical, ethical, and pedagogical. It is also cognizant of its emplacement in that region of discourse called Anthropo-logy and is indebted to those eventful and experimental inter-medial moments that have made humanist visualizations and figurations of “Anthropos” tremble.20 The book’s larger intellectual context is therefore the so-called “anthropological turn” in contemporary art 21 and the modes in which anthropos is being curated, today.22 Perhaps, this book could be approached as a manuel d’instruction and an outline for an anthropology of the image that joyfully turns its back to the humanist, postcolonial, representational, and people-oriented cross-cultural framework that has preoccupied artists, anthropologists, and curators under the regime of the so-called ethnographic turn in contemporary art from the 1990s on. This contemporary anthropology foregrounds inter-medial practices that problematize the modernist panegyric to medium specificity – from the reduction of cinema to film or, indeed, the conflation of anthropology with its privileged medium of ethnography – and that temporalize media assemblages through ongoing fractures between the contemporary and the present. These practices enable us to avoid returning to debates that have already ossified into unproductive dead-ends: namely, questions of representation and cultural alterity, on the one hand, and issues of analog modernity versus digital23 post/premodernity, on the other. It is, in fact, the very indifference, in Mexico, towards the Ethnographic Turn and its cross-cultural fixation on the Other that has inspired and has taken this experiment in a direction different from those that routinely search, via the medium specificity of ethnos, for inter-medial alternatives to Western modernity. Mexico’s visual, curatorial, and media culture could only be studied through the difficult task of conducting an anthropology of the West.24 In light of this immanent ontology, the book is therefore an immersion into the contemporary visual, curatorial, and inter-medial culture of that uncanny Western modernity called Mexico. Moreover, the post-Mexican assemblage and its untimely futures are being diagnosed in the larger context of an ongoing breakdown internal to our societies of control. In these, as Deleuze had famously noted, “even art” has been subsumed by multimodal and multimediated (financial) circuits of Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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the debt and exchange, including critical curatorial forms of exchange and circulation. From the perspective of second-order participant-observation, curatorial thought experiments and experimental media arts in Mexico lend themselves to a singular form of theatrical thinking25 that reconfigures an older assemblage constituted of three “conceptual personae” which have long ceased to be mere figures: the curator, the anthropologist, and the artist. They function, for better or for worse, as an indivisible aggregate, as variables in a triptych. I have found the notion of personnages conceptuels26 very useful to think of this triptych as an empirical inquiry of conceptual personae that cannot be reduced to figurations of Mexicanist aesthetics, only. The difference between conceptual personae and aesthetic figures consists first of all in this: the former are the powers of concepts, and the latter are the powers of affects and percepts. [. . .] The great aesthetic figures of thought and the novel, but also of painting, sculpture, and music produce affects that surpass ordinary affections and perceptions, just as concepts go beyond everyday opinions.27

Created to defamiliarize our everyday usage of terms, such as curator or anthropologist, conceptual personae have an imperceptible role in the play of post-Mexican inter-medial life. Neither metaphors nor allegory, they introduce a difference by generating, simultaneously, new images of thoughts as well as forms of care and intervention in a wide range of venues. In light of this, my participant-observation-based inquiry has led me to ask the following set of questions: What motion is taking place between figure and persona, today? What is at stake when actual forms of mediation are discrepant with the subtle iterations and intercessions enabled by conceptual personae? Specifically, I have been problematizing the rapid ascent of the Curator, as a new figure of the public intellectual, as well as a new figure of care, in the context of transnational networks and assemblages that link curatorial and media art worlds to “the experimental moment in the human sciences”? How does one then conduct an ethical and conceptual inquiry into contemporary art and curatorial worlds in and beyond Mexico? Often mistakenly diagnosed as an effect of the recent “social turn” in contemporary art from the 1990s on, this assemblage of personae ought to be approached, indeed, as both a legacy of the fascinating, anthropologically driven historical avant-garde in Mexico and as a sign of a more profound mutation of control societies. In fact, we might have already entered, today, what can be called a post-social “state of curation,” a health state that ought to be problematized and curated in ways that can no longer be indexed by the Durkheimian, modernist, and organicist concept of society.28 Indeed, our current continuous attention to states of curation would be the image Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



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our thought has taken in the shared context of a damaged cosmopolitan and humanist horizon. This book examines how, amid the malaise of the post-Mexican condition, this health state could be worked only through the combined care of the anthropologist, the artist, and the curator. If there is an important lesson to be learned from Mexico, it is that curation requires us to address it as a question of health in the philosophical, clinical, and theatrical senses of the term. This book’s key concept of the incurable-image is extracted from this context and from my interlocutors’ generous working assemblages and ontology of curation, one enabled by the singularity of the Mexican tradition of the historical avant-garde and modernity in which the anthropologists, the artist, and the curator have always – for better or for worse – worked hand in hand. Their search for a new conceptual idiom, at once clinical and ethical, organic and inorganic (but never organicist), is a form of repair and maintenance of damaged post-cosmopolitan life and an antidote to exhausted culturalist and indigenista frameworks. The question of curation and its uncanny double, the concept of the incurable-image, are, indeed, linked to the adjacent concepts of nihilism, vitalism, and humanism. In Mexico, specifically, curating becomes a vitalist imperative to remediate the conceptual constellations designed during the 1920s and 1930s – iterated, contested, and reframed in the 1960s – to manage the life and death of the post-revolutionary figure of the New Man and the then twin futurist concepts of mestizaje and estridentismo exalted by the Vanguardia. What is refreshing, today, about the Mexico City-based curatorial collectives I have researched is that the curator, the artist, and the anthropologist have emerged not as antipathetic conceptual personae as they are often presented in the ethnographic turn. Instead, they are continuously reconfigured, reassembled, and reattached through a dynamic relation, owing to their ontological and epistemological interconnectedness in the very fabric of contemporary Mexican public life and visual culture. As a consequence, curators, anthropologists, and artists are not encountered here as agents with vocational and professional occupations in public life with their specific speeds, spaces, and temporalities. In the conceptual elaborations of these curatorial collectives the curator, the anthropologist, and the artist encounter one another as “Conceptual Personae.” Staging thus these three rival and friendly conceptual personae opens up a space that exceeds both the experiential horizon of cross-cultural intersubjectivity and ongoing intellectual efforts to generate a transnational public sphere through cosmopolitan, national, and regional art-curatorial circuits routinely generated amid societies of control. It engages the task of curation less as an authored or collective history of exhibition or, indeed, as the sole domain of contemporary art29 than as a conceptual Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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pedagogy immanent to the force field of contemporary inter-media culture. It is in this specific sense that this book sets in motion a broader reflection beyond the actual work of my Mexico City-based interlocutors – without whom the questions raised here would have been impossible in the first place. It approaches curation thus to make sense of the fate of image studies when media anthropology and fieldwork shift their energies from ethnography to “concept-work.” Indeed, this book’s central concept – the incurable-image – serves the purpose to think of curation and its uncanny double as an image of thought: as a task of caring for the work of creating and conceptualizing both images that think, as well as a thought without images. It is in this sense, and this sense only, that the post-Mexican condition ushers less a post-imagistic cosmopolitics than another form of thinking the very concept of Mexico. The curatorial platforms and media art practices examined here point to an outside to Mexican cosmopolitics and mark the breakdown of the incurableimage of the New Man – the “cosmic” Race30 – curated through decades of cosmopolitan modernism and revolutionary visual culture. Hence the importance to tackle these questions from the perspective of an expanded understanding of curation that exceeds the exhibitionary modalities that host these media artworks. To do so I have found it indispensable to create such a concept, functioning as the uncanny double to curation, as its shadow. The incurable-image is therefore extracted from the eventful convergence of the ailments of the post-Mexican condition and the larger context of the ethnographic turn in contemporary art. The incurable-image is a concept specific to the visual and intellectual culture enacted by the iterative assemblage art – anthropology – cinema rehearsed throughout this book. Not unlike the pharmakon and those concepts that present a Warburgian ambivalence (for example, snake31), the incurable-image is a doubled and enfolded concept with an intractable pathos formula. It infects and inflects curation as the “radical step of positing the immanence of sickness and health in which critique would necessarily be a synthesis of patient and doctor, poison and antidote.” The hyphen between the incurable and the image is the creative repair work called upon in such a synthesis. Chapter 1 re-evaluates the dominant concepts that form the so-called ethnographic turn in contemporary art, including the cross-cultural approach. Taking cue from anthropologist and public intellectual Roger Bartra’s provocative notion of a “post-Mexican condition” (1992), Silvia Gruner’s pioneering archaeophobic video Don’t Fuck with the Past, You Might Get Pregnant, and Eduardo Abaroa’s iconoclastic installation The Total Destruction of the National Museum of Anthropology (2011), the chapter meditates and speculates Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



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on the lessons that can be learned from this assemblage of seemingly nihilistic gestures and post-anthropological attitudes. In light of this, the chapter introduces the contemporary anthropologist’s mode of curation through an attempt at answering the question: What is Contemporary Anthropology? Vitalist in orientation, the proposed contemporary anthropology reappropriates the concept of curation from the art world and inflects it in ethical and clinical terms. The chapter announces the conceptual orientation of the book by arguing that the stakes behind this “assemblage-work” (Rabinow, 2011) are nothing less than the differential futures brewing in the contemporariness of contemporary anthropology and contemporary curation. This future, the chapter argues, can be sensed through a careful exploration of the friendship and rivalry between the three “conceptual personae” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994) that make up the iterative assemblage diagrammed and decomposed in the book: the anthropologist, the curator, the artist. The “incurable” is presented in Chapter 2 as the “emerging property” (De Landa, 2011) and “ethical substance” (Foucault, 1982) of the assemblage formed by the three conceptual personae encountered in the introduction: the anthropologist, the curator, the artist. This chapter begins with a discussion of theories of the Contemporary Image in the context of both the ethnographic and anthropological turns in visual studies. It then proceeds to problematize those conceptions of the image that take the cross-cultural dimension as the main generative matrix of visual culture and the media artwork. From the 1990s on, some of the most compelling conceptualizations of moving-image and time-based media have been forged under the so-called “anthropological turn” in film and visual studies. From Laura Marks’s The Skin of Film to Catherine Russell’s Experimental Ethnography to George Didi-Huberman’s L’Image Survivante or, more recently, Jacques Rancière’s The Intolerable Image; from María Inés Canal’s La Imagen desorbitada to Documenta13’s commissioning of Javier Téllez’s installation and video Artaud’s Cave to the Mexico City-based curatorial collectives Laboratorio 060/Emergency and Curare, one can begin to sense the contours of a generalized malaise in contemporary curatorial and visual culture. In light of this, what emerges is a form of care for a complex assemblage composed of cinema – anthropology – art. This book argues that the impact of these debates lives on as it continues to be under radical re-evaluation and examination in a constellation of contemporary moving-image media and art practices. With this background in mind, the book carefully revisits this inter-medial tradition from the perspective of an inquiry into experimental films, video installations, media art works, and curatorial platforms in contemporary Mexico. The result of this re-evaluation is both a meditation on the trope of curation and the creation of the concept of the “Incurable-Image,” emblematically figured in the c­ross-cultural Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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a­vant-garde film that haunts all the inter-medial practices analyzed in the book, Sergei Eisenstein’s ¡Que Viva Mexico!. Chapter 2 detects this malaise and introduces the book’s key concept of the “incurable-image”: a species of images that throws us into clinical, ethical and pedagogical struggle. A limit to both ethnographic and curatorial practice, this struggle is symptomatically devalued, concealed, and discouraged by what can be called our “states of curation.” The concept of “the Incurable” is one way in which to work through this material insofar as it points to the limit of the psychotherapeutic treatment, ethnographic work, and curatorial practice itself. The hyphen between the “incurable” and “the image” is therefore the very inter-medial space explored here. This chapter extracts and outlines three lessons that can be learned from the work of the incurable-image: a clinical lesson that parametrizes and modulates the diagnostic and the therapeutic; an ethical lesson that parametrizes the pedagogical and the social; and a lesson in untimeliness that parametrizes the historical and its imperceptible becomings. The incurable-image and the three lessons learned from Mexico provide us with an image of thought, a conceptual pedagogy, and a form of repetition that render more tolerable the creative risks required to resist and take pleasure amid post-social states of curation. In light of this, concept work and conceptual art gradually emerge as anthropology’s incurable-images: intensive sites of repetition where borders have historically been erected where encounters ought instead to have been cultivated. Chapter 2 also examines the opening sequence from Rubén Gámez’s watershed experimental ethnographic film La Fórmula Secreta: Coca Cola en Las Venas (1965). It discusses, in particular, two photograms that uncannily bind the opening scene’s clinical and medical dispositif to the emerging post-Mexican condition that anticipates the curatorial, anthropological, and artistic works discussed in the book. The chapter suggests that Gámez’s film also anticipates, specifically, a clinically oriented mode of curation. La Fórmula Secreta’s opening sequence provides us with an incurable-image and an intriguing point of intrusion into the diseased body politic of the postMexican condition, and the autopsies and modalities of intrusion celebrated by the curatorial platforms it has affinities with. The Emergency Room of La Fórmula Secreta thus leads us to the Curator’s Clinic where the generous etymological registers invoked by the concept of curation are elaborated: cure, care, priest/cura, editing/montage/assemblage (a cura di), curare (poison, pharmakon), and the incurable. I reflect here on the terms that ground the dialogue between contemporary anthropology and curation through a case study of three virulent Mexico City-based curatorial platforms. Specifically: the curatorial groups Teratoma, Curare, and Laboratorio 060 whose names hint at the contemporary appeals of the pathological and inorganic in conNot for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



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temporary art and curatorial practice. Images of disorder, intrusion, and disorganization in the living organism and body politic, Teratoma, Curare, and – from a different perspective and institutional agenda – Laboratorio 060 challenge the organicist orientation of dominant curatorial practice. Their critical and clinical style of practice suggests the continued relevance of the trope of intrusion as the very condition of any curatorial thought interested in harnessing the toxic and therapeutic nature of the incurable for a health to come. Indeed, these critical and clinical terms complicate the anthropocentrism of global curatorial practice and the postcolonial constellations that underwrite them. Chapter 3 explores the postnationalist and postcosmopolitan diagnostic work of Roger Bartra, leading public intellectual figure in contemporary Mexico. It is both a portrait and a symptomatology of a fellow anthropologist playfully intruding in what he calls the “melancholic post-Mexican condition.” “Bartra” stands here both for the conceptual persona of the Anthropologist and for a sign of a slow and patient disarticulation of the historically constituted racialized citizen-subjects and media-objects staged by postrevolutionary cosmopolitan modernism and avant-garde art/film practices. Bartra’s larger project of doing an anatomy of Mexicaness can be seen as an antidote to the psychoanalytical inclination of generations of Mexican cosmopolitan–nationalist intellectuals from Samuel Ramos’s classic Adlerian “Psychoanalysis of the Mexican” to Octavio Paz’s Freudian psychohistories of Mexican solitude.32 Bartra has also been a key figure to curators as well as conceptual artists explored in this book, from Eduardo Abaroa’s The Total Destruction of the National Museum of Anthropology, discussed in Chapter 1, to Erick Meyenberg’s installation Forjando Patria explored in the last chapter. Chapter 4 is a meditation on the watershed curatorial project Mexperimental: 60 Years of Avant-Garde Media Arts from Mexico. Curated in 1998 by Jesse Lerner and Rita Gonzalez as a visual and conceptual probe into the post-Mexican condition, Mexperimental has had an enduring impact on my ethics of curation and pedagogy of moving images. There, I zoom in, specifically, on the historical and contemporary figurations of one of the incurable-images of Mexican modernity and visual culture – the maguey plant (Agave americana). The maguey is not only a key rural icon of the postrevolutionary nationalist, technocultural and ethnographic imaginary of 1920s and 1930s Mexico but also a complex, transdisciplinary object located at the intersection of art history, avant-garde cinema, and anthropology. Heroized in Diego Rivera’s murals and in Dr Atl’s landscape paintings, monumentalized in Sergei Eisenstein’s ¡Que Viva Mexico!, and reappropriated by irreverent experimental filmmakers from the 1960s on, the maguey has left an enduring impression on the anthropological, political, optical, and curatorial unconscious of ­postrevolutionary Mexico. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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This chapter examines three contemporary experimental documentaries that propose an alternative montage to nationalist and vanguardista uses of the maguey. In Rubén Gámez’s Magueyes (1962), Olivier Debroise’s Un Banquete En Tetlapayac (2000), and Jesse Lerner’s Magnavoz (2006), the maguey emerges as the incurable-image of the post-Mexican condition, and each of these experimental documentaries can be approached as setting in motion the “swan song” of both Mexican cosmopolitan nationalism and nationalist cosmopolitanism. Chapter 5 is a pedagogical experiment in curatorial design that takes issue with humanist and socially oriented forms of collaboration in the age of ethnography. In 2013 I had the opportunity to impart a one-week seminar and a public lecture in the context of the “Curation and Critique” series programmed by Javier Toscano at the Escuela Adolfo Prieto in Mexico’s iconic industrial city of Monterrey. My seminar was designed to explore the concept of the incurable-image with twelve participants active in Monterrey’s contemporary art scene. To this end, we embarked on a thought experiment and a collaborative essay that would diagnose one of Monterrey’s postindustrial landmarks: Parque Fundidora. Immediately adjacent to our seminar classroom, the park became an excuse to think through our intrusion alongside the “emergency” and “crisis” from which Monterrey ails. The chapter is divided into two parts. The first part is an introductory essay in which I diagram, with his complicity,33 Javier Toscano’s curatorial work. The second part consists of a string of two-page responses by each of the seminar’s participants that examine the interplay of control and curation in the very layout of what we have come to call the “Incurable Park.” Through collaboration, this chapter tests the limits of ethnography, curation, and conceptual pedagogy. Moreover, and perhaps more importantly, Mexico’s art scene is extremely centralized around its capital’s cultural activities. Bringing into the conversation the art, film, and curatorial scene of a “provincial” city such as Monterrey functions as an internal counterpoint to both this book’s author and his interlocutors’ very complicity with Mexico City’s hegemony. This chapter thus sharpens the conceptualization and radical critique of the cosmopolitics of contemporary art worlds. The final chapter speculates on the future of contemporary anthropological “installations” by reappropriating the very term “installation” beyond its traditional home in the art world. Such reappropriation, indeed theft, invites the reader to sense the incurable-image as a form of life that harbors and struggles with a futurist mode of care. This symptomatology enables a renewed encounter between the conceptual personae composing this book’s ­assemblage – curator, anthropologist, artist. The personae they repeat are “not just a matter of diagnosis. Signs imply ways of living, possibilities of Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



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existence, they’re the symptoms of life gushing forth and draining away.”34 Ultimately, these incurable-images and iterative assemblages begin to release untimely futures in which the artist, the anthropologist, and the curator use inter-media experimentation as part of a demanding ethics of immanence to endure our states of curation. Notes  1. James Clifford and George E. Marcus (eds.), Writing Culture: The Politics and Poetics of Ethnography.  2. See the important anthology edited by Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Visualizing Theory, and the cross-cultural reflections on cinema and media arts in the editorial work of Faye D. Ginsburg, Lila Abu-Lughod, and Brian Larkin; A. Guneratne; Hamid Naficy; Lucy Lippard; Michael Renov; Ella Shohat and Robert Stam.  3. See George Marcus and Paul Rabinow’s Designs for an Anthropology of the Contemporary; Arnd Shneider and Christopher Wright’s Anthropology and Art Practice; Arnd Shneider and Caterina Pasqualino’s Experimental Film and Anthropology; and Ana Maria Forero Angel and Luca Simeone’s Beyond Ethnographic Writing. Of important note, here, is Craig Campbell’s ongoing work on indigenous media and the curatorial and artistic experiments under the umbrella term “Ethnographic Terminalia.”  4. Janet Roitman has shown how the trope of crisis functions as a narrative device that blocks critical work and experimental forms of thought. See her Anti-Crisis.  5. Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of “geophilosophy” in What is Philosophy? examines the emergence of figures and forms of thinking as a function of an interplay of milieu, territory, and polis. The concept was created to understand why the cities of ancient Greece provided a fertile milieu in which philosophy and the figure of the philosopher could emerge. Similarly, this book’s geophilosophy seeks to understand how the convergence of anthropology, art, and cinema in Mexico City – the chaotic and metastatic tumor-city as it is often refered to – resulted in the cultivation of post-humanist forms of curation and figures of the curator. Geophilosophy is another way of diagnosing Mexico City’s state of curation and status as one of the most intense (and, at times, toxic) epicenters in contemporary art worlds.  6. Chapter 5 explores in detail the work of Roger Bartra. See his Blood, Ink, and Culture: Splendors and Miseries of the Post-Mexican Condition and my “Intrusiones Mutuas: Metálogo Con Roger Bartra” in Revista de Antropología Social.  7. In his deconstructionist The Exhaustion of Difference: The Politics of Latin American Cultural Studies Alberto Moreiras identifies a shift toward a “second-order latin Americanism” (93) in the work of various intellectuals in the region, including Roger Bartra whose writings he takes a great deal of care to analyze and critique. Moreiras sees in Bartra’s work a difficult tension between the production of an outside and the external, “counter-lucidity of the thinker” (144) who sets out to Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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interrupt the lucid, identificatory logic of the nation-state’s ideological apparatus and networks of power. Bartra’s call for an abandonment of the nation-state’s ur-objects is framed by Moreiras as an example of a highly risky “move to go from within Latin Americanism towards the outside of Latin Americanism, to its limit [. . .]” (140–4).  8. As we shall see, symptomatology and symptom are used in Deleuze’s specific, technical sense: that of an increasing convergence, today, between “the critical and the clinical.” The psychoanalytical suspicion towards images and their attendant reliance on hermeneutical strategies of decipherment between manifest surfaces and latent depths is eschewed in what follows. For psychoanalytical approaches to the image and the symptom see W. J. T. Mitchell’s What Do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images and Lydia Liu’s The Freudian Robot: Digital media and the Future of the Unconscious.  9. Cuauhtémoc Medina, “Contem(pt)orary: Eleven Theses” in e-flux no. 12 (2010) debates on the contemporary, 2010, http://www.e-flux.com/journal/contemporary-eleven-theses/ 10. Olivier Debroise, Alvaro Vazquez Mantecon, and Cuauhtémoc Medina, La Era de la Discrepencia: Arte y Cultura Visual en Mexico, 1968–1977 (Mexico City: Universidad Autónoma de Mexico, 2008). 11. See Dominic Boyer’s Understanding Media: A Popular Philosophy, p. 57. 12. Scholars, curators, artists, and critics have already underlined the militaristic etymology of the Spanish word vanguardia, as well as the French term avant-garde. In his article “The Idea of ‘Avant-Garde’ in Art and Politics” Donald Egbert identifies the generative function of the Saint Simonian sociological tradition in Mexico in shaping the contours of the term around a constellation of modernist figures, with a particular emphasis on the engineer and the artist. See also Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo’s Mexico at the World’s Fairs for a reflection on the intellectual context of the Cientificos under the Porfiriato. Such critiques of the historical avant-garde’s forward-looking and progressivist futurism have recently generated alternative calls for a “rear-guard.” 13. The title of a short essay by curator Itala Schmelz in the journal Curare’s watershed issue on curation and the figure of the curator. 14. See Paul Rabinow and Anthony Stavrianakis’s co-authored Designs on the Contemporary: Anthropological Tests for their compelling framing of untimeliness as a series, passage, and motion between various temporal sheets of the present, the actual, and the contemporary. These passages are enabled by “participant– obversation-based inquiry” and concept work. 15. Affect is employed throughout this book as a force that is distinct from affections or emotions emerging from lived experience. See Claire Colebrook’s excellent “Earth Felt the Wound: The Affective Divide” for a critique of the “affective turn” in contemporary culture and theory: “‘The affective turn’ accounts for the emergence of language, music, morality, and art in general by referring to the lived body’s desire for self-maintenance (In a similar manner the ethical turn was also a turn back to social relations, feelings and duties: and we might ask why Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21.

22.

23.

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this turn back occurs just as humanity is facing a world where there may be an unlived?)” (49–50). Medina is not helpful, however, when he relies on ideological frameworks and geopolitical terminologies such as “North Atlantic” art world. It keeps us stuck in a problematic and, indeed, resentful dynamic of periphery and center. ¿Neomexicanismos? Ficciones identitarias en el México de los ochenta was the title of an exhibition held in 2011 at the Museo de Arte Moderno. In Designs on the Contemporary Rabinow and Stavrianakis caution against the toxicity of these vices that range and vary from disdain to disparagement to ressentiment. See http://cueflash.com/decks/Key Concepts of Nietzsche’s Philosophy. I have focused on the deployment of “envy,” in particular, as a minor vice that alas continues to haunt the relationship between anthropology and contemporary art worlds and between academic and non-academic worlds in general. See Chapter 1. Claudio Lomnitz-Adler, Deep Mexico, Silent Mexico: An Anthropology of Nationalism (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), p. xvi. Raul Ruiz speaks of “des images qui tremblent.” Making “anthropos” tremble is the calling (vocare) of the artists, filmmakers, participants, interlocutors, and scholars who inspire this book. This body of work is exemplified by books such as: Hal Foster’s now classic The Return of the Real: Art and Theory at the End of the Century; Arnd Shneider and Chris Wright’s Anthropology and Art Practice; Arnd Shneider and Chris Wright’s Contemporary Art and Anthropology; Claire Bishop’s Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Poltics of Spectatorship; Miwon Kwon’s One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity; George Marcus and Paul Rabinow’s Designs for an Anthropology of the Contemporary; George Marcus’s Para-Sites: A Casebook Against Cynical Reason; Alex Coles’s Site-Specificity: The Ethnographic Turn; Okwui Enwezor’s Intense Proximity: An Anthology of the Near the Far; and Olivier Debroise, Alvaro Vazquez Mantecon, and Cuauhtémoc Medina’s La Era de la Discrepencia: Arte y Cultura Visual en Mexico, 1968–1977. See Paul Rabinow, Anthropos Today (2003). For readers interested instead in a staunchly anti-modern, “perspectivist”, and indigenista line of inquiry into the question of anthropos see also, Viveiros de Castro (2012). Another perceptive, post-ethnographic line of research can be found in Tim Ingold’s RadcliffeBrown lecture provocatively titled “Anthropology is Not Ethnography” (2007). It would be a mistake to translate these divergent views on “anthropos” through a rigid dualism between ontologically and case studies- (casuistry) oriented modes of thinking. Though my interolocutors and I would find it difficult to think of Mexico as never having been modern, we would all benefit from assembling, beyond irony, these divergent positions on “anthropos.” Such a reassemblage would less foreclose their incommensurable differences than underscore the anthropophagic orientation of contemporary anthropology. In the age of the digital humanities and “cyber-anthropology” (Escobar, 1994), there are invaluable pedagogical lessons to be learned from the combination of Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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assemblage thinking and an emerging anthropology of digital media. This emerging anthropology of digital media worlds, objects, and infrastructures ought to be attuned, specifically, to the intensive curatorial logic of late capitalism. The curatorial machine and prototypes designed in this book frame the “digital” less as an enthusiastic celebration of the “new” for the sake of the “new” or as a mere techno-utopian promise of a neo-cybernetic revival. Humble, the curatorial machine “enfolds and unfolds,” to borrow from Laura Marks, the old and the new, “culture” and “techne,” “anthropos” and “ethnos,” and virtual and actual forms of life. Media worlds ought to be approached as an origami-like universe that puts in uncanny proximity a multiplicity of technologically mediated forms of life that complicate the dualism of analog and digital all the while foregrounding their differential capacities. See Chapter 6 per Eric Meyenberg. 24. See Paul Rabinow’s Essays on the Anthropology of Reason. To frame Mexico as an uncanny Western modernity is indicative of an urgency to find analytical tools beyond those of postcolonial studies and of the historiographic school of alternative modernities. This urgency requires from us the invention of creative forms of inquiry akin to those at work in the oeuvre of Roger Bartra (see Chapter 3). In this sense, I disagree with Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo’s review of Bartra’s La Jaula de la Melancholia where he claims that Bartra’s work is “much more than a critique of an identity characterized by the desire to incorporate Mexico into the modern western world” (522). As we shall see, Bartra’s work is not interested in engaging the geopolitical and identitarian anxieties of so-called peripheral modernities. For pionnering attempts to find a line of flight through these competing scholarly geopolitical frames see Roberto Tejada’s National Camera: Photography and Mexico’s Image Environment and Rubén Gallo’s Mexican Modernity: The Avant-Garde and the Technological Revolution. It goes without saying that these observations are always, in the final instance, a function of the point of view of the researcher that, far from being given, ultimately produce the task of thinking and the pleasures it generates. Claudio Lomnitz-Adler unhesitatingly refers to Latin America as the “western extremity of Europe” (14) in Death and the Idea of Mexico. Regardless of whether one agrees or not with these positions, what emerges from these discussions is the increasing untenability of negative definitions of Mexican modernity as categorically non-Western. 25. Samuel Weber refers to Deleuze, Derrida, and others as “theatrical thinkers” in Theatricality as Medium and, in like manner, Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli astutely deploys the notion of the “theatrical event” in relationship to the large-scale public installations of Mexican Canadian media artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer. See her article “Shadowed by Images: Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and the Art of Surveillance” for an exploration on Deleuze’s (and Deleuze and Guattari’s) singular “theatrical thinking.” 26. In addition to the well-established figures and prototypes which have fueled anthropology’s medial imagination – the “Bricoleur,” the “Engineer,” the “Filmmaker,” and the “Indigenous” – this book foregrounds the “Curator” as a figure of mediation indispensable for visualizing, diagnosing, and interpreting Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



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contemporary assemblages. In keeping with Lévi-Strauss’s observation that the Bricoleur derives his poetry “through the medium of things,” this book explores how the anthropologist, today, can learn to derive his/her poetry both from the care for (cura) and the soul of (anima) media assemblages. 27. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy? (65). In his Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy Manuel DeLanda singles out the counter-actualization powers of conceptual persona, as a set of enigmatic logical operations that animate concept-work: “[t]he quasi-causal operators behind these effects of exoand endo-consistency are referred to as ‘conceptual personae.’ Thus Deleuze writes [in What is Philosophy?]: ‘The conceptual personae is needed to create concepts on the plane, just as the plane needs to be laid out. But these operations do not merge in the personae, which itself appears as a distinct operator.’ Conceptual personae are endowed with all the characteristic of the quasi-causal operator. Much as the latter must inject as much chance into the singular and the ordinary in virtual series, ‘the persona establishes a throw of the dice and the intensive features of a concept.’ And much as the operator is said to extract events from what actually occurs (that is it performs ‘counter-actualizations’ or ‘contre-effectuations’), in philosophy it is the ‘conceptual persona’ that countereffectuates the event” (215). 28. Put differently, the emergence of the figure of the curator ought to be framed less in epochal terms – that is, an effect of the demise of the welfare state and the rise of neo-liberal economics – and more as a remediated form of care less and less grounded in traditional “social” formations. This is why it would be oxymoronic to speak of an emerging “society” of curation. See Paul Rabinow’s Essays on the Anthropology of Reason; Manuel DeLanda’s A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity; Eduardo Batalha Viveiros de Castro and Marcio Goldman’s article “An Introduction to Post-Social Anthropology: Networks, multiplicities, and symmetrizations”; See also the “Post-Social Workshop” organized at McGill University by Tobias Rees; Bruno Latour’s Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory; Brian Massumi’s Parables of the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation; and the Leonardo Electronic Almanac journal issue “Without Sin: Freedom and Taboo in Digital Media” (vol. 19, no. 4 [2013]). Finally, the “Social Turn” is an expression used by Claire Bishop who takes issue with the hopeless humanism and humanitarianism of contemporary social art/ curatorial practices. The polemic, indeed panic, triggered by her Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship is symptomatic of a larger curatorial malaise. These anxieties also index the inclination of various sectors within the art world towards visual activism and collaborative, community-oriented work. The philosophical and anthropological assumptions that underwrite these polemics are discussed in Chapters 1 and 5. 29. See Paul O’Neill’s The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Cultures and Terry Smith’s Thinking Contemporary Curating. Both offer valuable insights regarding ongoing curatorial mutations in contemporary art worlds and are useful companions for thinking curation in expanded terms, within and beyond the boundaries Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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30.

31.

32. 33.

34.

The Incurable-Image of contemporary art such as, for example, Smith’s focus on the composite figure of the curator–artist. In his watershed book La Raza Cósmica (1925), José Vasconcelos articulates a fifth race that not only synthesizes Mexico’s official racial topologies of Criollo, Indian, and Black into a radiant process of biocultural hybridism – the Mestizo – but also triggers a futuristic and gnostic post-civilizational and post-racial horizon hosted by what he calls “Universopolis.” Alongside Manuel Gamio’s Forjando patria: pro-nacionalismo (1916), La Raza Cósmica marks the culmination of Mexicanist cosmopolitics. The snake is the incurable-image of Aby Warburg’s mythical Kreuzlingen lecture on the Hopi Indians’ snake-dance ritual. Written during Warburg’s stay in a sanatorium, where he was under the care of the psychoanalyst Ludwig Biswanger, the lecture was set up as a performance in which Warburg was interpellated, as both a patient and anthropologist of images, to demonstrate signs of recovery and proof of recovered sanity following a mental health crisis. While recognizing the widespread, cross-cultural status of the snake as two-sided symbol of illness and health, death and life, Warburg nonetheless went on to “admonish his audience to leave behind the dark realm of the snake and return to the bright light of the Sun (Enlightenment)!” (Hans Belting, An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body, [33]). See Samuel Ramos’s “El psicoanálisis del mexicano”; Octavio Paz’s El laberinto de la soledad; and Rubén Gallo’s Freud’s Mexico: Into the Wilds of Psychoanalysis. See the chapter “The Uses of Complicity in the Changing Mise-en-Scène of Anthropological Fieldwork” in George Marcus’s Ethnography through Thick and Thin. This chapter’s use of complicity is also indebted to the notion of “authorsupervisor of the experiment” in Vertov’s The Man with the Movie Camera. Here again, anthropology and cinema converge around the concept of experimentation as complicity (and vice versa). Gilles Deleuze cited in Aidan Tynan’s article “Deleuze and the Symptom: On the Practice and Paradox of Health.”

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CHAPTER ONE

Curatorial Work

Montage and Animation From the mid 1990s on many anthropologists have rallied around cinematic and media arts tropes to account for their increasingly complex fieldwork mise-en-scènes, multi-sited ethnographies, and contemporary figurations of “anthropos” and “ethnos.” In a now classic essay titled “The Modernist Sensibility in Recent Ethnographic Writing and the Cinematic Metaphor of Montage” George Marcus foregrounded Soviet avant-garde film artist Dziga Vertov’s The Man with the Movie Camera as a powerful prototype to account for the simultaneities, movements, temporalities, and, more broadly, the non-linear dynamics generated by our multilayered fieldwork mise-en-scènes. Marcus’ essay had fascinated and inspired many of us who were training as cultural anthropologists with a medial perspective. Some of us also noted that both the status of montage as metaphor, as well as Marcus’ distinction between realist and modernist ethnographic modes, then very much necessary, would have to be qualified and shown contingent at a later stage. This amendment, we thought, would foster a new relationship between media arts and anthropology beyond the opposition between literalism and metaphoricity,1 on the one hand, and beyond the opposition between realism and modernism,2 on the other. In a recent conversation, Marcus reiterated his commitment to the initial “affinities” not only between moving-image media and anthropology but also, and more broadly, between the conceptual arts and experimental ethnography: My own personal evolution in this direction since Writing Culture is marked by the mid 1990s essay on the emergence of multi-sited ethnography. This was before the expansion of the internet, but it did envision, in a tentative way, a terrain in which fieldwork could no longer be what it used to be. At the same time I became interested in certain projects of installation and conceptual art that involved inquiry similar to fieldwork in their production. [. . .] While I don’t think ethnography is or should be the same as these art movements, my attraction to the latter captures something in terms of practice that I think ethnographic inquiry is lacking and needs very much. (Elhaik and Marcus, 2012) Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Since then, many cinephile anthropologists have suggested that we could approach media art forms by directing our attention to a “film’s anthropology” and to the complex modes in which technology is always “encultured.” These anthropologists have underscored, in particular, how “studies of narrative films made by people about their own societies are often rich in ethnographic registers.”3 Adding to previous discussions on the techno-politics of representation in both indigenous media and ethnographic cinema, others have gone so far as to suggest that our discipline’s research imagination is “cinematic and anthropological”,4 at once. Thanks to these genuine efforts a useful venue was opened up for anthropological studies of media worlds alongside and beyond “the textual strategies of film studies.”5 More recently, the concept of “animation” was also added to our media anthropological repertoire. The concept of animation was introduced, specifically, to make sense of the new materiality of digital media objects and infrastructures, and to account for the life and motion of media assemblages in (post)industrial contexts. In an article many media anthropologists, including myself, consider to have become a canonical text, Teri Silvio eloquently notes that we increasingly find ourselves these days surrounded by all kinds of animated characters. They dance across our cinema and computer screens and sit on our desks to keep us company at work; they beckon us into shopping malls, museums, and airports; they show up on our credit cards and dangle from our cell phones and book bags; they run, on their wooden, plastic, or furry little feet, across the Broadway stage and through the pages of novels and academic essays. Over the past 20 or so years, without much fanfare, animation has become a ubiquitous part of daily life in the postindustrial world.

Animation has, in fact, become so widespread and productive it has now morphed into the very medium of contemporary politics and politically oriented art practices. One can see this at work in Voz Alta, a 2008 largescale public installation by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer that reanimates, through an elaborate digital dispositif which converts urban space into a screen, the ghosts of students massacred in Mexico City’s Plaza Tlatleloco in 1968; or again, in a hologram protest and virtual march against the new gag laws in Spain under the slogan: “you will only be allowed to express yourself if you become a hologram.”6 Curation In recent years, the concept of curation, too, has emerged as another key form of figuration of visual culture and media assemblages. Curation not Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



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only emerged as the driving force behind the institutions and networks of contemporary art and curatorial worlds, it has also increasingly come to index the emergence of a new form of life and figure of care, the curator. The rise of the curator seems to be filling the void left by both the withdrawal of the figure of the public intellectual and the crisis of the contemporary university. Moreover, it is also in the context of a refashioning of the rapport between academic and non-academic worlds – between academic and art worlds in particular – that the recent so-called “ethnographic turn” in contemporary art has been generating intense conversations and collaborative dialogues among anthropologists, artists, and curators. Since the 90s an increasing wave of challenging art events occurred that shows significant similarities with anthropology and ethnography in its theorizations of cultural difference and representational practices. At the same time, there has been growing interest in anthropology for contemporary art that started from a problematisation of the different possible ways to communicate ethnographic findings and insights. This interest has been referred to as the sensory turn in anthropology and ethnographic research and is exemplified by anthropologists who are collaborating with artists, by artists who are creating projects generating anthropological insights, and by art projects that are produced as outcomes of ethnographic research.7

Yet, while ethnography – sensory ethnography, especially – has been both generously and problematically reappropriated by the global art world – and conversely anthropologists are turning to research-led art practice – curation has seldom caught the conceptual attention of anthropologists of media. Curation is, indeed, more than just the new medium of contemporary media culture; it is also a welcomed addition to the well-established gestures of bricolage, animation, and montage. To this end, curation ought to be conceptualized not only as an exhibition-oriented practice or as the force that holds together our digital culture, it is also an image of thought and a figure of care that puts pressure on ethnographic montages, animations and bricolage. A curatorially inflected anthropology aims, in fact, at cultivating an ethics that reassembles the prefixes which dominate its disciplinary imagination: “anthropos” and “ethnos.” In short, curation has become an anthropological problem in a “growing and hyper-connected world of analog and digital information.”8 As an anthropological problem, a curatorial form of ethics and a curatorial mode of thinking can equip us in our efforts to repair the breakdowns and ordeals generated by the pressures brought on both “the human figure” and “the culture concept.” I am, of course, not suggesting we ought to adopt another grand narrative for a postmodern and postcultural age, à la Frederic Jameson – a sort of “curatorial logic of late capitalism.” But I am, indeed, suggesting that anthropologists and ethnographers could benefit a great deal Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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from harnessing, for conceptual purposes, the logic of curation immanent to contemporary media and visual culture. Ever since the publication of Hal Foster’s now classic essay, “The ArtistAs-Ethnographer” (1996), and more recently Okwui Enwezor’s panegyric for the curator-as-ethnographer,9 the current regime of contemporary art and contemporary anthropology has gradually moved toward both an intolerance and communion of the three figures that dominate contemporary culture: the artist, the ethnographer, and the curator. From the early 1990s, we have seen an intensification of an adversarial and a friendly relationship, and a multiplication of sequential series where these figures have traded places and accumulated misunderstandings. Ontologically posed questions began to proliferate, and one mode of inquiry, in particular, has dominated the conversation by seeking to formulate the problem through hyphenating the artist–ethnographer-curator relationship under the twin signs of the “sensorial” and the “social.” A vestige of conversations from the modernist repertoire, the historical dialogue has now mysteriously been transfigured into doubled-edged questions: What does the artist/curator-as-ethnographer do? Who are his/her interlocutors? And vice versa: What does the practice of the ethnographer/curator-as-artist look, feel, sound and taste like? Who are the beneficiaries of these dialogical processes of empowerment and collaborative work? Have the friendly and rival encounters between the curator, ethnographer, and artist generated interesting clusters of concepts that have a chance for a viable future? Post-ethnographic Intrusions As a moving-image curator and a media anthropologist engaged and collaborating with contemporary art worlds in Mexico City, as a primary site, I have always been struck by the absence of references to the ethnographic turn. It would not be an overstatement to say the rhetoric of turns is seldom deployed by my Mexico City interlocutors who, too, dwell in the very same affective and aesthetic landscape – the assemblage – we have come to call the ethnographic turn in contemporary art worlds. We should perhaps learn from that silence and indifference. There, indeed, the ethnographer, the curator, and the artist have simply been part of the project of Mexican modernity since the 1920s, since the primordial scene of the ethnographic turn. They are, first of all, historical figures whose relationship has enjoyed a certain measure of continuity, the frictions notwithstanding. Suffice to mention iconic muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros’s 1939 hybrid abstract–figurative painting titled “Etnografia” and the casting of contemporary art curator Cuauhtémoc Medina in the role of Diego Rivera in two recent experimental documentaNot for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



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ries.10 On the political front, these figures have always been part of a process of nation-building and, more recently, part of a process which has generated what Mexican anthropologist Roger Bartra (1987) provocatively calls “a post-Mexican condition.” Second, and more importantly, the ethnographer, the artist, and the curator encounter one another as conceptual personae and characters. The role of conceptual personae is to show thought’s territories, its absolute deterritorializations and reterritorializations. Conceptual personae are thinkers, solely thinkers, and their personalized features are closely linked to the diagrammatic features of thoughts and the intensive features of concepts. [. . .] These are no longer empirical, psychological, and social determinations, still less abstractions, but intercessors, crystals, or seeds of thought.11

Something can, indeed, be learned from this long-standing relationship among these conceptual personae that has not generated the culturalist anxieties of the ethnographic turn provocatively diagnosed by Hal Foster. It is in this sense, and this sense only, that other traditions do exist, and we could learn a great deal from the differences they introduce in contemporary artistic, anthropological, and curatorial thought. In Mexico, the very dispositif of the historical Avant-Garde out of which these personae and differences are extracted can be seen as generative of a contemporary assemblage in which art–cinema–anthropology enter into an intimate set of connections. At once making and undoing one another, this assemblage has prompted fascinating forms of curatorial rivalry and competitiveness whose frictions seldom threaten their inaugural friendship. In line with those critics who recently set out to “open a new dialogue,”12 I, too, think something can be saved from these discussions. But we would have radically to question the constellation of concepts at work for the past twenty years. This will require not less but more forms of intrusion. These emerging intrusions would enable us to relativize and, indeed, bid farewell to those contemporary forms of sensuous scholarship13 and cultural relativisms that compulsively return us to a stylized engagement with radical alterity and the linguistic liminality of the figures of the foreigner and the native. In the heart of the post-Mexican condition another conceptual persona has entered the scene and inflected the mode of relation that has linked the anthropologist, the curator, and the artist: that of the intruder. A few years ago, Mexican anthropologist and philosopher, Raymundo Mier, wrote a quite fascinating and perplexing essay with the title “El acto antropológico: la intervención como extrañeza” (2002). There he posits the notion of anthropological intervention as a negotiation among a series of forces: despotic, intrusive, affective, methodological and creative forces Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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haunted by the uncanny. In that scene, the anthropologist without motives, the anthropologist who constantly searches for alibis, finds him/herself operating in a terrain that frustrates our given research imaginaries, haunted by decidedly sticky binaries: strange/familiar, foreigner/native, outsider/ insider, same/other, north/south, south/south, and that particularly sticky (and irritating) monad and universe of the postcolonial native anthropologist and its blackmails which go like this: a given national context can be approached as the only site of its own deterritorialization. This is as messy as it should be so we all need a bit of patience. Now that we are beginning to make sense of the envy at work between contemporary anthropology and contemporary art worlds, now that envy is gradually being understood as a contingent affect and effect to be left behind, we do not need to get angry or to be unduly proud either. We need to endure and be imaginative conceptually. Whether we name this messiness a dispostif, an assemblage, a tradition, a discipline, a specter or simply “fieldwork,” the anthropologist who is no longer seduced by Heideggerian place-based philosophy will begin to seek a line of flight, a fuga/ fugue. In this fugue, collaboratively and from a lonely place of ­reflection – affective and narrative – the anthropologist, the artist, and the curator would have to accept his/her inevitable status as an intruder. The shift from being an étranger to an intrus, from being an extranjero to intruso, from stranger to intruder, is the very stake and risk that fuel the affinities and adjacencies of what comes “after” the ethnographic turn. The most promising direction is to be found not only in the work of those who engage so-called non-Western anthropological traditions but in the work of those who assemble various anthropological traditions and recognize the “intellectual” work that crisscrosses our field sites, not simply the voices of those subjects and communities who are allegedly empowered through a politics of representation. There is always a subterfuge by which we think intellectuals are not objects of ethnographic attention or that ethnography would be contaminated by their presence. This would therefore require from us another pedagogical horizon that would not only familiarize us with other anthropological genealogies (the Brazilian and the Mexican are quite fascinating, among many others) but would show how they are inherently interconnected, not only geographically but also conceptually. The so-called Western economy of departure and arrivals will be demystified (Bartra and Elhaik, 2008; Clifford, 1981; Lomnitz-Adler, 1995, 2001) and thus will be reassembled. And, through this assemblage work, we might encounter concepts that may or may no longer be useful. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1994) define a concept as a zone of turbulence. We shall then learn that there have been numerous zones of turbulence and ethnographic turns – Mexico and Brazil in the 1920s to 1930s: these primary scenes of the ethnographic turn in Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



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contemporary art – but also that writing culture, experimental ethnography and the ethnographic turn are not necessarily analogical with, and equivalent to, one another. Ethnography as a concept is such a zone of turbulence. But it is not the only one at work in the multi-mediated relationship between art and anthropology. Perhaps the time has come to shift our attention somewhere else that is far from being given, as ethnography has been: something more imperceptible, something that does not return to haunt us as Okwui Enwezor and his team of curators-as-ethnographers have recently claimed. Ethnography has always been a good object, to borrow from Kleinian psychoanalysis, and the “colonial encounter” (Asad, 1973) has not and will not exhaust the potentiality of anthropology. But, regardless of whether ethnography is perceived to be a good or a bad object, some of us have already moved beyond ethnography towards an adjacent work that assembles conceptual affinities. Affinity On the one hand, there are those who cultivate an antipathetic relationship between art historians, artists, curators and anthropologists, and who have made it more or less clear that they do not desire the ethnographer and the artist to belong to the same sphere of existence. It is safe to say that Foster’s essay has (wittingly and inadvertently) generated and contributed to the expansion of this territorialized version of the ethnographic turn. On the other hand, there are those who would agree that contemporary anthropology and contemporary art worlds ought to remain as distinct disciplinary fields. But the latter, to be sure, make exception for periodic overlaps only when those concerned pay strict attention to the “sensorial” convergences in their respective modes of deploying the experiential and methodological registers of ethnography, understood as an emblematic figure of research. Whatever camp one leans towards, this affective economy of attraction, seduction and repulsion has generated one unfortunate consequence: the tropes of radical alterity and incommensurability have acquired greater force over the more interesting initial promises based on the “affinities,” “appropriations,” “hybridisations,” and “processes” (Canclini and Montezemolo, 2009; Elhaik and Marcus, 2012; Marcus, 2010; Schneider and Wright, 2006; Taylor, 1998; van Dienderen, 2008) advocated from the early 1990s onward. With this shift from affinity in affect and practice to the incommensurable cultural translations between Self and Other, the impetus of the experimental moment in the humanities (Fisher and Marcus, 1986) was to be the first victim of these territorial wars. Experiments in aesthetic form have continued to thrive but conceptual experimentation remains to be desired. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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A well-established body of scholarship has enthusiastically and, at times, problematically identified with a “sensorial turn” in anthropology as a parallel research agenda to the ethnographic turn in contemporary art. I would suggest instead that we go one step further by underlining the dominant status of the sensorial research agenda, and by alerting ourselves that we should be worried about this reigning paradigm. In my view, it would be simply too risky to reduce the futures of art–anthropology dialogues to acquiescing to the sensorial and the sensuous as the ultimate “affinity,” meeting point, and zone of contact between anthropology and art. An “anthropology of emotions” and a “sensory ethnography” will not only fall short of overturning the Cartesian sovereign subject but they will probably not contribute to re-enchanting our experience of modernity. Of course, it is important to remind ourselves, as Jonathan Crary, Laura Marks, and others have astutely done, of the imperial primacy of vision in Western modernity’s capture of the world and its attendant neglect of the haptic, the aural, and so on.14 But, the sensory mise-enscène will always be haunted by two ghosts that are ultimately two sides of the same coin: it will claim the so-called non-Western, subaltern and subcultural practices as often occupying a more multisensorial, less ocular-centric subject position while attempting, in the same gesture, to search for and redeem, in the present, a pre-visual, communal and artisanal state of affairs which the West has allegedly lost. Further, people/ethnos, autobiographical forms of subjectivity generated by colonial-repressive mechanisms, and the intersubjective dimension of dialogical life will continue to appear to be the only point of departure. The image will be scorned and collective rituals will be praised. Digital techno-aesthetics and the indigenous will merge in sublime sparks and radiant mediations. Talk of an indigenous cosmopolitics15 and aesthetics will become more audible as the harbinger of a morally responsible future where particularizing and universalizing gestures are reconciled. Tragedy the first time, farce the second. We need to cultivate other forms of repetition, other uses of the iterative assemblages and conceptual stations that lie imperceptible on the side of the road of the ethnographic turn. My point is that it is ultimately radical alterity that, alas, continues to be the point of departure and that has now come to organize normatively collaborations between artists, anthropologists and curators. Under the collaborative regime of contemporary research-led practices between art and anthropology, it is ultimately, for better or for worse, the anxiety generated by the concatenation of incommensurable worlds that has “inflected the notion of culture with the quality of hysteria” (Povinelli, 2006: 236) and has led the ethnographic turn into such an impasse. Alas, rather than opening new vistas and problematizations, this impasse implicitly returns us to a place that still distinguishes between West and non-West, and from which we have to choose Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



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between “conceptual–abstract” and “sensorial–material” modes of conducting life and research. I believe this opens the possibility to be perplexed about how hermeneutical and phenomenological debates continue to underwrite our problematizations. This conundrum is the direct effect of our attempts to decolonize contemporary anthropology and contemporary art worlds. It is a sign that decolonization and its gestures of reversal and hybridization are not inherently conceptually productive, even if they might be liberating at the level of subjectivity and on some political fronts. It is unclear why and how a sensory–ethnographic orientation would enable, simultaneously, the decolonization of the categories of the ethnographic turn, the poststructuralist desire to unseat the sovereign subject and the question of the author, and the geopolitical reconfiguration of artists’ and anthropologists’ mise-en-scènes. It is simply unclear why and how, today, the value of the sensory should be the order of the day and the ethical mode framing the relationship between art and anthropology. Moreover, such an ethos and mode of research attention often result in us weaving webs of significance in which the experience of the ethnographer–artist–community relationship emerges as the sole object of inquiry. Indeed, it becomes cathected and thwarts the very process it values. I believe we need to create and invent other concepts. Some have actively and painstakingly tried to find a line of flight within this conundrum. Some have succeeded in bringing some of these questions to light by shifting our attention from art objects to processes and practiceled research. And, while I am less hopeful than those who have placed their faith in practice-led research under the sign of the sensorial, I welcome, wholeheartedly, their rigorous attempt to search for sites where the futures of these discussions are already being hosted. Recent conversations have explored the interface between art practice, ethnography, research, and contemporary curatorial trends. It carefully signaled fissures, sites of intense reflection and experimental forms of composition which have been inherited from the “montage” (Marcus, 1994) practices of experimental ethnography. In addition to interrogating, from a pedagogical perspective, the “normative conceptions of what counts as literacy,” these trans-medial experiments enable us to navigate the affinities “between book and other media forms” (Rutten and Soetaert, 2013). With these small gestures, these conversations remind us, with deep affection, that experimental ethnography ultimately exceeds the terms of the debates shaping the ethnographic turn in contemporary art. Far from being mistaken for a Habermasian ideal speech situation or facile cross-cultural and interdisciplinary alliance-making, the reconfiguration of affinity as an object of inquiry in its own right generates interesting frictions. First, it is my provisional understanding that present-day anthropological Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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practice points to emerging assemblages and research strategies that have complicated: 1. geopolitical determinations such as north–south, south– north, north–north, south–south, a schizophrenic mise-en-scène that ought to be welcomed; 2. the common-place relations of alterity that have historically linked anthropology, ethnography and the artistic territories of so-called “Non-Western cultures,” namely colonialism, nationalism and cosmopolitanism; 3. the relationship with avant-gardist affectivity (enthusiasm, anger, stridency, rage, pride, wonder) through curatorial–cinematic and documentary practices that are beginning to secede from Third Cinemas and the figure of the revolutionary militant; and to 4. an increasing cultivation of affective and ethical forms of a-nationalist life. This suggests that the rapport between contemporary anthropology and contemporary art ought to aim at evaluating and producing other cartographies by extending its dialogue and reaching out to interlocutors who are debating and engaging more or less similar questions – curators and media artists in particular. In light of this, there could be a salutary shift in the kind of media–anthropology–art we practice, from a concern with processes attached to radical alterity and forms of cultural otherness to processes that insist in finding and creating minor differences out of the family resemblances at work in the practices of those who affect us and who, in turn, are affected by us. As Chokri Ben Chika and Karel Arnaut eloquently note: In spite of its limitations, Foster’s compact article acutely evokes the complex imbrications of art and anthropology in dealing with issues of cultural identity/alterity and location/position. His two points of critique on the pseudo-ethnographic stance of certain artists appear indeed fundamental. First, Foster rightly questions the idea of radical alterity by arguing that in a profoundly globalised world people’s lives and “liquid” cultures are deeply enmeshed across ethnic, national, linguistic, etc. boundaries. Second, Foster addresses the question of reciprocity through selfing and othering and warns against the danger of blind projection of the self into the other or, indeed, the implosion into self-absorption.

Envy As we know so well, difference is not diversity emerging from a partitioning of the neo-colonial and postcolonial order nor is it a diasporic longing for one’s lost identity amid multicultural democratic landscapes. Conversely, the concept of affinity, and life lived as encounters and connections between affinities, is not similarity, identity-politics and an imperative to decolonize via the usual categories of ethnicity, race, gender, and so on. I believe – if we return to cultivating an ethics of affinity and persevere through the constellations of affinity generating and generated by our fieldwork mise-en-scènes – Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



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we will assuage, and perhaps even move our attention to another scene, a real scene of alterity beyond the affective, geopolitical and disciplinary dimension of envy characteristic of the ethnographic turn. I believe this tendency to cathect on radical alterity has resulted in a complex affective and moral landscape that has coalesced around a single emotion: envy. The point is not to eliminate desire but to see desire as the work of affinity, and affinity as the work of desire. On this particular point, I side with Hal Foster who (in his engagement with Clifford) rightly put the finger on an intractable economy of envy. I would also add the issue of jealousy to this affective equation. In a 1972 Current Anthropology dossier, appropriately titled “The anatomy of envy: a study in symbolic behavior,” George Foster (ibid., 168) incisively observes: Envy stems from the desire to acquire something possessed by another person, while jealousy is rooted in the fear of losing something already possessed. In schematic form both emotions involve a dyad, a pair of individuals whose relationship is mediated, or structured, by an intervening property of object. The intervening object may take innumerable forms, such as wealth, material good, the love and affection of a human being, or it may be intangible, such as fame, or good reputation. The mediating property is possessed by one member of the dyad, the other member doesn’t possess it, but wishes to. It is this desire that creates the feeling of envy in the latter person, making him what I shall call the “envier.”

George Foster’s point raises the idea that the ethnographer and the artist, and their respective guardians and custodians, might be approached usefully through a competitive and symbolic axis, as figures of the “envier.” It should by now be clear to us why the relational mode generated by these debates has clustered around a form of life lived enviously, and why “ethnography” has emerged as one of those objects that cause both envy and jealousy. A poetic and romantic answer would be to say that perhaps it is as mysterious as the form of circulation at work in a Kula ring; that ethnography is a gift16 of sorts that generates these obligations, impossibilities to reciprocate; that ethnography is larger than both the ethnographer and the artist who compete for recognition, exchange and circulation, always in excess of the scene of intervention which artists and ethnographers are both participating in. In addition to a classic anthropological answer, it would perhaps also not be unwise to propose a geopolitical one, linked to the rise of postcolonial studies as an alteration of the terms and conditions under which ethnography has come to be desired, mourned, abjected, sacrificed and transfigured. Under this symptomatology, ethnography would function as a Lacanian object or a Kleinian bad-object, a Batallesque Part maudite/accursed share inherited from the violence of the “colonial encounter.” Perhaps it is so. But, if we were Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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to adhere to the classic ethnographic interpretation and the postcolonial ethnographic/documentary paradigm, we might never address some of the more serious damages, indeed turn-offs, generated by these debates. As it is becoming evident, the ethnographic turn has produced more existential and conceptual prison houses than we had anticipated. What follows should be read less as a set of moral prescriptions than options facultatives (Deleuze, 1995: 100) to be discarded if not useful to the reader. They have been useful to the author of these lines in a moment of difficulty in which “ethnography” as an ideal came into crisis and into question, in a moment of difficulty through repeated attempts to think and live with the exhausted conceptual repertoire of the ethnographic turn. I believe some of these can be assigned the status of damage to thought. Damages • Damage 1: The non-Western as authentic and political by virtue of resisting the colonial legacy. This point is an extension of Hal Foster’s warnings. As a result, the so-called non-Western is often erroneously equated with so-called peripheral modernities (both “West” and “non-West,” Latin America, specifically, often occupies an ambiguous position in this uneven geography of desire and abjection). • Damage 2: It is often assumed that the economy of departure and arrivals generated by ethnography’s mise-en-scène is systematically linked to a cultural critique of the anthropologist and the artist’s native17 cultural context. It unduly reduces and attaches life to the past and to one’s alleged cultural background. The migratory tales of the anthropologists and the site-specific artists are always thought to operate along the usual national and diasporic coordinates. Our models are too reflexive where they ought to be refractive, as well. A perilous logic dominates our teachings and mise-en-scènes. We ought to cultivate another logic: I study Y not to enact a cultural critique of X where I am from but to do something with Y, yet to be formulated, that will be named Z. X is not bracketed, mourned, and a source of colonial guilt. Self and Other, and their blurring, are no longer useful points of departure. We are monads living in assemblages, more than subjects living in nation or region X. • Damage 3: The cathexis on the poor, the subaltern, the minority, the undocumented migrant, and generally subjects whose lives have been understood through Agamben’s notion of “bare life” has not only neglected the tradition of anthropology of intellectuals, of cultural experts, of scientists, and of other subjects who occupy powerful institutional positions but it has also created a new mode of life and research Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



•

•

•

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with reckless moralist implications for both anthropology and art. In this context, very little attention has been paid to those powerful mediators of “envy” and “jealousy” in contemporary cultural life – the curators who have entered the conversation from multiple standpoints and agendas, who curate and care for our lives. Surprisingly, little has been said, in general, about the powerful curators-as-ethnographers who have taken on the task of public intellectuals and have institutionalized the debate, at times opportunistically, I might add. Damage 4: It is compulsively required of anthropologists and artists to frame their work in geographic–territorial terms: “a study of this and a reflection on that in nation X.” Geographical location, usually defined in national terms, has dominated our creative horizons. What if artists and anthropologists met around a different horizon: an assemblage in which “ethnos” is not the point of departure? Damage 5: Critiques of the culture concept (Bartra, 1987; Bartra and Elhaik, 2008; Gupta and Ferguson, 1992; Povinelli, 2006; Rabinow, 1996, 2003) have been met with an intensification of culturalist-oriented responses. We have not yet learned from the serious critique of the culture concept. Damages 4 and 5 are intimately linked and will be the ones most resisted. A combined critique of both “ethnos” and the “culturalist” traditions of Franz Boas have yet to take place (Rabinow, 2011). This will be the most contested terrain. Damage 6: Cosmopolitanism is often understood as the other of nation or the other of the province. Cosmopolitanism is no less complicit with “culturalism” than nationalism or provincialism. We have to invent new concepts in order to grapple with the force of our vertiginous detours in multiple modernities. By elevating cosmopolitan anthropology (from below or above), we risk reducing our intellectual and artistic labor to the project of “provincializing.” Has the time not come to invent another concept for our engagement with increasingly complex forms of power no longer hinged on subaltern/colonizer and provincial/ cosmopolitan relationships? An answer to this would not be to seek ad nauseam for ever more peripheral sites as points of departure, for more resentful attempts at “provincializing.” Rather, we ought to abandon these, the way we “abandon” (Philips, 2006: 24) a psychoanalytical process when it is no longer useful or has led us into unproductive impasses. One can indeed do much with an impasse, and the “ethnographic turn” has become such a conceptual dead-end. Damage 7: Intrusion and exoticism are often viewed as figures of aggression and as effects of the immunological paradigm of the foreign body, even for those who critique these paradigms. Rather than eliminating Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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these from our modes of living life, we ought instead to cultivate them as figures generative of promising differences. To remove intrusion from our vocabulary would only increase some of the irreversibly cultivated values of mutual understanding. I have suggested elsewhere (Elhaik and Bartra, 2008) a scene of “mutual intrusion.” Exoticism, on the other hand, is more complex and would require to be thought of in tandem with the question of intrusion. One cannot police the modes of fascination of artists and anthropologists, lest we encourage the more pernicious moralism we might find in a world without intrusion and exoticism. Adjacency Rather than a sensory-oriented fieldwork which would merely add flesh and emotions to ailing living bodies, and to a politics of visual representations in crisis, I would suggest, instead, the counterintuitive strategy of pausing for a second and initiating what Paul Rabinow (2003, 2011) calls “assemblage-work.” Assemblages stand in a dependent but contingent and unpredictable relationship to the grander problematizations. They are a distinctive type of experimental matrix of heterogeneous elements, techniques and concepts, they are not yet an experimental system in which controlled variation can be produced, measured and observed. They are comparatively effervescent, disappearing in years or decades rather than centuries as is the case of problematization. [. . .] The anthropologist of the contemporary seeks to identify emerging assemblages and to set them in an environment that is partially composed of apparatuses and partially of a variety of other elements (such as institutions, symbols, concepts and the like). (2003)

Moreover, assemblage-work is a singular form of positioning and working through. It is conducted from a position of “adjacency” that is urgently needed if we are to generate a matrix in which anthropologists, curators, and artists can cultivate new thought habits. Through these they would care about the conceptual interconnections and affinities with which they are bound and unbound. “The goal of an anthropology of the contemporary is identifying, understanding and formulating something actual, not by directly identifying with it or by making it exotic. It seeks to articulate a mode of adjacency.” (Rabinow, 2003: 43) This zone of adjacency – a zone of neither intense proximity nor intense distance – would initiate a different kind of dialogue between the conceptual practices of contemporary anthropology and those of contemporary art. In that zone, anthropologists, artists and curators intrude, intervene, defamiliarize and repeat the mise-en-scène of a vocation that has been forgotten: to extract concepts from our contemporary affective, moral and aesthetic Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



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Figure 1.1 Eduardo Abaroa, La Destrucción Total del Museo de Antropología, 2012 (courtesy Gallery Kurimanzutto).

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l­andscapes, concepts that have a chance at a future, concepts that are very much alive but beyond the usual living organisms and subjects to which the ethnographic turn has accustomed us. Indeed, assemblage-work does not assume that ethnography is the only research mode of existence of the anthropologist, and consequently that anthropology is a de facto humanist or people-oriented practice. It begins with iterative assemblages in which the human/ethnos/people occupy only a position alongside non-human and antihumanist practices. Indeed, the problem of the ethnographic turn is the question of the social and the categories of the social. The ethnographic or documentary turn is an effect of a strange compromise – a humanitarian compromise. To persevere in categories as “community” and “social life” is to be complicit in two things: in anthropology, it is a sign of a Faustian bargain in which anthropologists and ethnographer–artists or artists-asethnographers cling to social formations and their most visible expression – communities, subjects and rituals made visible through a conjugation of overdetermined categories which have a particular intensity in so-called multicultural democratic contexts: gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, and so on – to evade the residual positivism and overall anti-art sensibility of anthropological thought. The banalization of the social finds its most perverse expression in something like this: you want to do art, do it on the terms of the social only, that is, people-oriented, community and indigenous-oriented art. Ultimately, the outcome is neither art nor anthropology, nor the production of a radical between: just practicing guilt – a guilty art and a guilty anthropology. It is from this compromise that the relationship between anthropology and art ails. It is its symptom. Could we imagine a form of adjacency to the social, rather than an immersion in social formations and their communities? This certainly has affinities with the “nearby” Arnd Schneider respectfully mobilizes from Trinh T. Minh-ha’s writings and filmwork. But the anthropological design and its attendant curatorial work I have in mind here would frame “alongside-ness” through a different formulation of power – one that does not begin with the question of who is speaking on behalf of whom, or designing curative and dialogical approaches to unequal relationships found in the field, nor with an obligation to attend to unequal power relations along the lines of a Gramscian model from below. Assemblages do not speak and we cannot identify with them but they nonetheless enable us to produce another sense amid dominant capitalist forms of relation, modes of mediation, and patterns of territorialization. We ought, perhaps, to think of ways of being adjacent to our humanist conception of what anthropology is. It would require greater effort to think conceptually, to think in such a way that we muster the “non-organic power of life,” to borrow from Deleuze (1995: 143). To prevent us from sacralizing Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



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both bare life and the living body, we perhaps need to free ourselves from the humanist, dialogical and phenomenological inclinations of the ethnographic turn and its social compromises. Why are we so shy to take assemblages of human and non-human forms as objects of study, and be nearby assemblages rather than those whose voices we allegedly have to hear and care about? A care for assemblages might be colder but more effective in helping us to understand how “subjects” and living bodies ail, collaborate and resist. This assemblage-work is one way of naming the capacities at work between anthropology and art, one way of enduring the impasses and damages caused by the categories and exhausted concepts of the ethnographic turn. In our post-disciplinary worlds it creates “the possibility for an engagement that is neither rigidly controlled nor a social formation” (Ravetto, 2010). Many works under the banner of the ethnographic turn do, indeed, work with such assemblages but there seems always to be a problem at the level of naming “it,” conceptualizing “it” beyond merely bringing in powerful theoretical frameworks while acting out mere personalist and moralist deference to the people and practices studied. The “it” is the third person infinitive, the Nietzschean “non-historical cloud” and the “diagnosis of becomings,” in the sense of Deleuze, and, above all, depersonalization beyond moralism. We ought, perhaps, to cease to confuse our obvious sympathy for, and solidarity with, those who belong to disenfranchised communities, on the one hand, and the task of finding elsewhere the tools required for thinking about the concept of the “contemporary” that binds contemporary anthropology and contemporary art under the ethnographic turn, on the other. Indeed, the intrusive conceptual personae encountered on this post-Mexican and contemporary stage – the anthropologist, artist, and curator – move adjacently to one another and share a same calling: they have no usage other than their affinity for a relentless capacity to assemble. Post-Mexican Assemblages Since the late 1980s, Mexico City has been harboring a cluster of fascinating practices that cover a temporal scale of roughly three decades. What I propose to call a post-Mexican assemblage was forming, specifically, around the intellectual, curatorial and artistic activity that emerged in the wake of the disastrous 1985 Mexico City earthquake. An event seen by many as a moment of emergency in which the administrative and bureaucratic structures of the Mexican state were provisionally suspended and profoundly questioned from both below and above. (It is too soon to tell but it is very likely that the tragic events of Ayotzinapa will be remembered in similar fashion.) The potential for developing innovative and creative forms of organization, social Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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networks, and cultural practices at once independent – if not autonomous – and dependent from state policies generated an unprecedented enthusiasm throughout Mexico’s cultural apparatus. As Ruben Gallo has noted “the 1990s in Mexico witnessed a radical change in the institutional receptivity of experimental arts. The most recent development in Mexican art has been its sudden – and lucrative – insertion in the global art circuit and its frenzied world of biennials, art fairs, and international exhibitions. In 2002 alone, over half a dozen major museums around the world devoted large-scale exhibitions to Mexico . . .” (2004, p. 10). Moreover, the eventful and polemical publication of anthropologist Roger Bartra’s antinationalist book, The Cage of Melancholy, as well as the diagnostic activity of the curatorial and artistic groups, such as Curare, SEMEFO (Servicio Médico Forense), Teratoma, and InSITE, have reoriented and retuned the mecánica nacional in a post-nationalist key. This was the a sign of a malaise in national culture and contemporary life – or rather “contem(pt)orary” life to borrow the expression of a renowned Mexico City curator and anthropologically driven art historian. Increasingly, this contemptorary situation was beginning to be described as one that anxiously and contemptuously wrestles with what Bartra has provocatively diagnosed as the “post-Mexican condition” (see Chapter 3). This volatile composite set in motion a virulent critique of Lo Mexicano discourse and a reappropriation (if not theft) of the Left’s old guard complacency with official and institutional forms of public programming. This shift towards a post-nationalist and postcosmopolitan curatorial and artistic culture generated deterritorializations of dominant forms of curation, imageries, and mappings of Mexican-ness. As one learns to lend a careful ear to this post-Mexican assemblage, one hears, in the form of whispers or screams, a concern for disarticulating nationalist culture and aesthetics, indeed a post-Avant-Garde ethos and pathos, always involving anthropologists, curators, and artists exhausted (or obsessed) with Temas Nacionales/National Questions, and the rapport between revolutionary political, experimental media arts, and visual culture at large. As Bartra provocatively observed: The Transition towards a post-national political culture is already taking place, and a large part of the Mexican population has initiated this change. What we need to know now, is whether or not the intellectual and political class will accept this change pragmatically, as a mere reorganization of their alliances, or whether it will accept them as a new beginning for our political culture.

Recent writings by Mexican intellectuals – cultural critics, writers, artists and social scientists alike – have seriously begun to displace nationalist constructions of identity and official formulations of selfhood, and have rallied Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



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around a new repertoire of concepts and theoretical agendas. Mexico’s current cultural and political conjuncture has been theorized in more than one way but all analyses have tended to underscore the same problematic, namely, and to cite only the most prominent and publicized interventions: the need for historical and anthropological genealogies of the “fissures in contemporary Mexican nationalism” (Lomnitz, 2001), or the call for a new anthropology in order to grapple with the emergence of “a post-national democratic practice in the wake of a post-Mexican condition” (Bartra, 2003), or the unsettling intervention of urban anthropological critique of public art, curatorial practice and the politics of museums “[in the midst of] the crisis of Mexican national identity” (Canclini, 1993; Fusco, 2003; Santamarina, 1993), or again the study of popular culture and “other threats to the Nation” (Rubistein, 2000), and the need to rethink the Left in Mexico in the context of the agony of the “revolutionary family” in the wake of post-1968 countercultural movements, and even more so since the 2000 elections (Monsivais, 1995; Agustin, 1996; Zolov, 1999; Villareal, 2005). All these nascent intellectual productions – to be sure, elaborated out of a wide range of theoretical sensibilities and vantage points – seem to coalesce around a desire to grapple with emerging aesthetic forms, subjectivities, modes of self-fashioning, and the concern of deploying and extending Mexican citizenship beyond the boundaries of the well-entrenched, yet dissolving, political culture of revolutionary nationalism (Bartra, 2002; Canclini, 2002; Vaughan, 2002). Curatorial, anthropological, and artistic practices linked to the contemporary art scene in Mexico City, in particular, have managed, through a mixture of institutional and micro-politics, to actualize the potentials created by the post-Mexican fervor. If, historically, debates in Mexico about the cultural politics of difference have consistently been framed in relation to the fragile and unstable link between the normalizing discourses of mestizaje and its attendant mode of subjectivation, post-Mexican becomings would instead disable the official compulsion to inherit a nationalist mode of repetition built in the very concept of “Mexico.” The official and hegemonic ideology of national belonging and identity of the post-revolutionary period – “mestizaje” and its attendant citizen subject, the mestizo/a – have not only come under attack. The very political culture that has anchored their legitimacy has also ran out of support among Mexicans within and outside of Mexico. This can, of course, be attributed, partially at least, to watershed political events during the 1990s – the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the 1994 Zapatista uprising, the San Andrés Accords and the amendments to the 1917 Constitution that introduced a recognition of the “multicultural” and “pluriethnic” composition of Mexican society, as well as pushed for a decentralized implementation of indigenous18 rights; the temporary fall of the Institutional Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Figure 1.2 Eduardo Abaroa, La Destrucción Total del Museo de Antropología, 2012 (courtesy Gallery Kurimanzutto).

Revolutionary Party (PRI) and the end of single-party hegemony and the decline of revolutionary nationalism – have emerged as harbingers of a transformation of official modes of mapping and occupying the Mexican national space. It, of course, remains to be seen whether the effervescence of these post-Mexican assemblages will survive the return of the PRI to power and its intimate links to the wave of violence the country is currently suffering from. Assemblages do fade and disappear: it is their destiny. Regardless, the zone of friction between the ethnographic turn and the post-Mexican condition has produced singular curatorial and inter-media events at the threshold between contemporary art and contemporary anthropology. Eduardo Abaroa’s installation, The Total Destruction of the National Museum of Anthropology (2011), in which the eponymous museum is fictitiously exploded into pieces and displayed in a gallery space, can be seen as a re-configuration, remediation, and reconstitution of the interconnections between the three conceptual personae of the anthropologist, curator, and artist. The tactical logic of destruction and detonation performed in the title requires from us that we first decompose it into its various components. ANTHROPOLOGY, NATIONAL, and MUSEUM function as both institutional and instinctual forces stirring the foundations of one of the most emblematic cultural institutions of Mexican modernism.

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Although Mexico has had a national museum since the mid-1820s, none of its previous incarnations was planned as an ideological vehicle as carefully as the present structure, inaugurated in 1964. As designed by Pedro Ramírez Vásquez, a giant of mid-20th-century Mexican modernism, with input from many of the nation’s leading intellectuals and artists, the museum models archaeological stratigraphy, with ancient objects displayed in ground-floor galleries, and upstairs the material culture of the native peoples who live (or lived until recently) in the same geographic regions. So ancient Maya stelas are downstairs, while upstairs visitors can view dioramas of modern Maya homes peopled by mannequins and furnished with contemporary material culture. However, as in Edward Curtis’s photographs of Native Americans a century ago, clocks and radios (not to mention iPads), and other obvious tokens that these people exist in time are banished from these scenes. (Villela, 2012)

All three terms – National, Anthropology, Museum – also function as variants of a Weberian iron cage, or of what Bartra has famously called a “cage of melancholy.” The installation’s semiology and iconography point to the “archae” of a post-Mexican assemblage in which anthropologists, artists, and curators are moving alongside one another, as both destructive, caring, and form-giving characters. By interrogating the dispositif of Mexican modernism and the historical avant-garde’s very ethical substance, Abaroa’s piece is wrestling with the incurable images of the post-Mexican condition. Abaroa’s installation extends a long tradition of critique by public intellectuals and critics if not strongly opposed to, at least skeptical of, the politico-ideological framework of both anthropology and art in Mexico. In fact, the country’s most emblematic figure of the essayist, diplomat, and public intellectual, namely Octavio Paz, had already raised some of these questions in his notorious essay “A Critique of the Pyramid.” There, he passionately reflects on the linkages between official revolutionary ideological indigenismo, and the interpellative force of the Mayan pyramidal structure of the Museum of National Anthropology’s architecture. Yet Abaroa’s piece points to the ambivalent role of the anthropologist in this hardened Mexicanist politico-aesthetic landscape and requires us to flesh out another form of ethical position and assemblagework that escapes the nationalist and ideological ‘oficio/vocation’ of our three conceptual personae: artist, anthropologist, curator. As media historian and curator Jesse Lerner notes: Paz was not the only one to question the state’s evocation of the indigenous. A more general skepticism pervaded the nation’s intellectual and cultural elites. Mexican anthropologists, particularly relevant here as the appointed explicators of cultural difference, likewise opened an attack on the national school within their own discipline. A group of young professors from the Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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The Incurable-Image ENAH [National School of Anthropology and History], housed on the new structure in Chapultepec park, attacked the dominant strain of indeginismo. (p. 40)

This resulted in the notorious manifesto That Which they Call Mexican Anthropology written by the collective, Los Magnificos. Abaroa’s piece not only pays tribute to this critical historical background, it also converts the task of critique into a further exploration of the very ontology19 of “installation”20 itself and proposes iconoclastic forms of curation to endure the incurable tropes of nationalist and indeginista modernism. By linking the conceptual personae of the anthropologist, curator, artist, and adding to them the character of the Indigenous, his installation’s archaeophobic ontology prevents the ghost of perspectivism to be smuggled through the backdoor. It redirects our attention away from the unidimensional nationalist scene and its condensed alterities and personae towards a “multi-­attentional”21 form of inter-mediation. The installation shows us something that requires us to think of the creative and curatorial acts beyond both formal art historical interpretation and a transcultural anthropology of art that zooms in only on questions of cultural and civilizational difference. It opens another task for the anthropologist, the curator, and the artist, if not unmoored from, at least radically adjacent to, the historical. In fact, Abaroa’s piece displays what anthropology “shares with art [and curation], what common origin they share in the forces of the earth, what ways they divide and organize chaos to create a plane of coherence, a field of consistency, a plane of composition on which to think and create” (Grosz, 2008). The installation’s adjacent features extend beyond the walls of the white cube of the gallery and deploy some of the media strategies of site-specific art. Some of these features blur completely the notorious blackmail of museum versus site. For instance, an on-site tour of the museum, conducted by, and in the company of, the artist, walks us through a fake explosive parcours. Beyond traditional curatorial questions, this walk shows the use of the power of the false that connects the dispositif of nationalist and indeginista modernism and a post-Mexican assemblage in the making. It thus connects immediately an installation with the curatorial tribulations and repair work of contemporary anthropological thought as inter-medial expressions. Abaroa’s installation asks us to examine and consider alternate affective and creative strategies to both nationalist and indegenista modes of knowledge production and modes of presentation of anthropological material. In the midst of contemporary culture wars, and industries in which academia’s slowness is compensated by the velocity of contemporary art worlds, it also points to the singularity of a new question posed at the heart of an emerging post-Mexican modernity. In Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



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the latter, logos + anthropos = a media anthropology continuously in the process of becoming a remedial force that might generate both new mediations and forms of care. In the polluted air of Mexico City, Abaroa’s piece delinks the futures of (media) anthropology from the indeginista and nationalist modes of life that have for too long been the only air all those of us who care and relate to Mexico breathe, day in and day out. Eduardo Abaroa’s installation proposes a concept of the image hinged on assemblages in which “the anthropological” is installed in a mode which not only exceeds the ethnographic and its alleged cross-cultural default but which also takes distance from conceptions of the image grounded in the “national” and the “indigenous.” One could, of course, read Abaroa’s installation in strict political and symbolic terms terms as “an exercise in iconoclasm, the destruction of an ‘idol’ or collection thereof, so closely associated with Mexican nationalism that the gesture reminds one of the annihilation of the Twin Towers on 9/11, or the Bamiyan buddhas, just six months prior in March 2001” (Villela, 2012). Its libidinal force could also establish a parallel between the installation’s imagery and “the pictorial counterpart of the death drive.”22 But, in a country like Mexico where “death” has been elevated to a “nationalist totem”23 – a form of death enthusiastically channeled, for instance, by the historical Vanguardia’s monumentalization of Eisenstein’s ¡Que Viva Mexico! – it would be very problematic to make a classic Marxist–Freudian–anthropological argument in favor of a theory of the image as totemic and death drive. “The nationalization of an ironic intimacy with death is a singularly Mexican strategy. No similar nationalizing of death has occurred in any western European nation.”24 Rather, it is the very modernist affinities between Dada, Punk, and Fluxus that Abaroa’s piece seems to detonate. Abaroa’s multistaged installation (the guided tour, the show, the videos, the writings on the wall with references to Fluxus and Dada, the abstract sculptures) are a meticulous study of Western modernity’s fascination with the gift economy as an alternative to exchange. It appears to pit the the gift of Punk/Fluxus/indigenous/primitive against the exchangist horror of capitalist museographic culture. Abaroa’s explosion is more subtle than the debris that form its seeming Punkish spectacle. Abaroa’s installation offers another media event and another form of spectacle, freed, or at least attempting to liberate itself within the controls effected on contemporary art and anthropology by both gift and exchange logics. The Total Destruction of the National Museum of Anthropology is a detonation in the very heart of the anthropological turn in contemporary curation and visual studies. It is an explosion that not only shifts our attention beyond the ethnographic turn but also towards the entangled nature of the “anthropological” and “medial” as indicative of the malaise of contemporary curating and art. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Figure 1.3 Eduardo Abaroa, La Destrucción Total del Museo de Antropología, 2012 (courtesy Gallery Kurimanzutto).

In this sense, it resonates beyond the Mexican case. The installation has the power to convert the figures of the curator, the anthropologist, and the artist into destructive conceptual personae who have historically been entrusted with the task of diagnosing the malaise of culture and caring for the future of that malaise. It disorganizes the role of these figures, and converts, as we shall see in the next chapter, the curatorial, anthropological, and artistic act into adjacent forms of care by incessantly mediating the repetitions enacted by the incurable. In Abaroa’s installation the modernist fantasy of destruction and the post-Mexican powers of assemblage-work release new forms of thought, new images of thoughts, unthinkable post-Mexican horizons, at once anthropological, artistic, and curatorial. The act of detonation becomes here a “vitalist imperative” (Colebrook, 2010). To live in the post-Mexican condition, one has to go through this disjunctive and conjunctive phase: that is, through the destructive rituals of assemblage-work. Moreover, these rituals release what I call incurable-images: the hyphen between iconophilia and iconophobia, the fold that enables a pathway between image, pathos, and curation. As Boris Groys reminds us it is no coincidence that the word “curator” is etymologically related to “cure”. Curating is curing. The process of curating cures the image’s powerlessness, its incapacity to present itself. The artwork needs external help, it needs an exhibition and a curator to become visible. The medicine which Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



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makes the sick image appear healthy – makes the image literally appear, and in the best light – is the exhibition. In this respect, since iconophilia is dependent upon the image appearing healthy and strong, the curatorial practice is, to a certain degree, the servant of iconophilia. But at the same time, curatorial practice undermines iconophilia, for its medical artifice cannot remain entirely concealed from the viewer. In this respect, curating remains unintentionally iconoclastic even as it is programmatically iconophile.

The incurable-images of the post-Mexican condition, such as Abaroa’s (or Erick Meyenberg’s whose work is discussed in the last chapter) stand less as an index of a museographic curatorial practice than as the promise of another visual order and inorganic future where another form of thought without affective iconic images seems to be brewing. Hence the hyphen between the incurable and the image in the title of this book. In Abaroa’s installation, the hyphen between image and incurable is much more than the negotiation of an iconoclastic urge that would accompany our non-biological death drive (Freud distinguishes between death drive as a mode of repetition from actual taking of one’s life). The hyphen is the line of tension, both a mode of rupture and bondage between the image and the incurable, a masochistic relation that requires us to think beyond the dualism of “desire and drive.” The incurable, as an ontology of life, and of the life of images, is not necessarily coinciding with the death drive. Though it, too, is profoundly non-humanist. The destruction of the Museum of Anthropology is the destruction of anthropos, tout court. The hyphen is the mode of repetition (the most profound of repetitions) that restores belief in the world, that generates the complex repetition and difference for itself. To a visitor from the future, the social, documentary, and ethnographic turn in contemporary arts would instead look unduly humanist, and this excess of humanism in contemporary culture would be met with this detonation at the heart of anthropos. Abaroa’s incurable images plunge us headlong into the questions of nihilism and humanism, into the very limits of mestizaje, and blow up the archae of the dangerous humanism inaugurated during the 1920s under the aegis of the synthetic failures and cultural hybridism on behalf of the post-revolutionary New Man. Far from giving voice to this new man and its metamorphic transformations, Abaroa’s installation shows how the creative act, and the image of thought it generates, are instead an act of “throwing of a net over chaos” (Deleuze). At once ethical, diagnostic, and pedagogical, Abaroa’s “total destruction” repeats a Nietzschean tradition of nihilism against itself in order ultimately to connect us with the untimely contemporariness brewing amid the post-Mexican condition.

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Collaborative Assemblages From a less chilango-centric perspective, and far from the capital city and “balcony of the nation,” the border cities of Tijuana25 in the north, and of Frontera in the south, have recently been harboring and hosting another mode of assemblage-work. (Note that ‘chilango’ is a Mexican slang term for the attitude, accent, and vernacular practices of natives and long-time residents of Mexico City.) Cognizant of the geopolitical interplay of North and South within the Americas, yet not anxious about it, the Mexico Citybased curatorial platform Laboratorio 060 can be seen as another interesting combined effect of the ethnographic turn and post-Mexican pathos. Artist and MoMA curator of public programming Pablo Helguera recently qualified Laboratorio 060’s curatorial mode of intervention in the following terms: The Mexico City-based collective, Laboratorio 060, blurs the line between the processes of curating and art making through elements of art history, humor and contemporary social commentary. Since coming together in 2003 as part of a seminar on curatorial practice in Mexico City, Laboratorio 060 has brought their [sic] varied projects to traditionally peripheral audiences through inclusion, not just presentation, “creating new communities within the relational sphere of art.” Underlining the participatory and sometimes confrontational nature of Laboratorio 060’s work, the members, Lourdes Morales, Javier Toscano and Daniela Wolf, use terms such as “curatorial actions” and “interventions” to describe many of their projects.26

Between 2006 and 2008 Laboratorio 060 carried out a series of interventions around a long-term project named Frontera: Sketch for a Society for the Future. The project was designed and created as a curatorial platform and a series of conversations in which several artists were invited to intervene and collaborate with the indigenous Cho’l community in the town of Frontera at the border between Mexico and Guatemala. At first sight, Frontera appears to be yet another instance of site-specific process via the trans-cultural logic of departures and arrivals characteristic of our contemporary colonial and postcolonial encounters; as another instance of a detour via the ethnographic archive and its dissemination in contemporary art worlds; as another detour via current attempts at remaking anthropology’s affective economies of fascination and repulsion; as another detour via anthropology’s engagement with contemporary art (and vice versa) as both fields consolidate their shift from objects to collaborative processes and as they redirect their attention away from “native to counterpart” (Marcus, 2001). As we shall see, some of the artists’ works featured in the two-year process of Frontera emerge as more than a mere reappropriation of the emblematic figure of fieldwork. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



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Instead, they appear as a complex reassemblage of the desires and “ends” of the strange discipline we continue to call anthropology, as the last continues to be extremely useful and powerful as a technology that mediates detours via mutually constitutive modernities and, in the case of Frontera, a cross-civilizational dialogue. Some of the artists’ works featured in Frontera put that very “technology” in motion, and open new possibilities for both anthropology and contemporary art. They slow down the usually high-speed temporality of contemporary art worlds and accelerate the usually slow temporality of academic production. Without the marvelous capacity of Laboratorio 060 to collaborate, it would, indeed, be difficult to catch up with the proliferation of interventions programmed during a two-year period. Frontera links anthropology and contemporary art by converting curatorial practice less into a search for alternative modernities or counternarratives of modernity and more into a powerful critical and clinical take on the interentanglements of ethnographic and art practice, between academia and contemporary art, in the context of what has recently been called “The age of discrepancy” (Debroise, 2007). Among the commissioned pieces which caught my attention is the installation of artist Pablo Helguera, The Conservatory of Dead Languages. The piece is instructive insofar as it discloses the appeal of the “participatory” in social art and problematically stages ethnography as an emblem of research. It captures the contemporary art world’s dominant form of engagement with anthropology. Reminiscent of 1920s Constructivist agitprop kiosks, Helguera’s sound installation stages an encounter between an artist, the indigenous population of the border town of Frontera (natives, ethnos) and a technology of mechanical reproduction (Edison’s wax phonograph, an ur-recording and sound-storage device). The objective is to document, archive, and salvage the local knowledge, mores, and languages of Frontera. The strategies implicit in Helguera’s piece belong to the register of classic ethnography and indigenous media, a kind of late modern salvage anthropology that chronicles postcolonial processes of disappearance. It is the least interesting component of the installation as it runs the risk of converting the attraction for ethnography in social art into an uncritically engaged methodological fetish. The image of an indigenous man speaking in his native tongue, the dead language in question, directly through the phonograph reminds us of the legendary scene in Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North, a fiction-like mise-en-scène of a technologically mediated cross-cultural encounter which invites a complex reflection on the ethics and politics of documentary film representations. The curatorial setup – the scene of curation to frame this in psychoanalytical terms – attributes a therapeutic value to the act of speaking through the phonograph in one’s native tongue. Yet, putting aside Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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the artist’s intention, an interesting and more imperceptible assemblagework could emerge. Indeed, Helguera’s piece points to the foundational ­misunderstanding between anthropology and art: the assumption that primitivism and cross/­transculturalism have “affinities” with cosmopolitan modernism and the sovereign belief that detours via an allegedly countermodern cultural alterity re-enchants our demagified modern world. This would create a much-needed state of turbulence in the category of indigenous media. Under this diagnostic view, the installation would appear to be interested less in self-representation and the salvaging of indigenous epistemology than in assembling the modernist debris of modern art history, the historical avantgarde, and anthropology. Against itself, Helguera’s installation points to the impossibility of ­conservation–preservation and the fragility of a mechanical apparatus of reproduction en route of becoming obsolete in the digital age. To its credit, it doesn’t celebrate the digital for its own sake. But, like many works in the wake of the “recent surge of artistic interest in collectivity, collaboration, and direct engagement with ‘real’ people,”27 it remains humanist and within a logic of representation. Yet, unlike many works invested in the “social turn”, both Helguera’s piece and Laboratorio 060’s Frontera project retain a pedagogical and conceptual value. Laboratorio 060’s Frontera project in general shows how these transdisciplinary exchanges nonetheless remain profoundly problematic and, indeed, it is what Frontera seems to be about. It seems to be pointing to the fact that neither “relational aesthetics” (Bourriaud, 2002), and its hopes of constructing an alternative global public culture through new forms of conviviality and gift logics, nor its collaborative/participatory ethnography, in its attempt to decenter classic models of Malinowskian fieldwork and authored interventions, is sufficient to translate the series of “appropriations” (Schneider, 2006) taking place between contemporary art and anthropology. It is at this rich juncture – conceptual and experiential – that singular modes of curation diagonally engage some of the in-site and site-specific installations commissioned by Laboratorio 060. A curatorial project such as Frontera is an opportunity to rethink the zone of friction between contemporary art and anthropology, as well as reformulate constitutive concepts and the conceptual personae that people the ethnographic repertoire from border, frontier, liminality, threshold, detour, boundary, to the figure of the indigenous, and its uncanny doubles, the anthropologist, the artist, and the curator. As Silvia Gruner, a pioneering figure in the anthropological turn, astutely notes:

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Curatorial Work

Figure 1.4 Silvia Gruner, Don’t Fuck with the Past, You Might Get Pregnant, color photograph, 1994 (courtesy Silvia Gruner).

Figure 1.5 Silvia Gruner, In Situ, video (15 minutes), 1996 (courtesy Silvia Gruner).

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Figure 1.6 Silvia Gruner, detail from the group show Time Capsule Art in General, 2003 (courtesy Silvia Gruner).

We are taught in Mexico to look into the past in a very contrived way, and it’s a way which assumes many assumptions, not only about a notion of a “glorious past;” our archeology, our big culture, the treasures of the last thirty centuries etc., but we are also taught to look at all these things in a very conservative way, as if it were outside of ourselves. This was the way I was taught to look at Mexican culture. Mexicans have learned to see themselves constantly through the mirror of anthropology.

The artists, anthropologists, and curators with whom I have dwelled converge around this one intellectual and curatorial objective: Mexico’s anthropophilia, indigenous-philia, and archaeophilia28 had to be if not exploded, at least tamed. Then, and only then can the task of curation fulfill one of its callings: to treat the incurable of the post-Mexican condition. Notes  1. Both my interlocutors and I deploy curation less as a linguistic trope indexing frictions between literalism and figuration than as a concept and practice Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



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that undermines organicist thought. See the dossier on metaphors in Cultural Anthropology issue 27 number 1 (February 2012). See also Vincent Crapanzano’s Imaginative Horizons: An Essay in Literary-Philosophical Anthropology for an understanding of metaphorization as a “redemptive act” that achieves, hermeneutically, the resolution of metonymic continguities.  2. This would enable us to eschew the antimodernist orientation of Speculative Realism, and antirealist inclinations of the historical and neo-avant-gardes. Other terms ought to be created to help us cross over these rigid dualisms. Assemblage and curation are such terms, among others. Though different, assemblage and montage have affinities as both emerged from the toolbox of the modernist and  historical avant-gardes of the 1920s, and again later in the context of the intermedial neo-avant-garde politics, media arts, and conceptual art of the 1960s and 1970s.  3. Michael Fischer, “Film as Ethnography and as a Cultural Critique in the Late Twentieth Century,” 53.  4. Anand Pandian, “Imagination: Cinematic, Anthropological.”  5. Faye D. Ginsburg et al. (eds.), Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain (2).  6. In both cases, however, the politics of re/animation tends to reduce the genuine desire for creative political experimentation to the simple translation and transfer of self-expression and cathartic subjectivity to new media.  7. See the past and ongoing debate around the ethnographic turn in the 2013 double issue of Critical Arts. This quote is taken from Part 1 of the issue via Kris Rutten’s “Revisiting the Ethnographic Turn in Contemporary Art,” 459.  8. Susan Cairns and Danny Birchall, “Curating the Digital World: Past Preconceptions, Present Problems, Possible Futures,” 1.  9. Okwui Enwezor’s Intense Proximity: An Anthology of the Near and the Far, as the rituals of contemporary art world require, has been circulated on the list serve e-flux. Probably unknown to many e-flux readers, the image that accompanied the announcement was the book cover image of Clifford and Marcus’s Writing Culture: The Politics and Poetics of Ethnography.The effect was unequivocal and didactic: dozens of works distributed inside the Palais, mostly with a distinct postcolonial lesson to teach and the same tired desire to provincialize good old Europe. There were some interesting works, of course, by well-established artists, others from a younger generation of artists. Aside from the wonderfully edited catalogue with some very interesting essays, including Clifford’s essay where he draws a useful analogy between Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator” and the tasks of the curator. See Clifford’s “The Times of the Curator.” The show felt arrogant and hollow: its sole aim seemed to be that of “epater/impress” the former colon in the heart of the metropole. Hal Foster’s critique can, indeed, be extended to the curator-as-ethnographer, and for the same reasons: obsession with debates about cross-cultural representation, postcolonial alterity, and the assumption that equates anthropology with ethnography or ethnology. From a different perspective, conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth’s little-known 1975 essay “Artist as Anthropologist” Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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10.

11. 12. 13.

14.

The Incurable-Image attempted to recast the “structural similarities” between both fields through a more philosophical anthropological idiom: as creative activities haunted by an impulse to anthropologize and by a metaphysics of inside and outside (pp. 182–3). A portrait of an indigenous character whose face has enigmatically morphed and fused into an Olmec mask, Siqueiros’s Ethnography (171 x 81 cm) is considered to be one of his finest achievements. It is part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Jesse Lerner’s and Olivier Debroise’s films, in which curator Medina, as well as artists and anthropologists, play a role are discussed in Chapter 4. What is Philosophy?, p. 69. See Kris Rutten, An van Dienderen, and Ronald Soetaert’s “Revisiting the Ethnographic Turn in Contemporary Art.” See Paul Stoller’s Sensuous Scholarship, David Howes’s Empire of the Senses, the debate between David Howes and Sarah Pink around “The future of sensory anthropology/the anthropology of the senses,” and the work being done at Lucien Castaing-Taylor’s sensory ethnography laboratory in Harvard. Through her notion of “portable sensorium,” Laura Marks had judiciously highlighted both the synthetic potentials and conceptual limits associated with the dissemination of “inter-cultural” cinema into mainstream culture. In The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses, Marks writes “I would hope that the category of inter-cultural cinema will cease to be conceptually useful, as the intercultural and transnational status of all cinema becomes harder to ignore (p.3) (my emphasis). Similarly, Jonathan Crary offers an interesting archaeology and genealogy of how we have come to pay attention to things in modern culture that can be extended to a study of academic forms of attention. By exploring the connection between medical, scientific, cinematographic, and psychological discourses in late nineteenth-century Europe, Crary argues that the logic of capitalist production constantly reshapes our subjectivities and ways of focusing and concentrating on particular tasks, objects, situations, and artworks, always reorganizing our perceptual habits and changing the balance of power between the senses (the now canonical balancing act between the primacy of vision and the marginality of the tactile). In response to the cruelty of capitalist modes of attention, states of distraction (hypnosis, autosuggestion, trance, daydreaming, sleepwalking) have emerged as a kind of re-enchanting of a perceptual and sensorial other. In light of this, it seems to me that the story we are told by visual anthropologists and film historians – the sensuously oriented cross-cultural horizon contested here – are chronicles of distraction and attention while contemporary film/media historians and visual anthropologists orient their academic attention exceedingly to ecstatic states. See Jonathan Crary’s Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture. See also Raymond Bellour, Catherine Russell, and Paul Stoller for more traditional epistemological inversions that end up, if not ontologizing, at least privileging the constitutive exclusions of Western modernity. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



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15. The anthropology of the image conceptualized in this book shares the cosmopolitical objections to humanist metaphysics, as the image, too, is a being whose ontology lies beyond the subject–object divide, as well as beyond the nature–culture divide. As an assemblage of human and non-human forms, the image cannot be reduced to multiculturalisms nor can it be interpreted through the lens of cultural relativism; the image, however, is not only at once a being and a case, at once speculative and empirical, its volatility exceeds the category “indigenous” which too often reduces it to gestures of provincialization and/or arguments that are either modernist or antimodernist. For more on this see the presentations of the participants to the conference “Indigenous Cosmopolitics: Dialogues About the Reconstitution of Worlds”, organized by Marisol de la Cadena at University of California, Davis (2013). De la Cadena judiciously sees the question of ontology less as a “turn” that would unify these cosmopolitical positions than as an “opening” towards “excess.” 16. Building on Strathern, Weiner, Gell, and Derrida, Roger Sansi poses a question in Art, Anthropology and the Gift that takes us beyond the usual West (market economy) versus non-West (gift economy) dualisms that norm social art interventions and practices: “Are ‘gift’ and ‘commodity’ exchange totally independent and irreconciliable forms of valuing objects and persons?” (100). Despite efforts, including Deleuze’s, to arrive at a radical (that is, pre-Lévi-Straussian) use of the gift, a contemporary anthropology of the image would have to secede from this particular modernist repertoire of concepts. The image and the curatorial logic of assemblages require the creation of new concepts unmoored from the dialectic of person, subjects, and objects so entrenched in discussions around the gift. Ultimately, the gift is mired in a utopian imaginary that falls short of the untimeliness of contemporary images. 17. The anthropologist and artist Fiamma Montezemolo has framed the concept of “bio-cartography” to map the affective and conceptual economy of i­ntrusion at work in the inSite public art event and (anti)-Biennale between Tijuana and San Diego, highlighting the assemblages and iterations between curatorial practice, strategies of self-representation and self-exoticization by local artists, and the curatorial traffic of Otherness of artists-as-ethnographer across a binational site. See her “Bio-cartography of Tijuana’s Cultural–Artistic Scene: the Uterus as Limit and/or Possibility.” See also Arnd Shneider and Christopher Wright’s Anthropology and Art Practice and Giulia Grechi’s “Mi-lieus. El juego de la profanación” for other readings of the same piece. 18. Another effect of the post-Mexican assemblage has been the cultivation of a new intellectual trend, among historians in particular, foregrounding non-indigenous historiographies beyond the canonical trope of mestizaje. See the pioneering historiographical work of Gerardo Rénique and Alexandra Minna Stern in Race and Nation in Modern Latin America. See also my “Borderline Ghosts: From Touch of Evil to Maquilapolis,” in Tijuana Dreaming: Art and Life at the Global Border on Sergio de la Torre’s recent installation Nuevo Dragon City where he examines the condition of Chinese Mexicans in Tijuana and Mexicali. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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19. See the recent dossier on “The Politics of Ontology” in Cultural Anthropology Online. 20. I use the word “installation” less in art historical terms than in philosophical terms. Installation is understood as a matter of endurance, as framed in Deleuze’s formulation in the epigraph to this book: “We have to manage to fold the line and establish an endurable zone in which to install ourselves . . .” See Samuel Weber’s etymological nuancing of the word “installation” in his reading of Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Work of Art” in Theatricality as Medium. Weber’s reading of Heidegger and the latter’s insistance that “‘installation’ is not ‘organization’ because it is drawn by truth toward the work. Installation is in a work-like way.” An interesting parallel can be established between the “work” of assemblage-work and the “work” of Abaroa’s theatricality and staged archaeophobic installation. Installation could thus be understood as the work of endurance. 21. See Dominic Boyer’s Understanding Media: A Popular Philosophy. 22. W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images, pp. 74–5. In this sense, W. J. T. Mitchell’s psychoanlaytical anthropology/art history/visual studies opens an interesting query, one that requires us to revise, ethnographically and conceptually, traditional accounts of vitalism (the organicist vitalism Abaroa’s piece is bidding farewell to) as well as the relation between psychoanalytical theory and the Deleuzian formulation of desire in which death would no longer be framed through the Lacanian trinity of symbolic, imaginary, and the real. Mitchell creates an interesting discrepancy between the Lacanian trinity with the Piercian triad of symbol, icon, and index that informs Deleuze’s media and image theory. 23. Claudio Lomnitz-Adler, Death and the Idea of Mexico, pp. 23–4. 24. Claudio Lomnitz-Adler, Death and the Idea of Mexico, p. 20. 25. Another fascinating borderline assemblage-work and expression of the anthropological turn in Mexican contemporary art and visual culture is the collaborative curatorial–editorial project Here is Tijuana! Freed from the nationalist uses of both archaeological and indigenous legacies which haunt curatorial and artistic works in Mexico City, Here Is Tijuana! deploys instead the inter-medial dimension of Tijuana’s visual and urban culture. The multiplicity of images which punctuate the project ranges from everyday public-life practices to the hustle and bustle of street and nightlife, to aerial photos of housing projects and site-specific art interventions, to the more intimate interior spaces of bars, pubs and dance halls. The book is briefly introduced as a collective project in the prologue by the authors who reappear in the form of cameo appearances amid citations, statistical data, and a world of anonymously taken images that, over the years, have caught their attention and curiosity. 26. www.lavitrina.com/artman/publish/printer_299.shtml 27. Claire Bishop, “The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents,” 178. 28. See Luis Vázquez León’s analysis of professional archaeology and its entrenched presence in Mexican institutional and cultural politics. Archaeology’s sovereign Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



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power – and that of its twin rival and companion, anthropology – are hinted at in the title of León’s book: El Leviatán arqueológico: Antropología de una tradición científica en México/The Archaeological Leviathan: Anthropology of a Scientific Tradition in Mexico.

EDL\JBURGH University Press ,;

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CHAPTER TWO

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Pathos-formula THE SCREEN IS DARK. Our nervous system encounters its surface from an intimate distance that communicates to us an indiscernible aural pattern. We hear an alchemical mix of emulsion scratches and footsteps on the pavement reminiscent of military troops marching in step, perhaps performing a routine exercise, perhaps mobilizing for war. There is no reassuring match between the sound of the disciplined boots and an image that would confirm our projection or placate our mounting anxiety. We are perhaps being recruited for a collective ritual or are haunted by a militaristic performance. Within a few minutes, the steps gently fade and we gradually discern the contours of an uncanny clinical scene. Dimly lit drains and tubes connect, on the upper side of the frame, to what appears like contours of a bottle-shaped life-support system, vertically extending a long plastic cord across the frame. The movement of the camera follows the gravity of the liquid being inoculated and reaches the bottom of the frame, plunged in darkness. It connects to an unidentifiable and immobile diseased form of life yet an organic body is nowhere to be seen. A connection between something ailing out there and the makeshift medical equipment is never established. It remains concealed, as it were, under the thick shadowy world partially situated in the extreme lower side of the frame, below the frame, hors-champs. Musical notes emanating from a flute replace the footsteps, rise up, and are refracted towards our ears in a strange perpendicular motion, reaching us, as it were, from the underworld. Our eyes are poorly equipped and vainly compensate for the invisibility of the scene, following faithfully and hypnotically the leader, the camera movement, always in the same direction, reaching further down to connect the tube with its diseased source. We are no longer spectators who merely hear and see. We are patients, immersed in this medical dispositif, overcome by an illness the etiology of which remains opaque to our intrusive clinical gaze but of which these images, sounds, and camera movements appear, nonetheless, to be the symptoms. As the camera slowly proceeds downward, it reaches the lower Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



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Figure 2.1 Rubén Gámez, La Fórmula Secreta, 1965 (screenshot, Tarek Elhaik).

part of the frame. A brief silent and dark interval is opened for a fraction of a second. Out of nowhere enters an intense and fast-paced shadow of a large buzzard spectrally hovering over the Zócalo: the nationalist public square par excellence. The scene is now submerged in Baroque orchestral music. The bird’s shadow ominously glides and surveys the area demarcated by the baroque architectural cardinal points of the square: the historical seat of the Mexican executive and legislative branches, and Roman Catholic Church. The dots begin to connect, and metonymic contiguities enigmatically held apart by montage turn the scene into metaphor. The footsteps hint at the flag ceremony, one of the grandiose rituals of the nation taking place daily on the Plaza de la Constitución; the drain was of a Coca-Cola bottle, symbol of cultural imperialism, connected, with equal symbolic force, to the square. But  the seeming metaphor immediately disintegrates. The buzzard is not exactly the eagle on the Mexican flag clenching its claws on a serpent on a nopal cactus but the scavenger zopilote1 that surveys what now begins to feel like an autopsy scene, or at least an emergency or terminal situation. A zone of indistinction is created in our minds: the expectation of a life-support system sustaining the national body politic turns into its double, the autopsy of a corpse, its uncanny double. Credits appear on the screen with a Gothic Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Figure 2.2 Rubén Gámez, La Fórmula Secreta, 1965 (screenshot Tarek Elhaik).

typography amplifying the thematics of death and prolonging the surreal five-minute-long opening sequence. We are at the Filmoteca’s San Ildefonso screening facility and research center, located in Mexico City’s Centro Histórico only a few blocks from the Zócalo. I’m alone in the small theater watching for the first time La Fórmula Secreta: Coca-Cola en Las Venas, the 1965 essay film and coup de grâce by Mexican director Rubén Gámez. La Fórmula Secreta’s opening sequence is an uncanny mise-en-scène of a nationalist figurative impulse that defigures itself.2 The inoculation in process in this scene amplifies the ambivalence of the pharmakon. It both derives its strength and accelerates its imminent death from the very source of the disease: a symbol of cultural imperialism – the Coke bottle, prefigured in the title as Coca-Cola in the Veins – as it sets out to destroy the stage, the opsis on which the work of mythologization has taken place, on which it has been repeated, over and over, by decades of post-revolutionary education sentimentale. La Fórmula Secreta is clearly situated in a vanguardista cosmopolitan–­nationalist mode of figuration, in the context of a neo-baroque “war of images”3 in which the nation effects its powers by appearing as the only necessary ultimate horizon, the supreme cultural form to echo a voice from the very nationalist scenes4 it takes distance from. In doing so, it points to something interesting, Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



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ghostly, that breaks the mimetic identity between art and life under the mode of the national, and reconfigures it in another way not yet clear to many of us who are fond of this intriguing film. It undoubtedly disrupts and breaks down the mimetic effect by creating a disjuncture between viewers, like myself in San Ildefonso, and all those who have walked numerous times, habitually and ritualistically, through the Zócalo. It breaks down the identificatory habit of projecting on the screen, ad nauseam, nationalist and cosmopolitan pedagogies. It is “a ‘breakdown’ [défaillance] of the figure.”5 The buzzard and, later in the film, the images of Indians and mestizos caught in a cage of melancholy, as Roger Bartra would say thirty years later, are the lingering disruptions thrown at the spectator–ethnographer who had just left the theater. Gámez’s La Fórmula Secreta enacts more than mere iconographic disruptions, even as it anticipates, decades later, neo-Dadaesque and antinationalist artworks, such as Eduardo Abaroa’s Destrucción. It releases an incurable-image. More specifically, the film’s opening sequence points to the volatility of the hyphen between the incurable and the image. The incurable, curation’s dopplegänger, is understood here, first, as a “question of pathos and even, if one dares, of pathology.”6 It transposes nationalist and avant-gardist iconology through the imminence of a terminal situation that creates a tension between the symbolic and the clinical. It displays their mutual constituting powers, the pathos of the image in which symbols are caught between motion and immobility. Never resolved and profoundly ambivalent, the imminent death of the body politic in which a symbol (vulture) scavenges the scene which has hosted it for centuries (Zócalo) reveals the work of its pathos-formula. Symbol can no longer be equated with life, and the outside of the nation with death. This pathology, and the pathological inversions prompted by the incurable and its attendant health state, its very state of curation, provide us with an emerging conceptual key. Gámez’s secret pathos-formula – literally la fórmula secreta – begins to appear in fact as the sign of a more profound mutation in Mexican visual culture and the point of departure for the production of another anthropological unconscious. As Didi-Huberman explains: the pathos-formula gave art history access to a fundamental anthropological dimension – that of the symptom. Here the symptom is understood as movement in bodies, a movement that fascinated Warburg not only because he considered it “passionate agitation” but also because he judged it an “external prompting.” Gertrud Bing rendered the meaning of Warburg’s quest perfectly when she stated that the pathos-formulae are meant to be considered visible expressions of psychic states that had become fossilized, so to speak, in the images. Here, it is possible to think of the iconography of hysteria as Charcot might have recreated it by following the same threads of a history of styles. But Warburg went beyond “iconographical” notion of the symptom Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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found in nineteenth-century mental hospitals. He understood that symptoms are not “signs” (semeia of classical medicine) and that their temporalities, their clusters of instants and durations, their mysterious survivals, presuppose something like an unconscious memory.7

These transformations from semiotiki to symptom would appear as a mere trick characteristic of our contemporary states of curation. Indeed, that this pathosformula would reappear, today, would perhaps even betray a persistence of a certain neo-avant-gardist and nationalist ethos: kill to resurrect, forget to remember, and fantasize on a scene peopled by non-­anthropomorphic scavengers preying on the anthropomorphized body politic of the nation. Locating this pathos-formula elsewhere, today, is an urgent task if we are not to pacify the critical and clinical capacities of the incurable-image or conflate it with a case of historical continuity. The last would suggest a dangerous and problematic reliance on the philosophical tradition of vitalist organicism, on the one hand, and on the agency of the historical over the powers of its becomings, the agency of form over chaos, on the other. Yet, if we persevere in our diagnostics, and therefore look elsewhere, beyond film and art history, a careful evaluation will reveal other sites where La Fórmula Secreta’s opening scene, its theatricalization of the incurable and the defiguration it prompts, continue to be active. Not only would looking at these other sites trigger a gradual delinking from the avant-gardist scene of curation, it would show, in other forms, via other images of thought, the unfolding of unruly becomings amid contemporary post-Mexican life. La Fórmula Secreta’s pathos-formula is to be found, instead, in the antidotes of the Curator’s Pharmacy. Teratoma In Mexico City, this conceptual mutation of the symptom is, today, accelerated by the convergence between emergent curatorial thought and new medical ontologies and styles of practice. This mutation and convergence mark the very “contemporaneity” of contemporary curatorial thinking.8 Let us now turn our gaze towards one of Mexico City’s most virulent sites of curation: the multidisciplinary group and curatorial platform Teratoma. Teratoma was set up as a place where art historians and critics, curators, artists and anthropologists can explore contemporary shifts in cultural, intellectual and aesthetic productions from a wide range of practices, engaging the effects of economic globalization and the mutation of cultural geopolitics, aiming at creating intercultural networks and circuits. In the words of Cuauhtémoc Medina, cofounder of the Teratoma group and chief curator of the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC): Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



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Teratoma is a site of encounters, debates, exhibitions, residencies, pedagogy, dialogues, archiving of textual, visual, physical and virtual information in order to allow production, debate and reception of the various cultures to come in our continent. [. . .] For now, we have decided to adopt TERATOMA as a provisional name for our group. As some of you may already know, the name comes to us from pathology: it is a denomination that refers to a type of tumor that has the nasty particularity to generate all kinds of cell types, but without organization. As a result of a failure in the cellular reproductive mechanism, often due to the latency of embryonic cells or to genetic disorder, Teratoma has the tendency to grow in the body by combining, in a quasi-monstrous way, neuronal tissue with pelvic bones, semen with mammal glands, and so on thus causing Teratoma to appear like a double of the affected body, perfectly identical to it, yet acting as its twin, without top or bottom, left or right, or clear distinctions between function and localization. Teratoma is a metaphor that stands for the rejection of at once the ideal architecture of culture and the evolutionist imaginary. It is the illness of a regression to chaos by a colony of cells that acts parasitically towards the symbolic apparatus.9

The image of Mexico City as a metastasized urban sprawl has earned the monster the name of “the Tumor City.”10 Teratoma was deployed by its founders as an oncological metaphor, both site-specific and practical to a framing of a curatorial intervention in the body politic of a post-revolutionary political culture ailing from what anthropologist Roger Bartra has diagnosed as a “melancholic post-Mexican condition.” In contrast – but in continuity with the dialogues initiated with the anthropologists, art historians, artists and curators who were then members of Teratoma – I began to understand the work of curation as an ethnography-based assembling of a Mexico City-centered clinical landscape, and eventually as a search for an exit from what might be called an onto-oncological form of intervention and conceptualization. Each curatorial encounter and conversation was haunted by an oncological refrain: Cancerous tissue: each instant, each second, a cell becomes cancerous, mad, proliferates, and loses its configuration, takes over everything, the organism must submit to its rules or re-stratify it, not only for its own survival, but also to make an escape from the organism, the fabrication of the “other” BwO on the place of consistency.11

The very word “teratoma” recruits a Nietzschean ethics of dosages that nonetheless remains hinged on a vitalistic ontology. Moreover, it evokes and suggests a revision of the cosmopolitan national body politic through a symptomatology hinting at an emerging cartography of intrusion beyond autopoeisis. Teratoma, as illness, diagnosis and form of curation, may even help us Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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locate an “originary susceptibility of nation to intrusion.”12 In acknowledging the inorganic side of critique, as a disorganization of the organism, Teratoma enables us conceptually to explore, hand in hand, questions of immunizations and curation of the body politic beyond the guarantee of homeostasis. It also dangerously flirts with the aggressive model of the curator as surgeon13 (at best) and benevolent caregiver (at worst). This form of thought, this curatorial pathos-formula, would appear as a symptom of the illness of curation. “Malaise in curation”14 and an image of a symmetrically placed white bandage in the middle of a journal front cover were after all the incurable-images from a 2003 symposium of contemporary art organized by the curatorial team of Curare. The title of curator Itala Schmeltz’s essay and contribution to the symposium drives the point home quite forcefully: “¿El Malestar en la Curaduría: Que lo-Cura?”15 In Spanish, the question brings together the psychoanalytical registers of madness (locura), on the one hand, and the other registers of cure, incurable, and care, but also of pastoral power (cura/priest). Furthermore, the question is posed in ontological terms. Schmeltz asks not who cures the malaise of curation but what. Though the figure of the curator’s function as a caregiver and priest is implied and troubled, the question nevertheless points to the ethical substance of curation that would cure its malaise. Perhaps the “what” refers to a calling of the caring curate who creatively proposes a diagnostics and a treatment rather than cure?

Curare While having a foot in the post-Enlightenment critical tradition, this form of contemporary curatorial thinking unequivocally tilts the balance towards the clinical. From Reinhart Kosellek’s Critique and Crisis, we learn that critique emerges in ancient Athens as the jurisprudential term “krisis.” Nearly untranslatable from the holistic Greek context to our much more compartmentalized one, krisis integrates polis rupture, tribunal, knowledge, judgment, and repair at the same time that it links subject and object in practice. Krisis refers to a specific work of the polis on itself – a practice of sifting, sorting, judging, and repairing what has been rent by a citizen violation of polis law or order. As the term winds its way into Latin and then the vernacular European languages, critique loses this many-faceted holism. It retreats mainly into medical vocabulary where it signifies the turning point in an illness, a usage that persists into the present.16

These images of the incurable of curatorial thought point to the balancing act between the critical and the clinical. It shows us it is a very delicate one, to be handled with a great deal of care and, with no illusions, our diagnoses Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



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and prognoses might remove the threat of illness or cure the malaise afflicting contemporary life. The art of dosages is one for which there are no guidelines and prescriptions, profoundly ethical and clinical in its cultivation of the values and images of repair,17 endurance, and perseverance. As these images and words reveal – MALAISE / BANDAGE / TERATOMA / CURARE – curation and the incurable are always two sides of the same coin. Yet, while our actual images of thought are incurable beyond consolation, their attendant curatorial, cinematic, artistic and intellectual malaise is not necessarily untreatable if one perseveres in believing in and creating forms of life beyond humanist prescriptions: that is, if we continue to think of the incurable via creative clinical and critical images of thought that will illuminate our path amid a cultural field increasingly lived as a relentless and remorseless force field. Mexico City is in this sense a symptom of this larger malaise. The postMexican assemblage-work not only disables the substantive ontology of the nation but it also inflects post-Mexican anthropology, media artworks, and curatorial practices with a clinical and ethical orientation: a complex ethics and clinic of the incurable. More than a figure of an impasse, this incurable appears in the works discussed here as the middle and milieu of a larger assemblage in which the truth practices of the anthropologist, curator, and artist are blurred. If handled properly, this assemblage, which many of us share, inhabit, and contest, has the capacity to curb the present-day habit and compulsion of speaking truth to power, of being dans le vrai. For too long, anthropology, art, and curation, especially those with noble critical intensions, have suffered from their respective interlocutors’ desire to be joined in their “dans le vrai.” Rather than being in the truth of the care and cures dispensed by the curator, and “given the status of the incurable as a negative entity, we can only hope to approach it obliquely. The clinic of psychoanalysis is exemplary in this regard, given that the style of its theory and practice is modeled after the very object of jouissance that it questions.”18 This could only be a provisional answer to Schmeltz’s interrogation in which the who and the what are sutured, diagonally, via an imaginary psychotherapeutic encounter. The stage of curation would add (cumbersomely?) another conceptual persona to the scenario of assemblage-work: the psychoanalyst. In light of this, curare’s locura would thus be a symptom of a precarious state of curation, a precarious health state, psychic and physiological at once. It would thus be a state of curation in which psychoanalysis, and the disruptive vocation of its pathos-formula, wrestles with the critical and clinical capacities of an emerging, contemporary form of curatorial diagnostic care. It would be a form of curation in which subject and the assemblage would appear to be mutually constitutive. This would be the trick of our societies of control in which continuous modulations keep subjects in their place to enjoy their symptoms. But Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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post-Mexican assemblage-work does something else with these incurableimages: it catches them as these undergo a complex process of parametrizations and modulations characteristic of societies of control. These curatorial modulations place the very figure of the curator as a “gap between diagnostics and therapeutics.”19 Curation understood as assemblage-work is precisely this shuttling back and forth between diagnostics and therapeutics: it extracts the incurable as its “emerging property”20 and converts it into an image of thought, into an incurable-image. Of course, curation also attends to subjectivities immersed in the social, to disciplined subjects in given institutional settings. But what and who cures the subject when the apparatus in which they are formed – such as the National Museum of Anthropology installed by Abaroa in Chapter 1 – are imploded? Under the guidance of a Lacanian curator-as-psychoanalyst, the subject could, of course, revisit the ruined site with a tragic affective disposition between mourning and melancholia. The playful21 task of curation would be one that attends instead to assemblages after the subject has left the scene of its subjection. If curation is to be generative of sense after the subject, its ethical substance is to be found beyond the meaningfulness of a subject suffering from the incurable. The onto-oncologies of Teratoma exacerbate and amplify the notorious diagnostic indifference of the oncologist towards the subjectivity of the patient. It curbs the psychoanalytical inclinations of the incurable of curare and its locura. Thus, formulated assemblage-work would wrestle with a ­schizophrenic historical sense and conceptual agenda that require us to set aside the question of subjectivity on the stage of curation, in favor of the ethical substance of the conceptual persona of the curator. Curare’s and Teratoma’s curatorial diagnostics do not dismiss completely curation’s attention to psychic states and the subjectivities it cares for. But it tilts the curatorial away from the subjective and the social towards a postclinical form of curation still to come. This form of curation would link assemblage (teratoma/ curare) and dispositif (Mexico) beyond the “desubjectifying” effects of apparatuses diagnosed by Agamben in the mid 2000s: What would such a non-subject look like? In the wide-ranging reception of Agamben’s work in the art context during the past decade, such depletion of subjectivity was still understood via fairly traditional models of alienation. And his notion of biological life was curiously marginalized in favor of a definition of life in social terms. The networks implicated in the concept of “life” were seen above all as social networks, shifting the concept of biopolitics into a form of post-Marxism that simply extended the concept of the institution to encompass every aspect of the social life of the subject. But at this point, it has become impossible to ignore that these networks are technical before they are social, and that the life in question is both biological and informatic, as Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



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Foucault and others predicted long before Agamben. Instead of institutions producing subjects, we have apparatuses capturing organisms. Both the informational form and the affective content of contemporary art are optimized for an apparatus that is increasingly dominated by feedback between the iPhone interface, the feed, and the aggregator, not the institutional structures of the gallery and museum. This shift is part of the long history of aesthetics as applied physiology – a history in relation to which the physiological–technical systems of contemporary art today have only begun to be understood.22

The curatorial frames of Curare and Teratoma open up a passage between an assemblage and an apparatus and through which unstable subject positions are produced. This passage, this hyphen between the incurable and the image, is the outcome of a singular work of curation that frustrates both symbolic and subjectivist reading. These curatorial platforms link the incurable and the image and assemble incurable-images. They not only eschew a diagnosis that privileges disruptions brought to the symbolic order of the nation (which it does, needless to say) but primarily disorient us by forcing a return to chaotic affects that cannot be curated in the professional sense of the term. In light of this, the exhibitionary value of the artwork is shouldered aside in favor of another form of curation that cultivates instead the value of the incurable. Curation shifts from exhibition to the incurable; in doing so, however, it does not return us to a celebration of an archaic, cultish, and ritualistic function of objects that would live well, if not better, without the act of display. It is in this sense that the incurable’s mode of remediation is distinct from that enabled by the medium of the pharmakon. The “essence” of the pharmakon lies in the way in which, having no stable essence, no “proper” characteristics, it is not, in any sense (metaphysical, physical, chemical, alchemical) of the word, a substance [. . .] It is rather the prior medium in which differentiation in general is produced [. . .] If the pharmakon is “ambivalent,” it is because it constitutes the medium in which opposites are opposed, the movement and the play that links them among themselves, reverses them or makes one side cross over into the other (soul/ body, good/evil, inside/outside, memory/forgetfulness, speech/writing, etc.) [. . .] The pharmakon is the movement, the locus, and the play: (the production of) difference. It is the différance of difference. It holds in reserve, in its undecided shadow and vigil, the opposites and the differends that the process of discrimination will come to carve out. Contradictions and pairs of opposites are lifted from the bottom of this diacritical, differing, deferring, reserve. Already inhabited by différance, this reserve, even though it “precedes” the opposition between different effects, even though it preexists differences as effects, does not have the punctual simplicity of a coincidentia oppositorum. It is from this fund that dialectics draws its reserves.23 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Building on Derrida, René Girard, too, had seized on the concept of the pharmakon as an ambiguous shadow that looms large over the political community. Philosophy, like tragedy, can at certain levels serve as an attempt at expulsion, an attempt perpetually renewed because never wholly successful. This point, I think, has been brilliantly demonstrated by Jacques Derrida in his essay “La Pharmacie de Platon.” He sets out to analyze Plato’s use of the pharmakon. The Platonic pharmakon functions like the human pharmakos and leads to similar results [. . .] All difference in doctrines and attitudes is dissolved in violent reciprocity, is secretly undermined by the [. . .] somewhat naive use of pharmakon. This use polarizes the maleficent violence on a double, who is arbitrarily expelled from the philosophical community [. . .] Derrida’s analysis demonstrates in striking fashion a certain arbitrary violence of the philosophic process as it occurs in Plato, through the mediation of a word that is indeed appropriate since it really designates an earlier, more brutal variant of the same arbitrary violence.24

In the same Derridean vein, art critic Boris Groys rehearses the premises of a contemporary understanding of curation of frail and ill art objects in relation to the pharmakon. While it is not clear why he sees the museum as the paradigmatic institution for hosting the art work, Groy’s reading of the pharmakon is nonetheless illuminating even if it reduces the event of curation to the act of exhibition and display: The curator administers this exhibition space in the name of the public – as a representative of the public. Accordingly, the curator’s role is to safeguard its public character, while bringing the individual artworks into this public space, making them accessible to the public, publicizing them. It is obvious that an individual artwork cannot assert its presence by itself, forcing the viewer to take a look at it. It lacks the vitality, energy, and health to do so. In its origin, it seems, the work of art is sick, helpless; in order to see it, viewers must be brought to it as visitors are brought to a bed-ridden patient by hospital staff. It is no coincidence that the word “curator” is etymologically related to “cure”: to curate is to cure. Curating cures the powerlessness of the image, its inability to show itself by itself. Exhibition practice is thus the cure that heals the originally ailing image, that gives it presence, visibility; it brings it to the public view and turns it into the object of the public’s judgment. However, one can say that curating functions as a supplement, like a pharmakon in the Derridean sense: it both cures the image and further contributes to its illness.1

If this shift of the task of curation from exhibitionary value to the value of the incurable is not governed by the sacrificial and archaic vocation of the pharmakon, what does, where does it take place, and how? The status of the Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



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incurable in Mexico City, the tumor city as Santiago Sierra calls it, is difficult to pin down. Hence, the need to reorient radically the acknowledged reliance on the pharmakon in my interlocutor’s concept work. For the founders of Curare and Teratoma curation is ultimately elevated to a form of écriture and a dangerous supplement that wreaks havoc in a polis ailing from a surplus of both cosmopolitan and nationalist pathos. While mestizo modernity and its iconic visual culture continue to be for most a scene of identificatory positions, dialogue in the city has long begun to breakdown. Not unlike the disfiguration taking place on the nationalist public square in La Fórmula Secreta’s opening sequence, Teratoma and Curare seek not to mourn this breakdown of figures. They welcome the urgent immersion into the formless medium of the pharmakon. To them, the curator ought to be understood as the reincarnation of a Socratic figure erring in the city, dispensing wisdom to its citizens, and whose last words before the philosopher’s death are destined to Asclepius, the god of medicine and health. This shift thus provides us with a way out from the cosmopolitan–national fantasies that agitate the revolutionary imaginary and visual culture. It points to the creation of another mode of curation for contemporary post-Mexican states of curation. The destruction and becoming imperceptible of the body politic and national visual culture are transfigured, conceptually, into a volatile zone of mediation populated with incurable images. There, the curator asked us to emancipate ourselves from overwhelming contemporary figures of care and curation, on the one hand, and the moral landscapes and affective geographies of cosmopolitan nationalism and Third Worldism, on the other. “Ever since I can remember, the art ­landscape – and especially national vistas – has nauseated me,” writes Teratoma cofounder Cuauhtémoc Medina in his introductory essay to the catalog of a watershed exhibit hosted by the PS1 gallery in New York, “Mexico City: An Exhibition about the Exchange Rates of Bodies and Values.” So the curator of the incurable requires us to think of other forms of collectivity through a different deployment of images. Ethical and affective implications can be drawn from the diagnostic activity of Teratoma and Curare, now understood as incurable images symptomatic of the post-Mexican condition. They usher in a politics of the unconscious through media and curatorial acts that celebrate the becoming imperceptible of the very publicity of the nation: from the destruction of the Museo Nacional de Antropología to the flight of the vulture in La Fórmula Secreta that gave it its initial impetus. It is in this sense that the work of the incurable-image does more than enact the differential and sacrificial diagnostics and therapeutics of the pharmakon. These media events and acts of curation anticipate instead “the exhaustion of difference,” to borrow from Alberto Moreiras, and thus inaugurate a mode of care for postnationalist and post-cosmopolitan assemblages in which the only thing that Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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emerges as singularly therapeutic is “the injunction to produce. As Deleuze puts it ‘you must produce the unconscious’. Produce it, or be happy with your symptoms, your ego, and your psychoanalyst.”25 This mode of curation would also be hinged on a form of repetition that problematizes the curator’s location between patient and agent. Agents Anthropologist Alfred Gell made a provocative distinction between a sociology of art and an anthropology of art yet to be articulated: The anthropology of art would forever remain a very underdeveloped field were it to restrict itself to institutionalized art production and circulation comparable to that which can readily be studied in the context of advanced bureaucratic and industrialized states [. . .] It seems, then, that the anthropology of art can be at least provisionally separated from the study of art institutions or the “art-world.”

Though Mexico could very well be included in what Gell has called “bureaucratic/​industrialized states,” his suggestion partially to disconnect the anthropology of art from the logic of state-sponsored art institutions is worth exploring. It informs and can be extended to the relation between curation and anthropology. With this in mind, I have therefore preferred not to rehearse the now canonical critiques of the politics of representing Mexico mediated by official cultural institutions (National Council for Culture and Arts [CONACULTA] or the National Institute for Fine Arts and Literature [INBA] for instance) or by international travel exhibitions, associated, for example, with the National Museum of Anthropology, especially since this one has already been detonated by Eduardo Abaroa; or again by focusing on the cultural history of such highly politicized exhibitions, such as Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries, prefaced by the precious pen of Octavio Paz (Canclini, 1994; Debroise, 2001). In short, I have tried to frame the question of the incurable not by proposing a revisionist history of art and curatorial practices in Mexico or by exploring the relation between official funding cultural institutions and contemporary art and curatorial platforms. What is now known as “institutional critique” – a moment during the 1990s in which my interlocutors have been active participants and agents – has not been my objective. Suffice it to say that the past two decades saw the emergence of semi-autonomous artistic and curatorial practices, that is, semi-autonomous assemblages which have posed watershed challenges to the relation between (nationalist/official) anthropological thinking and the cultural politics of contemporary art exhibitions in Mexico. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



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As the late Olivier Debroise, José Luis Barrios, Karen Cordero and other members of the curatorial group Curare have shown, contemporary art in present-day Mexico has to be put against the background of the long and sustained history – state-legitimated tradition – of official travel exhibitions with diplomatic objectives. These events, highly publicized in the Mexican press, have invariably projected representations of Mexico by way of a strategy that flaunts a proud sense of national harmony by linking the country’s preColumbian heritage, its heterogeneous indigenous cultural formations, and the modernism of post-revolutionary artistic culture. It can safely be said that what is “contemporary” about contemporary art and curatorial practices in present-day Mexico can be summarized by the following claim: the complex nationalist linkages between national identity, the Mestizo as citizen subject and mestizaje as official doctrine, curatorial/artistic practice, and the “discontinuous ethnic fragments” (Debroise, 2001) of the post-revolutionary nation have now been interrupted via sophisticated art historical revisions. The organicity of the nation as it was imagined by post-revolutionary nationalism and vanguardista public art has been in crisis for several decades, and transnational art and curatorial assemblages and platforms operating out of Mexico ought to be framed and understood in that context. The contemporary curatorial thinking of Teratoma and Curare is perhaps equally well served by a mode of research that seeks to give a name beyond the historiographical and curatorial expertise of curators. What has always struck me about these two groups is their capacity to create temporal shelters within the “frenzy,” as Ruben Gallo has rightly noted, of contemporary art worlds and the speed on which they thrive, often at the expense of rigorous research and writing. Perhaps these critics are so dependent and connected to the turbulent effects of these myriad market forces and the venues and trends they create that to take the time to address them in an adequate manner would be to exclude oneself from the hyper-accelerated current game of contemporary art. Timeliness is mandatory; being untimely (intempestif) is too risky professionally.26

By making time for concept work, Teratoma and Curare have taken the risk of creating what could be called a form of curatorial untimeliness. I propose to call Teratoma and Curare “emerging diagnosticians in Mexico.” These contemporary curatorial assemblages are profoundly imbued by a diagnostic dimension, one that exceeds the very culturalist contextualizations routinely imposed on their concept work. The problematization at work here can be summarized by this claim: to understand the logic of contemporary curatorial assemblages one has to engage their diagnostic, medical Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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and clinical dimensions. The task of the media anthropologist is to probe the kind of autopsy and reinventions of the national and regional implicit in the very logic of curation. One can, of course, rely on the dominant idiom of networks – node, connectors – because these curatorial platforms are linked to the connectivity of cybernetics terminology to larger systems of curation, art fairs, biennials, and the usual hustle and bustle of contemporary art worlds. These curatorial assemblages help us to rethink and rephrase the logic of networks in a new idiom and set of metaphors:27 that of immunology, oncology, and pathology. Tilting cultural critique towards clinical critique ought to be framed as productive of wondrous, even if dreary, conceptual differences. By underscoring the conceptual affinities between the diagnostic and the curatorial, Teratoma and Curare do not stifle differences. Quite the contrary, they enable a shift from dominant, organicist forms of cultural critique towards inorganic horizons. This profound rethinking is performed precisely because of the frictions at work at the interface between anthropology, art, and curatorial practice so specific to both the concept of Mexico and its expression as a national visual culture. In the work of Teratoma and Curare, this interface is extended and is mapped on to our late modern problematizations of life – medicine, pathology, health, and governmentality – as components of an imperceptible curatorial vitalism of the territorial nation state. Teratoma deploys a conceptual pedagogy that enables contemporary curatorial practices to question curation as a site of problematization rather than as a history of representations: the history of curatorial thought is the history of problematizations. As Foucault once noted: “Problematization is not the representation of a preexistent object nor the creation through discourse of an object that did not exist. It is the ensemble of discursive and non-discursive practices that make something enter into the play of true and false and constitute it as an object of thought.” Contemporary curatorial thought thus frames and conceptualizes the incurable as an emergent relationship and zone of friction between patient/ agent, health/illness, affections and afflictions. Teratoma and Curare ought to be framed as such curatorial platforms and diagnostic forms of curation that wrestle with this very problematization of life, in, alongside, and beyond Mexico. The central argument proposed here can be framed as follows: from a historiographic perspective, a rigorous investigation of contemporary postMexican curatorial thought ought to begin by probing the challenges posed by curation to the vitalistic ontology of the nation that emerges towards the late eighteenth century, normalized during the nineteenth century within the social sciences and subsequent nationalist discourses, and finally challenged and redesigned by the curatorial forces and movements set in motion by Teratoma and Curare under pressures and new capacities unleashed by Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



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the globalization and increasing professionalization of curatorial practice. Indeed, “an argument that globalism is nothing new risks the insensitivity to the singular, contemporary effects of historical repetition, whereas an assertion that the world has dramatically changed easily becomes an untheoretical, artless attempt to shape the ghosts of the historically amorphous into an empirical event.”28 The illnesses and cures offered by these emerging diagnosticians have, indeed, historical antecedents, well beyond my expertise. I can, however, think of at least one text written in the late eighteenth century and therefore before the formation of a Mexican nationalist and cosmopolitan horizon. Hector Villareal’s Political Illnesses that Affect the Great Capital of this New Spain / Enfermedades Políticas que padece la capital de esta Nueva España (1787) evokes early organicist conceptualizations of the then emerging postcolonial state, what some would call decolonization. The book begins with this: [For political bodies and the human body present a series of disquieting analogies, the wide array of illnesses I list in what follows is nothing more and nothing less than an extension of those analogies] / Siendo notorio que tengan los cuerpo politico una cierta analogía con el cuerpo humano, tambien lo sera que padeciendo este diversos generos de enfermedades, no hayan de estar aquellos exentos de ellas. (p. 50)

I bring in this text not to seek a continuity between a colonial mode of curation and a postcolonial one which would find new expressions in post-1990s curatorial platforms such as Teratoma and Curare. Rather, I wish to underscore the becoming at work in the concept work of contemporary curatorial thought and its attendant inter-medial and visual culture. What Teratoma and Curare might ask from us is not to return to the late eighteenth century to locate some precursor to their form of curation. Quite the contrary, they ask us to conceptualize the persistence of the clinical and critical concept of intrusion and, more specifically, the “originary susceptibility of the nation to intrusion” (Cheah, 1999). Teratoma and Curare are counterintuitive forms of curatorial thought: rather than framing intrusion as a form of aggression, they seem to say that we are contemporaries to various forms of intrusion. In addition to being a conceptual persona, the curator of Teratoma becomes an agent who smuggles through the conduit of intrusion. The task of curation in this conceptual landscape and diagnostic assemblage thus effects multiple deterritorializations through intrusive, “ungovernable specificities.”29 The historical particularity of Mexico is curatorially converted into emerging post-Mexican intrusions. I thus endorse Carl Good’s and other recent theoretical trends cautious about the risk of reestablishing or defining national difference or even of somehow assuming the “nation” as an organic entity. For as soon Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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as “Mexico” is identified as different from x or simply defined in any way, it becomes a problem that pertains not to “itself” but to the very discourse that desires the definition in the first place. Instead, “Mexico” always already has been the effect of a de-territorializing of itself. (ibid., p. 2)

As in the opening sequence of La Fórmula Secreta, the art of curating postMexican life remains, today, in the chaos between life and death. Chaos I have tried to pay careful attention to the ethico-affective operation underlying the clinical concept of curation. It stemmed from an effort to design an outline of curation from the pathic point of view of images and images of thought. This shift in attention would require us both to engage the production of images as a radically de-authored conceptual process and to displace our subjectivities towards a commitment to the pathos of images that have a life and death of their own. This ought to be achieved not by simply displacing the dyadic relation between patient and doctor, or between analysand and analyst, on to that of image and curator and on to that of spectator and screen, as in classic psychoanalytic visual and media theory. It would have to put us instead in the role of the patient, and the image in that of the doctor. We are images’ clinical pictures: they repeat us as symptoms and we repeat them as diagnosis. The task of curation would then be one committed to participating in collective curatorial processes and to forging therapeutic communities through intractable and incurable desires encountered in images. We are the hinterlands of images, nothing more and nothing less: we are images’ expressions, bas-relief from the chaotic and infinite world of images, and not the other way round, in which images are formulated as mere representations of our collective and personal ordeals, subjectivities, lives, realities, and so on. The task of curation which emerged from these post-Mexican assemblages and from their encounters with the incurable is both anonymous and therapeutic, tending to and caring for iterative assemblages in contemporary visual culture. Teratoma and Curare curators take the “work” in curatorial work as a composite form of working through that wavers between two ethical traditions: on the one hand, a psychoanalytical ethics of mourning that laments and re-elaborates the loss and failures that affect us; on the other, a Deleuzian symptomatology, full of belief in the future, that also laments the material retuned by the Real but that does so by joyfully seeking to reassemble and reactualise those imperceptible potentialities crushed by dominant and indifferent agencies of symbolization.30 I side with the latter but have learned to Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



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be respectful of the former. The work of curation, like the Deleuzian and psychoanalytical ethical operations – such as the operation of the pharmakon and the pathos formula – begins with a form of attention and care for signs of imperceptible potentialities that lay dormant in sites of complex repetition. This imperceptible, this pathic, dimension of curation governs the hyphen between the incurable and the image. It is incurable in a double sense: in the professional and institutional sense of the term, literally escaping the reach of curatorial practice and its attendant disciplinary institutions (museums, university, nation state); in the psychoanalytical sense, by pointing to troubles and disorders that cannot be treated and cared for in the biomedical31 sense of the term. Incurable-images can be only the source of a lament at the threshold of a mourning process hinged on a singular ontology of images and pedagogy of healing. Incurable-images are both clinical and non-clinical forms of life. Our curatorial task is to evaluate some of the uses and disadvantages of these incurable-images for life. The rest escapes us indefinitely. Notes  1. Lomnitz notes in Deep Mexico, Silent Mexico: An Anthropology of Nationalism that “the buzzard became a regular motiv in travel writing on Mexico during the 19th century. Buzzards figure in the first Mexican impressions of both Fanny Calderón de la Barca and E. B. Tylor” (234). Some of these travel writers have gone as far as suggesting that the zopilote are “among the institutions of the country” (Evans [1873] cited in Lomnitz, p. 234).  2. See Philippe Lacoue-Barthe, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Simon Sparks (eds.), Retreating the Political.  3. See Serge Gruzinsky, Images at War: Mexico from Columbus to Blade Runner (1492– 2019).  4. La Fórmula Secreta’s ambivalence is, in this sense, different in orientation from such iconic Third Cinema films of the period as Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas’s The Hour of the Furnaces (1966–9). The latter opens with unequivocally anti-imperialist and nationalist references to Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth and Eduardo Galleano’s The Open Veins of Latin America.  5. Retreating the Political (p. xxii).  6. Foreword by Georges Didi-Huberman in Philippe-Alain Michaud’s Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion, p. 14.  7. Ibid., p. 16.  8. In his Thinking Contemporary Curating, Terry Smith astutely proposes a distinction between curatorial practice and curatorial thinking. The latter’s emerging philosophical and conceptual vocation would be to give visibility and expression to the experience of contemporaneousness amid our “current condition.” See the chapters “The Lure” and “What is Contemporary Curatorial Thought?”, pp. 17–25 and 28–55. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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 9. Conversations with several members of Teratoma took place in the context of my ethnography in Mexico City during 2004–6. I am particularly grateful to Cuauhtémoc Medina for sharing with me, in private conversation, the founding document that I quote here, in which he delineates with remarkable rigor the conceptual contours, geopolitical concerns, and curatorial objectives of this interdisciplinary group. 10. See Santiago Sierra’s interview with El País. He is also known for his installation work that performs corporeal inscriptions on the bodies of marginal forms of life, undocumented migrants, sex workers, street children: that is, forms of life reduced to bare life or diagnosed with incurable illnesses. 11. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 163. 12. Pheng Cheah, Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation, p. 239. 13. Walter Benjamin’s analogy between filmmaker and surgeon comes to mind via “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” 14. “Malestar en La Curaduría” is the title of a dossier published in the journal Curare as the proceedings from the Symposium of Contemporary Art in Puebla, Mexico (2003). I have particularly benefited from the interventions of curators and art critics Osvaldo Sánchez and Itala Shmeltz. 15. See Itala Shmeltz “El malestar en la curaduría: ¿Que lo-cura?”/“Curatorial Malaise: What to Cure?” 16. Wendy Brown, Is Critique Secular?: Blasphemy, Injury, Speech, p. 9. ­ olecular 17. “Repair” is a term borrowed from the biological sciences, often used in m biology and genetics in reference to DNA. More recently, the term has been used in critiques of social art, artivism, and issues of documentation and archiving of art with an activist vocation that aims to induce “change” and “emancipation.” See the discussions on the listserve and online platform, Empyre. Repair is used more in the sense of Claire Colebrook, Elizabeth Grosz, and Paul Rabinow. 18. Andrew Skomra, “The Insufferable Symptom.” 19. See the chapter “Artificiality and Enlightnement: From Sociobiology to Biosociality,” in Paul Rabinow’s Essays on the Anthropology of Reason. See also Robert Castel’s work on “post-disciplinary societies.” 20. See Manuel DeLanda’s lecture, “Assemblage Theory, Society, and Deleuze,” at the European Graduate School, 2011: www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-I5e7ixw78 21. Anthropolgist and psychoanalyst Anthony Molino has initiated a very useful displacement of Lacan towards Winnicott in his Culture, Subject, Psyche: Dialogues in Psychoanalysis and Anthropology. Rather than the somber and tragic Lacanian school, Winnicott’s focus on “play” inaugurated a “comic tradition,” as Adam Philipps puts it, we ought perhaps to emulate in our dealings with the current curatorial malaise. It is not surprising that Félix Guattari likewise found in Winnicott a source of inspiration for his schizo-analysis and transversal ethicoaesthetics following his break with the analytical tradition of Lacan. The point is not to choose between the two. Guattari was inheriting something specific to his context and to his own transferential horizon. Rather, these trajectories ought Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31.

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to make us pause and think through the way we inherit intellectual traditions, by cultivating more joyful and affirmative affective registers. It might be worth the effort, against all odds. See also the work of Brazilian psychoanalyst, Heitor Maceido, who cultivates a joyful psychoanalysis, and Rubén Gallo’s examination of a “wild psychoanalysis” in Mexico that would give nightmares to Freud. Michael Sanchez, “On Art and Transmission.” Derrida, Dissemination, pp. 125–7. Girard, Violence and the Sacred, p. 296. See Aidan Tynan, “Deleuze and the Symptom: On the Practice and Paradox of Health,” in Journal of Deleuze Studies (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 153. See Rabinow’s The Accompaniment: Assembling the Contemporary (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011). See the dossier “On Metaphor: Reciprocity and Immunity”, in Culural Anthropology: http://culanth.org/articles/421-on-metaphor-reciprocity-and-immunity See Carl Good’s excellent “Ungoverned Specificities,” in Carl Good and John V. Waldron (eds.), The Effects of the Nation: Mexican Art in the Age of Globalization (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2001), p. 6. Ibid. The juxtaposition of Deleuze’s symptomatology with the key Freudian concept of “working-through” is a symptom less of an impasse or impossibility than of hope: to find help from two of the most powerful theoretical and practical attempts to handle and care for the volatile materials of repetitions. It also goes without saying that the title of this chapter is indebted to Deleuze’s own wrestling with the ontology of repetition (see Deleuze, 1994). See also Lambert, and Rabinow on durcharbeiten. Curator and critic Osvaldo Sanchez (also a member of Curare) speaks of a “demedicalized” curatorial ethics. Personal conversation.

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CHAPTER THREE

Roger Bartra: Intrusion and Melancholia

La Melancolía era un mal de frontera, una enfermedad de la transición y del trastocamiento. Una enfermedad de pueblos desplazados, de migrantes, asociada a la vida frágil de gente que ha sufrido conversiones forzadas . . . una dolencia que afecta tanto los vencidos como a los conquistadores, a los que huyen como a los recién llegados.1

In the early 2000s, during my first trip to Mexico City, I recall going with my friend Alberto to the Ghandi bookstore off the Quevedo metro station in the Coyocán district. At that stage of our disciplinary training, a book was simply a curio site, a prosthetic affective landscape, and a weapon to deflect and temper nativist and culturalist claims one inexorably encounters during fieldwork. Among Alberto’s book suggestions, which would leave a trace and eventually trigger a long-term dialogue, was polemical Mexican anthropologist Roger Bartra’s The Cage of Melancholy: Identity and Metamorphosis of the Mexican, an experimental book that diagnoses the nationalist trope of “Lo Mexicano” through an eroticized and voyeuristic mise-en-scène of an anthropologist gazing, not from the perspective of the “balcony of the nation” (Lomnitz, 2001) as late nineteenth-century dictator and enthusiast modernizer Porfirio Díaz had once proudly called his great capital city, but through the keyhole of an imagined post-nationalist peep show. Little did I know that, less than a year later, I would be conducting fieldwork in Mexico City and would initiate a sustained dialogue with Bartra who is, in my view, one of contemporary Mexico’s most sophisticated and incisive public intellectuals, above all an anthropologist with a tongue dipped in the most caustic of acids. To many, including the interlocutors whose work is featured in this book, he has been emblematic of a rupture with the Franz Boas-inspired and state-official indegenista anthropology of Manuel Gamio, the “father” of Mexican nationalist anthropology. By diagnosing what he calls a “post-Mexican condition,” Bartra extended the initial revolt of 1968 marked by the notorious manifesto written by a group of angry anthropologists known as the Magnificos under the title That Which they Call Mexican Anthropology.2 The Magnificent Seven had inaugurated what ought perhaps to be approached as nothing less and nothing more than a disarticulation of the connections between the culturalist aesthetics of the historical Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



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avant-garde(s), Mexican nationalism, and what a perceptive art historian has called “the role of Manuel Gamio’s anthropology as a tool of social engineering.”3 With these readings, I had entered the convulsions of a more primordial anthropological turn that shed some light on the unproductive malaise generated by the more recent ethnographic turn in contemporary art. What Roger Bartra had called the “post-Mexican condition,” in the early 1990s, was an intervention in the assemblage of conceptual personae that shaped Mexican modernity and its visual culture. I was also struck by the singularity and political dimension of these debates, as if these debates were already raging long before the so-called ethnographic turn in contemporary art became formalized and capitalized on as a post-1990s phenomenon. Bartra is, in a sense, a postMexican intruder from the future whose ethnographic and assemblage work remediate the primordial scene of the anthropological turn. Assembling ‘Bartra’ This chapter is the fruit of monthly conversations with Bartra that took place over a period of two years in his office at the Centro de Investigaciones Sociales at the Universidad Autónoma de Mexico (UNAM).4 We both seemed always to look forward to continuing our conversations, sometimes building rigorously on the previous ones, at others, just speculating on current events or indulging in personal reflections. In any case, we both seem to have welcomed our mutual intrusions. What follows is an attempt not only to give form to these intrusions but also to evaluate Bartra’s intellectual vocation and anthropological motion in and out of Mexico. Our exchange has certainly proved invaluable in terms of its impact on my understanding of what an anthropological calling might be in the context of an emerging re-elaboration of the art–cinema–anthropology assemblage that drives this book. As mentioned in previous chapters, this re-elaboration has taken the form of an assemblage-work: a passage across affective, aesthetic and moral landscapes afforded by the juxtaposition of various national traditions. I was immediately intrigued by Bartra’s severe and humorous evaluation of the dominant forms of affectivity transmitted by the nationalist and national tradition of Mexican anthropology: a composite of pride, abjection, enthusiasm, and melancholia. The challenges posed by his intervention in Mexican anthropological thought invite a rethinking of the intellectual orientation of anthropologists in contemporary Mexico as an affective vocation. In short, it begs the following question: what type of intellectual and affective mise-enscène might an anthropologist such as Bartra stage, in and out of Mexico? And what implications does this have with regard to the assemblage at work in the anthropological turn in contemporary art? Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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I have both built and departed from the two dominant conversational modes and approaches characteristic of contemporary research processes: on the one hand, the well-established and classic genre of the intellectual portrait, life history and biography, with its inclination for recounting in detail carefully selected points on a personal and intellectual trajectory; on the other, the “conversation” format initiated in the context of documentary turns and site-specific art practice through explorations of the so-called methodological affinities between the concept of site, experimental ethnography, and contemporary art interventions. Dialogues, metalogues, and conversations have long been the inter-medial and transcultural bread and butter of anthropology.5 There has been a certain tendency in contemporary art, and social art in particular, to redeploy the dialogical and the relational.6 These can be seen as yet another symptom of the ethnographic turn this book distances itself from. Instead, I have tried to probe another form of conversation that shifts attention from the dialogical aesthetics, based on ethnography and social art practice, to a conceptual pedagogy based on assemblage-work. This form of conversation would transform a people-oriented dialogue – an actual dialogue between subjects that always takes place in ethnographic work and research-led art practice – into a sphere of inter-medial connections that generates echoes among conceptual personae. Indeed, it is very hard to “explain oneself” – an interview, a dialogue, a conversation. Most of the time, when someone asks me a question, even one which relates to me, I see that, strictly, I don’t have anything to say. Questions are invented, like anything else. If you aren’t allowed to invent your questions, with elements from all over the place, from never mind where, if people [my emphasis] “pose” them to you, you haven’t much to say. The art of constructing a problem is very important: you invent a problem, a problem-position, before finding a solution. None of this happens in an interview, a conversation, a discussion. Even reflection, whether it’s alone, or between two or more, is not enough. Above all, not reflection. (Deleuze and Parnet, p. 1)

A conversation7 can thus be approached as an experience and experiment grounded in an encounter that welcomes the mutual intrusions attendant to the conceptual personae haunting, tormenting, and producing the assemblage at hand. It is akin to an intervention into given sites and the lives of others not unlike the strategy of a ready-made that intrudes, via the gesture of curation, in a given institutional setting. We can provisionally rename this old philosophico-anthropological weapon – at once a form of intervention, a style of inquiry, and a mode of presentation – the work of intrusion enabled by an assemblage composed of resonating conceptual personae. In light of this, “Bartra” is here assembled as a conversation that connects the conceptual personae Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



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of the anthropologist, artist, and curator. The work and life of Bartra can thus be approached from different angles: as an intellectual portrait of a fellow anthropologist playfully diagnosing the incurable “tumor city”; as a biographical and conceptual framework of Bartra’s oeuvre and his contribution to public and intellectual culture in Mexico; as a conceptual personae and antidote to the ethnographic and social turn’s interpellative, cosmopolitan– nationalist, cross-cultural, dialogical, and humanist deployment of the figure of the anthropologist. Claudio Lomnitz describes nicely the tradition of republican and national intellectuals in Mexico who, on occasions, take the time to perform by means of highly publicized and avidly read reviews, essays or chronicles, their pathosridden obligation to interpret the cultural, political and moral health of their patria and hence their location within a fantasized international public sphere. There is a class of intellectuals who have the delightful privilege of constantly keeping their readers company – writers who take down their impressions of the significant events of a community and supply it with a steady stream of commentary. The role of these intellectuals is something like village priest, consecrating significant events, offering advice and sympathy, proffering benedictions, and even threatening the unbelievers with ex-communication [sic]. Their lives are like a book that opens onto their community. Perhaps because it is, at heart, a Catholic and provincial society, Mexico has always had a special preference for these chronicles, and they have thrived even in today’s mass society.

Born in Mexico City to Catalan intellectual exiles at the height of the Spanish civil war in the 1930s, Bartra has designed, over the decades, a singular form of anthropological practice that complicates the logic of identity characteristic of Mexican nationalist and national social science. His emplacement with regard to this national intellectual tradition is no less ambiguous. He managed, indeed, thanks to his caustic irony and suspicion towards both conservative and leftist forms of nationalism, to resist the temptation of reproducing the solemn and paternalist figure of the public intellectual in Mexico. If publicity is a measure of intellectuality and visibility one can safely say that Bartra continues to have a foot, though an uneasy one, in the grand intellectual tradition that runs from Salvador Novo, Octavio Paz, Carlos Monsiváis, Elena Poniatowtska, and Enrique Krauze.8 The caliber of writing, notwithstanding, there has been no room, in Bartra’s attitude, for nostalgia towards the heydays of vanguardista intellectual activity and its attendant intimate relation to both the official and critical rituals of the nation state though, unwittingly at least, one inevitably extends some elements of the moral, ­affective, and narrative paradigm one writes against. Once director of the legendary heterodox Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Marxist cultural magazine El Machete, and leading figure in the rethinking of Marxist thought in Latin America during the 1970s and 1980s, as well as author of the polemical anthropological experiment, La Jaula de la Melancholia, Bartra remains today one of the most important public intellectuals in Mexico. His work both continues and disarticulates a long-standing intellectual culture in Mexico, and he can be seen as a pioneer in articulating a “second-order Latin Americanism”9 unmoored from regionalist investments. Bartra has a style that does not lend itself to easy categorization. In contrast to some of his intellectual contemporaries, such as Carlos Monsiváis, for instance, he discontinues the grandeza and pride often generated by intellectuals who wallow in affectionate complicity with their co-national readers and who become proselytes of the supposed exceptionality of their national–­cultural context. Carlos Monsiváis has excelled in this genre, a genre that relies on potlatch-like attitudes toward the faithful reader, at home and abroad, among co-nationals and various diasporas. The strategy associated with this culturalist style of thinking, and of the grandeur and nostalgia that usually underwrite it, is to turn and represent every stone of a national cultural desert by means of overwhelming and encyclopedic performance of the blind spots of a given national–popular archive. Less doesn’t seem to be better in this Mexican version of archive fever. Monsiváis has excelled in a refined intellectual practice that has eventually spawned Mexican cultural studies. In Bartra’s peep show, as he calls Mexico, there are no riots of voices or carnivalesque reversals. Rather, what strikes as a riot is his unrepentant humor, clear and well-argued vision for a post-nationalist and post-cosmopolitan future, visual culture, and intellectual orientation. Bartra steers clear of an identitarian attitude. I found that refreshing in the context of a neo-baroque modernity such as Mexico. To accuse him of afrencesado and criollo liberalism as a journalist in a prominent newspaper had done, would be missing the point. It operates only a racialized reversal and extends the three main racial categories at work in Mexico to an intellectual context that conceptually calls for something else other than the dominant colonial and historical topology of Mestizo, Afro-Mestizo, Criollo, and Indian. Bartra’s style is distinct from the diplomat–intellectual tradition – read critical representative and spokesperson of a given national culture – that runs from Paz to Monsiváis. His is laconic, minimalist, erudite, clinical, variation on a single theme, obstinate, curious, rigorous, cold and cruel at times. Political as well, his forays into agrarian questions in the 1970s, coupled with difficult ideological arm wrestles with orthodox Marxists intellectuals, left an indelible mark on his understanding of the relation between anthropology as a form of intellectual vocation located at the critical juncture between private and public, between a politics of representation and an ethics of the Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



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self. His consistent, stern admonishments of the enthusiasm generated by the Zapatista uprising have upset more than a few. His keen and shrewd political sense is coupled with a distaste of the affective mixed economy of enthusiasm and melancholia, or pride and abjection, characteristic of nationalist and minority/indigenous media culture in Mexico. In passing, his attitude has been equally impatient towards Catalan ethno-nationalism. He no doubt takes perverse pleasure at disparaging nationalism and exalted forms of minority10 activism. It is not accidental that his work has not been taken up by mainstream curatorial and inter-medial culture now staunchly geared towards safer conceptual personae, from the activist to the militant to the organic intellectual. This is best captured, with a great deal of humor, through his own forays into institutional curatorial practice where he takes delight in diagnosing and assembling the imagery and visual tropes of Mexican late modernity. In these curatorial11 projects, Mexico emerges as a strange inter-medial landscape. At times, it is a peep show: an intimate and eroticized space of intense libidinal activity in which one can indulge in the pleasures and abjections of observation, conversation, lessons of anatomy, organ flaunting, classifying, exhibitionism, loving, monstrosities, teasing, tickling, slapping, intruding, educating, resisting, eating, reading, writing, reflecting. At other times, it would be a permanent emergency room in which Mexicans, including Bartra himself, are likened to the amphibian figure of the axolotl, the salamander native to the ancient system of water channels and lakes in Mexico City as well as one of the major tropes of Latin American natural and literary history. Axolotl More than a hybrid form of life whose bio-evolutionary process has been arrested due to a neoteny12 that prolongs indefinitely the larval stage, the axolotl’s metamorphic failure in Bartra’s critique functions as a ruthless incurable image of Mexican identity and as a symptom of an uncanny Western modernity suffering from a Kantian malaise and “self-incurred immaturity.” Like Warburg’s snake, the axolotl is an ambivalent sign. It has long been an incurable-image of Mexicanism, not unlike the Maguey images from Eisenstein’s ¡Que Viva Mexico! explored in the next chapter. The axolotl has received the gracious attention of those who belong to the illustrious canon of Latin American public–diplomatic intellectuals, from Julio Cortázar to Octavio Paz. Yet, The Axolote [sic] canon is for Bartra intrinsically linked to magical realism as embodiment of a particular kind of Latin Americanist response to the problems of cultural difference . . . Magical realism points to the past in a radical Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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way to elicit those Benjaminian dialectical images that would, in the words of Taussig, reawaken “the dreaming collective past” in order to break out of history’s mythical spell, or “rescuing the voice” of the Indian from the obscurity of pain and time.13

From the standpoint of a thought that can envisage an outside, the diagnosis is accurate. Yet, rather than fulfilling a “redemptive function,” the incurable evoked by Bartra’s abandonment of the axolotl renounces without melancholy the allegedly radical magic realist tradition that would seek in the past the secret that would give viability to a subaltern hallucination. For Bartra, the axolotl indexes a harmful form of thought and mode of repetition that, under the pretext of a missing hors-champs, ends up sacrificing the virulent inter-mediality of post-Mexican becomings into a hallucination dressed in nationalist clothes. Rather than symbol and allegory, rather than a dialectical image, the axolotl is best approached as a fold that breaks the bond between the incurable and the image. By releasing another image unmoored from the magic realist mode of repetition, the post-axolotl order ought to be approached obliquely and as an ethical substance of a yet-to-be-formed contemporary post-Mexican condition. The abandonment of the axolotl imagery points to modes of affectivity of post-Mexican life: intrusive and adjacent. It replaces the iconic activism of the axolotl with an inter-medial passivism between the “no longer” and the “not yet.” Given the status of the image of the axolotl as an image of thought of a first-order Latin Americanism, Bartra suggests its abandonment and calls for an urgent shift to another ethical substance and figure of anthropos yet to be curated. Such a call frustrates Lo Mexicano’s melancholic condition that constantly converts the axolotl into a kind of Lacanian Object petit a. Voyeurizing his national and regional context as a peep show peopled with axolotls is a refreshing desacralization of the imperative to decolonize that, today, functions as the ethical substance of most contemporary curatorial, anthropological, and artistic forms of expressions. Bartra’s diagnostics and eroticization of this ontological anachronism at the heart of Mexican modernity is full of humor and political incorrectness. In fact, it never really sat well with contemporary artists and curators who see the more serious and hypermediatized question of violence as more urgent. Melancholia I want to emphasize the importance of the diagnosis on nationalist and national culture of Mexico that Bartra developed in his 1987 classic work, La jaula de la melancolía (The Cage of Melancholy) and later in La anatomía de lo mexicano Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



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(The Anatomy of the Mexican) had on the curatorial practices explored in the previous chapter. Through my conversations with curators, it became clear that Bartra’s contribution has been a source of polemic and provocation; all consider The Cage both as a classic of Mexican anthropology and a kind of anthropological work that studies the untouchable subject of the post-national and post-cosmopolitan in Mexico. Along with other prominent social scientists and critics, such as Néstor Garcia Canclini and Carlos Monsiváis, Bartra was attentive to the encroachment and the collaboration of anthropologists in the dialogue between contemporary art and contemporary anthropology. As we have seen, the curatorial platforms assembled in this book have developed clinical terms in order to examine the contemporary aesthetic and political culture of Mexico. Why resort to clinical terms in order to produce an analytical picture? Why did Bartra’s own clinical picture of a post-Mexican condition began with melancholia? How does melancholia enable us to diagnose the points of maximum disorganization in the ailing body politic? Bartra’s clinical pictures in the late 1980s have certainly contributed to the intensification of inter-medial experiments at the interface of anthropology, the biological sciences, and contemporary art, as in the recent installation work of artist, Erick Meyenberg, that elegantly theatricalizes research data obtained from the current mapping of the Mexican genome project (see Chapter 6). In light of this, the post-Mexican condition began to appear to me as an emerging form of “biosociality” (Rabinow, 1996, p. 99). Bartra is, of course, cautious about these entanglements: I can speak for myself, for what I have done. Now, if there is a general tendency towards it, it is something that intrigues me as well. I think I took an old tradition from Spanish American culture, mainly Spanish, from the Golden Age, and thought it would be interesting to analyze it from a clinical perspective. Of course I didn’t think of this first and then went on to confirm it. From my studies, my own meditations on national identity, I realized that the subject of sadness, of melancholy, of a set of related emotions associated with melancholy, had been broadly used, or is broadly used by writers, poets, film directors, in songs, etc. I didn’t just stop at considering it in terms of its Romantic origins, but rather thought of digging into the Hispanic cultural tradition, where I found it was really a clinical term used in the literature to refer to a type of madness, and that it was very important.

Bartra’s studies on this topic show, in innovative ways, that the subject of melancholy had been tied to national identity in other places around the world; very clearly in France and Britain. It is, of course, not the first time that essayists thinking about political issues or about social makeup borrowed ideas from natural science. As a matter of fact, in seventeenth-century Spain it was very common to use medical terminology to refer to ailments of the Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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social body;14 that is not a novelty. Other cultures also have been drawn to imagining and establishing some parallels between the social body and the individual, somatic body, the one made of flesh, that of people, and the social body and its problems which were considered ills. The theory of bodily humors lent itself more to that because it involved those four disquieting, mysterious substances that had great symbolic power, especially blood and black bile. Bartra: That made it easier; today, with contemporary medicine, it has become more difficult to speak of neurotransmitters; talking about culture is not very interesting, nor very productive. That metaphorical element is very attractive. I believe that is why writers who have addressed national identity, those who have brought it forth, appropriated the term melancholy, for an array of reasons I explain in The Cage of Melancholy.

Bartra’s challenge requires us to escape a Freudian conception of melancholy for understanding the processes of deterritorialization set in motion by the concept of the post-Mexican. A Freudian would tell you any process of national identity construction is a form of mourning for the loss of the loved object, the original mother; the loss of the indigenous results in a mourning process that generates all of that. I am opposing that because Freud, if I recall, says that if the mourning process is improper it degenerates in melancholy, in madness, in a pathology; I think there is more melancholy than mourning, although initially they go together. In The Cage of Melancholy I play with the Freudian metaphors, but I don’t make a Freudian interpretation. I am more of a neurobiologist, but I like to play with Freudian concepts. They are really stimulating. So, to continue using the metaphors, the mourning process is in crisis, national identity is in crisis, as are all the institutions of nationalism, but melancholy had developed, so melancholy is left and now is reemerging; as the transition to democracy begins, revolutionary nationalism is left behind and there is melancholy for that which is lost; we had a national identity, a meaning, etc. and democracy seems useless, we are just as miserable as before; but I don’t use Freud much beyond that.

Bartra is, of course, aware of the traps involved in this gesture, namely the potential of inadvertently activating the ghost of the positivist or sociobiological traditions. He warns against it from the start in The Cage of Melancholy, to the point of being destructive, critical; somehow an ironic perspective implies saying something while really meaning something else. His use of a strange blend of irony and humor becomes evident in that the organic body he deploys as a referent is that of the axolotl, an amphibian, not that of a Mexican human form of life. He therefore uses the comparison between the body, the somatic, and the social and cultural body and national body or Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



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identity in a purely ironic manner, a “superior irony” that might as well be called humor. “For if irony”, as Deleuze notes, is the co-extensiveness of being with the individual, or the I with representation, humor is the art of surfaces and of the doubles, of nomad singularities and of the always displaced aleatory point; it is the art of static genesis, the savoir-faire [sic] of the pure event, and the fourth person singular – with every signification, denotation, and manifestation suspended, all height and depth abolished.15

Barton continues: When I was writing The Cage of Melancholy my father-in-law, who is now deceased and who was a chemist and a physician, gave me some old photographs of the cadavers they used in a morgue, where they opened them up, like in the painting by Rembrandt; a photo of really poor Mexicans. They really touched me. The irony was in establishing an absurd relationship, that with an amphibian, to show that I don’t take the Positivist tradition, its comparisons, or anything, seriously. There is a play on time, an ironic game, because I was sure, and still am sure, that this concept needs to be critiqued in depth. Criticism might not be very destructive, but on its own it has managed to erode the myth, which I think, at this point, is hurting badly. So the additional element we must consider is irony. I am not taking this seriously, I am using a dangerous metaphor. For obvious reasons all use of biological metaphors in society, in culture, is dangerous. I purposefully handle these dangerous materials, which could blow up, with ironic intent. I claim irony as a research tool.

There is a touch of irony in saying that Mexican culture is like an axolotl: it means something else; it does not have a literal meaning; it is not as clear. Bartra’s work is a contribution – with that combination of humor and irony evoked by the non-anthropocentric image of the axolotl – to the mocking of the uses and abuses of organic metaphors in the history of Mexican national and nationalist anthropology, in the history of Mexican anthropological ideas. It is a history that is not very well known outside of Mexico because it is usually primarily heard in, and disseminated out of, Latin American studies. But there is another branch of his work associated to that strategy of initiating and exhausting a specific tradition. It is my suspicion that what Bartra does with melancholy and the axolotl is repeated with his attack on the history of myth. He develops an anthropology that searches for nationalist myths, all the while thinking and generating a futurist post-Mexican horizon. I was particularly interested in such questions, not as a Mexicanist – the mythical vision of the regional and area studies expert – but from the perspective of an inter-medial convergence between contemporary anthropology and contemporary art outlined in the first chapter. Bartra’s work operates as one of Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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the detonators behind the debris and rubble of Eduardo Abaroa’s installation The Total Destruction of the National Museum of Anthropology. Bartra confronted this issue after reflecting on the myth of the Mexican which was made up of at least two adjacent myths: that of melancholy, a myth associated with the natural sciences; and that of the savage, which is more European. At that point, Bartra had “reached an impasse” and, as ethically oriented intellectuals do when they hit a dead-end, he wrote an essay16 about that specific difficulty. As anthropologists and scholars we decide to make a history of myth; we love myth and we devote ourselves to the endeavor, and I compare it to the voyage of Ulysses, the sirens . . . What options are there? Not to fall in love with myth itself, because it is charming but also dangerous, it has reached its limit, but it needs to be heard, so you must strap yourself, like Ulysses, and the problem is that one reaches the same point. I have criticized LeviStrauss for that very reason. He goes to the end of the world in Brazil, with the Borabora, he doesn’t speak the language, he doesn’t understand anything, and he returns home, and says what he already knew before leaving because he had read about it in Rousseau; he might as well never have left, but he couldn’t hear the song because he didn’t understand anything, so he didn’t have the need to strap himself. One needs to hear them [the sirens’ songs], but one needs to be strapped in order to be able to return and to decode them using the elements of our own culture. I noticed that contradiction towards the end of my two books, the ones about the myth of the savage, and I realized that we are trapped in a circle that needs to be broken; I reached the conclusion that I think answers, in a way, your question: how can we study myth when we know that the science of mythology has been exhausted.17

Peep Show I vividly recall reading that essay. There, Bartra develops another image and setting, another analogy: between a peep show and the post-Mexican condition. In the peep show one thrives on a voyeurism that insinuates itself through cracks, fissures if you will, implying an eroticized conception of intervention that points to the problem of the voyeur who can seek and find points of entry into a site; it also implies the gender and the position of the researcher, of the art of the anthropologist, the type of objectivity created in such a context. The Cage of Melancholy is full of this imagery at the threshold of masochistic and sadistic metaphors. There is, in the peep show, a game of seduction18 that is also a game of intimacy with the national culture being abandoned. This implies, at the same time, a positioning on the part of the researcher and creating a connection to an outside through that particular form of distance called adjacency. I was intrigued by the notion of the peep show, and it puzzled me when considered from the critical perspective of Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



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gender. It brought to mind an entire repertoire of research strategies from an eroticized setting similar to that of the peep show which takes us back to a set of emotions, of affects, of feelings such as pride, the phallic pride of the national, Paz’s melancholy and solitude, the exoticization and politicization of indigenous groups. It is as if the setting of a peep show implied asking, as a perceptive historian and anthropologist of Mexican nationalism recently did, how to get away from the subject of the labyrinth (see Octavio Paz’s canonical book The Labyrinth of Solitude, as well as Claudio Lomnitz’s Las Salidas del Laberinto / Exits from the Labyrinth ). The peep show is an eroticized version of Paz’s labyrinth. It is also an incredible burden and, after a while, it becomes a tedious repetition. The conversion of the labyrinth into a peep show points to an important act of disactivation of one of the most productive incurable images of Lo Mexicano. Bartra developed the image of the peep show in the framework of reflections on the Western myth of the savage, especially in Europe, so there is a distancing . . . the distancing from the historian who walks through and alongside his actuality and gradually reaches towards the contemporary. The contemporary is never readily given and available: it is even more imperceptible when one studies those inter-medial borderlands national identity compresses into well-guarded territories. As a Mexican born in Mexico City, Bartra would appear to be trapped in that myth, and his conceptual peep show indeed generates an uneasy emplacement. But only to a certain extent; regarding his curatorial and scholarly work on the myth of the savage one can say he is studying documents from the fourteenth century, from the Renaissance, from the doctors of the Golden Age, and from those who believed it is dead, that it is no more: here “the past is a foreign country.” That adjacent distancing is vital, and what concerned him was how to illustrate the concept, how to narrow the field enough that his readers are invited to intrude and peep through a keyhole. The idea was to narrow down a notion, that of the savage, which seemed inconsequential, and to diagnose it very patiently. It is in this sense that Bartra’s is not a carnivalesque peep show, where spectators pay ten cents and spend a short time to indulge in nationalist and cosmopolitan jouissance. The intrusive task at work in Bartra’s historiographic and curatorial work sets up a peep-show apparatus, invites us to look through a peep hole, very patiently, and guides us less to identify with a nationalist visual culture than to construct an assemblage that connects us to an outside, to post-Mexican becomings opened up by repeated intrusions into the Achilles heels of Lo Mexicano. It, indeed, takes a special approach with regard to the historical that is not microhistory exactly because that would imply studying a small community or a marginal subjectivity that would re-enchant and arrest our thoughts, and eventually produce ­hallucinations; Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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there is where the peep show emerges as less than mere neo-baroque image and more as an incurable-image that functions as a disorganization of both nationalist identifications and the cosmopolitan and postcolonial curatorial culture on which they rely for symbolic circulation. The problem with approaching identity is that you are inside the little house of national identity, not outside of it, so you can’t pretend to be outside, although history plays that trick on us. You are soaked in it, and the only resource left to anthropologists is to declare themselves foreigners; the supposed advantage of the anthropologist is that he comes from afar, he is a foreigner. There is a game there. Of course, I took advantage of a certain quality as a foreigner that I enjoy in Mexico City. Although I was born in Mexico, I am of European descent. I am a Catalan. That has certain implications that emerged when The Cage of Melancholy was published: “what is this guy up to? He is nothing but a Francophile.” Many people thought because of my name, Roger, that I am French, and I studied in France, thus “he is a Francophile.” Others knew my parents were Spanish refugees who came to Mexico after the Civil War; my first language is not Spanish; it is Catalan. I toy with that, which in Mexico, although not so much anymore, is a dangerous game; Mexico is – although not so much anymore – a country that, from a legal standpoint, discriminates against people like me. The current legislation curtails my political rights; not that I want to become president, but if I wanted to, legally, I wouldn’t be able to because criollos are not allowed to. The law forbids it not because of who we are, but for who our parents were. It is a clear matter of ethnic discrimination. I toy with that, and that made many people very uncomfortable.19

One can recognize here how the deployment of an intrusive adjacency – the peep show – becomes a weapon that reorients the Althusserian interpellation on to a non-melancholic scene of curation where the incurable images of the Mexican morph into a post-Mexican futurism. This interpellation, specific to the complex intellectual tradition (in general) and the fusion of the cosmopolitan and the national, of the foreigner and the native, at the heart of (Mexican) anthropology, was already evident when The Cage of Melancholy was published; people said “how does this half-foreigner dare to have an opinion, to state things in such a brutal manner.” Bartra plays the role of the intruder effectively, accepting it and accepting the distance and adjacency. But it is a mirage. Even if I were a foreigner all the way, like you Tarek I would face the same challenge. You too let yourself be trapped by the halo, by the charm of myth, by its attractiveness, its mystery; even if you are a foreigner, it grabs you. That becomes a problem when you observe a culture, and must decode it. That is what I propose: after his return, Ulysses decodes, but then he recodes using the codes of his time. I study national identity, I decode it, Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



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I try to determine its anatomy and then I put everything back together using codes that are in accord with my vision, with my time, my age, different to those from the mid twentieth century, those of Paz, for example.

The result is a new composite of intrusion and adjacency that mocks the alleged melancholy of Lo Mexicano. Yet, the figure of the foreigner is ultimately less interesting conceptually than that of the intruder. Of course, I’m an anthropologist who grew up in Morocco – a former Spanish and French protectorate. This, however, does not mean, necessarily, that there are any potential links of historical or political relevance in a Third Worldist or even a more subtle south–south geophilosophical vein. Over a period of two years of residence in Mexico City, and subsequent and frequent trips, I sometimes felt interpellated by friends or interlocutors invested in a south–south perspective and through a mode of interlocution grounded in a de facto geopolitical affinity. It is, of course, not en entirely illegitimate perspective from a geopolitical sense. Yet, I continue to hope that the peep show of late modernity allows for the invention of “other” cartographies. I also believe a shift took place in Bartra’s work as a result of these painful and demanding interpellations. Unless we have political goals in mind, both geography and history eventually decrease our powers of life and, as such, require a radical shift in ethical orientation, a remediation in order to live better. Bartra has been working on this matter, not especially as it relates to the Mexican situation, because one of the decisions he took a while ago was not to work on Mexico, or to do so very little. This seems to be a healthy intellectual move that opens up a form of curation and anthropology to come. Because of the nature of his adjacency – alongside anthropology, art, literature, curating – Bartra is moving on after having deterritorialized an uncanny national anthropological tradition and the forms of mobility implied by it. It is perhaps no coincidence that the clinical continues to be a major thread in his work. His recent book on the anthropology of the brain sciences can thus be seen as yet another form of intrusive adjacency and an inter-medial zone where a curation to come can flourish. That is why I have been interested in the reappropriation and remediation of melancholy in Bartra’s work. It is as if melancholy is read in Nietzschean terms, as a kind of dominant historical sense of actual Mexico. This reconfiguration of melancholy beyond its mournful twin is mapped on to the very affective landscapes generated by Mexican anthropology and its interconnection with the avant-garde activity of the 1920s and 1930s. Melancholy for Bartra is the life and death of an assemblage of conceptual personae – the anthropologist, the artist, and the racialized post-revolutionary new man generated by mestizaje and cultural synthesis. Indeed, the post-Mexican, or the post-­Mexican condition, is a way of saying that in Mexico, today, there is Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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a chance to forget the post-revolutionary anthropological and visual culture of the 1920s and 1930s, begun with Manuel Gamio’s foundational project of “Forging the Fatherland,” to adopt the title of one of his canonical books. Bartra’s work is an opportunity to generate, today, in Mexican anthropology and beyond it, new modes of subjectivation predicated on a penchant for forgetting the racialized horizon of nationalist and cosmopolitan anthropological traditions. Aside from the fascinating amateur ethnographer, Miguel Covarrubias, who wrote a monograph on, and shot interesting footage of, Bali, Gamio ought also to be remembered as one of the first professional Mexican anthropologists to conduct fieldwork outside of his country. Gamio’s project on Mexican immigrants in the United States is a pioneering act because it is both an early examples of not only an ethnography of the United States – what some have called a reverse anthropology (an expression often used by performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña) – but also, and more importantly and to the point, the generator of another mise-en-scène. Manuel Gamio was, after all, creating a nationalist bubble, and somehow it is one of those foundations that have legitimated the notion that all Mexican anthropologists should work mostly in Mexico, and if they leave it is only to pick up the tools of the Chicago or the New York School and bring them back in order to patch up the national mechanics. That is the problem with Gamio, with Bonfil Batalla after him, but at the same time they are both very interesting; they take a lot of risks; Bonfil especially took a lot of risks; he took so many risks that I think he fell into a well and drowned, a tragic end . . . but one has to acknowledge their courage, their valor, etc. Gamio represents a very complex history, from another time; there was also the problem of his dependence on US anthropology, and his mentor Franz Boas especially . . .

The crucial point that emerges from these frictions is not to reduce fieldwork to the colonial imperative of locating otherness beyond a national territory. Rather, it is to cultivate a mode of deterritorialization generated by the assemblage of conceptual personae that haunt our mise-en-scènes. What matters is how and through what use of pleasure we arrive at exploring the social fact that nationalist anthropology in Mexico and elsewhere has produced very few research projects outside of the national territory. As an anthropologist, trained in the United States, from a post-ethnos perspective, I am ultimately skeptical of the Boasian tradition and the “historiography of influence”20 that links Gamio with the territories inherited from that tradition. We have heard the refrain ad nauseam, music to the cosmopolitan–nationalist ears: you leave your country and then you return, there is a detour through the other, and then return to your country in order to understand in a more complex manner that which you left behind in the culture with which you had a certain degree of familiarity. Humor aside, this was, of course, a research setting that was understandable in the post-revolutionary Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



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era. Yet, one ought to recognize that it is slowly becoming exhausted. I believe Bartra is ultimately interested in an anthropological setup and conceptual pedagogy that confirm the importance of “Lomnitz’s assessment that the Mexican and Anglo traditions within North American anthropology are mutually interlinked, yet exhibit reciprocal blindness and silences about their enabling exchanges and interdependency.”21 Moreover, Bartra seems to be saying that anthropology’s calling is less tied to a territory or geography in the colonial and postcolonial sense of the term. Rather, the impasse lies precisely in a form of thought based on a composite logic of both national location and cosmopolitan travel of ideas. It is this mode of thinking that seems to be the malaise diagnosed in his work. More than a sign of collage characteristic of the so-called “fragmentation of the postmodern condition,” to which Bartra mockingly juxtaposes his notion of desmodernity (un desmadre in Mexican Spanish means a mess, or chaos) in The Cage of Melancholy, his proposed postcosmopolitan and post-Mexican anthropology is chaotic and essayistic in narrative mode. In this articulation of anthropology and experimental writing, the desmadre and chaos surpass the logic of influence. The lesson: we ought to be worthy of the contemporariness and untimeliness of this chaos, of Bartra’s unruly incurable-images and assemblage-work, as we give form and thought to its unpredictable emergent properties. In light of Castaneda and Lomnitz’s work, I, too, would suggest the chaos ought to be tackled in intellectual terms, indeed, purely intellectual terms. I do not know if the reference to the opening lines of Levi-Strauss’ Tristes Tropiques, about the anthropologist who hates to travel, who is very well at home but is bored, is more or less what Levi-Strauss means; he inhabits a culture that seems dominated by tedium, so he embarks on a kind of adventure that is a burden, a task. He is afraid of being a tourist, of not understanding, yet he goes; that also is somehow modeled by North American anthropology, travels towards the ancient Mexican cultures and returns with knowledge of that culture but also, and very importantly, with a chance to promote his own. As an aside, one of the things that has most caught my attention about these trips by North American anthropologists is how little interest they show for the anthropology that is being produced in the places they visit; they are interested in the Lacandon, the Maya, the Bantu, but if there were a Bantu anthropologist, and there must be some, they would not be interested in them, or they would be interested in them if there is a chance for political activism, somewhat instrumentalized, but it is amazing how little interested they are in any thought that might emerge from that encounter with so-called otherness.

Books such as The Cage and The Savage in the Looking Glass have been very demanding books to compose. Bartra’s incursions into the outside, the first Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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one The Imaginary Networks, and mostly The Savage, took many years, and he was really immersed in the stage; perhaps there are images there that could be from the theater; the theory of the voyeur, of the spy, of the peep show, of spying, of searching for the moments when a scene that seems symptomatic takes place but there is also an element of pleasure, of joy, erotized; the bedroom of history; it is an intrusion, but a very peculiar one; in any case, one is outside of the box where it takes place. You are the intruder who is spying and who is unsure if this gazing through the keyhole is going to result in some kind of infection; you don’t think about that too much from the other side. This takes us back to the question of what kind of intellectual Bartra is in relation, for instance, to the iconic figures of Latin American studies or postcolonial theory. Bartra does not mince his words when it comes to highly mediatized intellectuals, such as Zizek, Spivak, and Edward Said, gurus of cultural and postcolonial studies and commodities generated by the political economy of both academia and contemporary art. Bartra is, indeed, one of those Latin American intellectuals who operate in and out of the well-oiled academic machine: I have met Spivak and Edward Said. They should be respected for some of their contributions, but they suffer from a kind of Third-Worldism. It seems that in their travels outside they sometimes choose someone who might be attractive to anthropologists, but not so much anthropologists as literary critics; some of the anthropologists on this side of the world are quite rebellious, as were for instance Gregory Bateson and Pierre Clastres. In any case, I think that outward travel is in crisis, it has become a dead-end street; they go into spaces that are broken mirrors, where some things are reflected but others are not, and they don’t really understand what is happening. I don’t know if they return to their countries with any new ideas; it is an unpleasant territory, harsh, complex, which is what I poked fun at; and, of course, it is easy to make fun of Levi Strauss [sic] because he doesn’t understand anything, you can tell he can’t understand anything, even though he is a wonderful writer; his book is a great work of literature. Of course, I am not in the least interested in what he has to say about the Borabora; I am interested in what he has to say about himself, about France, about Western culture. In that he is very interesting. It seems that the trip of the anthropologist to Borneo, or to Mexico, or to Argentina, or to the Andes, wherever, implies a certain sacrifice, is uncomfortable, difficult; he is the annoying tourist, people don’t understand him, he doesn’t understand either, he can’t understand the language well, but is a rite of passage that anthropologists must undergo; they must sacrifice themselves, they are going to face discomforts, etc. I, on the other hand, feel my experiences have been very different, to me it is an hedonistic journey, pleasurable, I don’t hesitate to take advantage of everything, of luxuries, of everything Europe, the United States have to offer. To Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



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me, undertaking fieldwork in Paris is an absolute pleasure, a hedonistic experience; the same in the United States, unless I end up in some lost field, but even then there’s a chance.

Pleasure The essayistic dimension in Bartra’s work foreground the question of pleasure. Research and detours through various sites fill him with a desire to write, to disregard the borders between academic anthropology and literature, and it makes him want to play, to play with gusto, something that I have not observed in North American anthropologists who travel; their goal is to suffer, to rid themselves of something, but that implies stripping, and they don’t like that; you must acquire something, but that something is full of thorns, and in the end it has to be understood and analyzed. This kind of masochism is what you find in hyper-theoretical readings; you have to be quite a masochist to read them; reading those third-world authors turned theorists requires a sort of martyrdom; reading Neruda’s poetry generates great pleasure, but they are not going to be interested in that, overall. I see myself in a completely different position, where there is no sense of sacrifice, nothing like that, and the end result of that bothers some Europeans and North Americans because they realize there is a sense of irony, that I am poking fun, that it is not all serious, and they worry. That leads some of us, at least it leads me, to jump from one subject to another, which can be a great sin in North American, British, or European academia, where you must stick to a topic; jumping from one subject to another, which is a lot of fun for me, seems to them irresponsible, it doesn’t allow the acquisition of sufficient knowledge; you have to dig the same hole for decades and decades until you find and exploit everything there is in it. I feel completely outside of that kind of anthropology.22

In light of this understanding of anthropology as a use of pleasure, the turn I see in Bartra’s work in the 1980s is an attempt at setting anthropology in motion to search for an alternative to nationalism and indigenism, both from the right and the left. He seeks a third alternative to nationalism and the exaltation of the marginal, ethnic minority, or of the native, etc. The global, mass phenomenon of immigration, especially in developed countries, is its foundation. He builds on that phenomenon but wants to reduce it because, as he argues in his short essay “Liquid Cultures,” there is a chance that such a phenomenon, that liquidity so obvious in immigrants is something that is only foretelling what is starting, or that is quite advanced in the rest of the non-immigrant population, in aborigines, in natives. It implies the possibility of exploring a third way of living in national spaces, in the countries that currently exist, without appealing or seeking shelter in ethnicity or exalting Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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nationalism – which would be, to a certain degree, critical, or whose critical side he explores, even if it is not necessarily critical – thus entering globalization, not denouncing it or denying it in the name of minorities or nations; accepting globalization and looking for lifestyles that are emerging in the areas inhabited by immigrants not because they are consciously constructing them but because they are developing, they are a reality. I think this is a very important phenomenon from the point of view of those who are not immigrants. This leads me to the second part of the question, Mexico, a country whose immigrants, Mexicans think, are in the United States, and they have a very uncomfortable relationship with them, but can learn a lot from them. Then you have the immigrants who are here; the immigrants who are here are more political, although not all of them; the immigrant has always been Spanish, sometimes French, but mostly Spanish; he came to America to become wealthy, and is important symbolically. There are also the waves of political refugees, mostly from Spain, but also waves from South and Central America, who came fleeing dictatorships and repression, a phenomenon that had quite an impact. I know I am creating a mix that is not very appealing, because when I mix gachupines, as Spaniards are disdainfully called in Mexico, or Chinese, who were horribly hated in the early 20th century, together with political refugees, it would seem an anathema, as it would be mixing those escaping dictatorships in Africa or Asia who move to Europe with those escaping hunger, but I think that, from a cultural perspective, there is a common element, that of deterritorialization, of voluntary or involuntary displacement, that has very interesting effects. Because of biographical reasons I have experienced this in Mexico; because of biographical reasons and having lived in the United States, where I have observed the Mexican community from up close, and because I am the son of Spanish refugees who fled Franco . . . I think there are bridges, there is an interesting space of exploration that emerges from asking if a third alternative isn’t emerging, a another way of thinking and living, as you said, different from nationalism and from the exaltation of minorities.

Because of both the political–public and academic status of anthropology in Mexico, it is no accident that Bartra’s reflections on areas dear to his conationals have generated resistance, among critics and journalists in particular. In light of this, one can think of the anthropologist as an intruder in that he creates a sense of strangeness within the dominant discourse. I proposed to Roger a notion I have been experimenting with – the anthrointruder – an anthrointruder in the dominant, hegemonic discourse of European, North American, and Mexican anthropology. As an aside, I was intrigued by a text written by another Boas student and major figure of the cosmopolitan avantgarde, the Mexican and North American journalist and anthropologist Anita Brenner. Of particular interest to our discussion is a statement she made in Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



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the 1920s at the height of revolutionary fervor. She declared there was “no Jewish Question in Mexico.” In this statement there seems to be a blind spot in the very avant-garde and nationalist discourse Brenner celebrated. Brenner’s comment generates frictions between indeginista nationalist historiography and a non-indigenous frame for the national. It is as if these frictions offer a way out of the labyrinth and that there is an opportunity for critiquing the current condition of the national from the absence of a serious debate on the history of immigrants (that is, non-indigenous) in Mexico. I like your view of the anthropologist as an intruder very much. I would even consider it as a sort of challenge: a return to the romantic and colonial origins; the problem is that it goes hand in hand . . . romantic anthropology is tied to colonialism, and that is what Frazer was, the perfect intruder, a practitioner of hodgepodge anthropology, an anthropology of breaks. There was an element of exaltation still visible in Malinowski, of the observer as participant, but he is really an intruder, someone who goes in there but, in a way, doesn’t belong, like a sliver, a splinter imbedded in the culture. The intrusion implies being like a pebble in a shoe, it is inside the shoe, a bit of a burden. I think there is something there. Obviously what I have done is turn things around, those critiques of my work, those accusations – that I am a Francophile, Europeanizing – I have taken advantage of them, I have used them, since I am. I don’t know if I am Europeanizing, but I am a European, born here but with a mother tongue that is not Spanish, although Catalan is not acknowledged in Mexico, well, it is now, it is more recognized now, but back then it was very exotic; French on the other hand . . . And my name, Roger, was considered French, if not American. So I decided to take advantage of that, even cultivate that position that in the 19th century, even before, was that of the criollo, the criollo who was born here and raised here, but who is a foreign seed; I took advantage of that and, clearly, intrusion is an issue, a very important one, I think. The Jewish question is also very important because in Mexico, as in many other places, Jews, symbolically, have represented – in the most exaggerated way, because of repression – have shed an enormous amount of tears and faced problems that make them a symbol of the intruder, of the wondering character. Although, in truth, in Mexico their luck is not much different from that of the Syrians and Lebanese, the Chinese, etc., and somewhat that of the gachupines. It is curious, we are told there isn’t a Jewish Question in Mexico, and I am not sure about that, not to the degree that there is one in Argentina . . .

The task is perhaps to view the anthrointruder as a conceptual persona that rejects romantic, humanist, and colonialist definitions of North American, Mexican and European anthropology, but also the automatisms of the left that link intervention to political commitment. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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I often say that the difference between what we expected of an anthropologist in the 1970s and 1980s, the committed anthropologist, was really more of an intruder, the intrusive anthropologist. Intrusive, not committed. Therefore bothersome, fastidious, meddling where he or she shouldn’t. I don’t say it only in regards to ethnic issues; at one point I decide to enter a territory that is very jealously guarded, that of the historian; historians are especially cautious about anthropologists because many historians have fallen in love with anthropology and wanted to use it. But when anthropology enters that realm they switch on the red light and go into a panic. I know what happens next. I am experimenting with it. I have already meddled with the philosophers, also quite a jealous bunch, but not as much because they are used to meddling into everything, so they have to put up, especially nowadays, after the great scientific revolutions. I am also meddling in neurobiology; those people get pretty scared when an anthropologist enters their space; they have a very peculiar view, and tend to cultivate the distance between the sciences and the humanities, although some deny it; but since now neurobiology has decided to explore the subject of consciousness, it is running into anthropologists, philosophers, historians, everybody; that is also an intrusion, being in the middle without the proper credentials, a degree that allows you to practice there, you are a busybody and an intruder. I try to explore those other areas, and it is very interesting. I go there and tell them they are my object of study. I speak with a Mexican neurophysiologist, one of the best, if not the best, Álvarez Ledman, and I tell him: “you are my object of study, you are, what you do,” and then, of course, he feels an intrusion. Since I obviously don’t know as much about neurophysiology as he does, there is a sense of discomfort. I think that exemplifies many situations we must reflect upon, and I believe we are in the first stages of building that communication, by meddling. In some ways it has taken me back to the 19th century, not romanticism, but evolutionism, Darwin’s evolutionism, not social evolution, and to today’s neo-Darwinians; to something that relativism and functionalism had thrown in the trash, which I think is scandalous. My relationship with neurobiology today has made me think that it is one of the things that must be reintroduced.

Fugue The dialectic of provincialism and cosmopolitism is another thorny theme addressed in Bartra’s work. In the Mexican context those concerns take the form of a crossing of both ghettoized multiculturalism one finds in the United States and the militant indigenismo one finds in Mexico. I think the 1920s and 1930s in Mexico are interesting, and there is a return to them because it was a time when the mirror was still broken, the revolution had shattered it. Forgetting is important, forgetting is one more Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



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r­econstruction of the mirror as a unit, Quetzalcoatl’s mirror, the obsidian mirror, whichever, a coherent reconstruction where we can look at ourselves; it generates existential angst and anything you want, but it is a mirror that reflects and allows for reflection. In the 1920s and 30s that mirror did not exist, it was still broken, and the nationalist culture aimed at mending that mirror into a concave mirror, an eye looking at us and where we could see ourselves, something that should be forgotten – quote, unquote – or overcome, because that mirror prevented us from being effectively cosmopolitan. The Contemporaneos is a case in point. They lived at a time when the mirror was still broken, and could therefore look outside the mirror. I think we could take advantage of the situation so that Mexican culture can, once again, look outside the mirror without feeling it is betraying it. I think it is interesting to look a the 1920s and 30s because, by the 40s, before the cycle of Lazaro Cardenas – the founder of the system as we know it, the famous perfect dictatorship, which is not so old . . . Before then things were quite fragmented; today that has collapsed, we have a past to remember that had been somewhat forgotten, that of a country without unity. In the twenties and thirties Mexican intellectuals were obsessed with achieving that unity, the idea of the melting pot where the different races and cultures would melt; they didn’t think they could live like that; I think that the situation now is different. I think we have to accept we have gone past the melting pot; the cultures have melted, the three, five, twenty cultures, and it has broken again; democracy is associated to that, a synonym of that, and that is why many see it as a disgrace. But it is not, it’s a new kind of cultural space, and even if it is shattered internally, that also allows for a move towards the European, the North American outside, for a different direction, like someone who goes hunting for some ideas and brings them back, a way of being more a la page out there. Cosmopolitans did not go through that in the twenties and thirties; their idea was to get out, like Octavio Paz going to Spain during the war. He went there and brought something back; he brings it back for the nation, etc. He is a cosmopolitan looking outward in order to nourish what is here; he has been heavily criticized, and in the end was trapped. Today’s cosmopolitan doesn’t have that problem, the situation is totally different.

Like the existentialist philosopher, Emilio Uranga, with whom Bartra had studied, he too is an escaped intellectual, escaped in the sense he uses it in The Cage of Melancholy. Escape (fuga) in Spanish has several meanings: it’s the baroque counterpoint, they are intellectual fugues, in the sense of Bach’s fugues, emphasizing structure. I have used him and, of course, the axolotl is escaping, but it never achieves anything because it never becomes a salamander [laughs], and it is always running away, it has escaped its larval stage, and what is left there is the Mexican; all of my book is constructed on that musical concept. So I think the concept of fugue is important, because it also means running away, Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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The Incurable-Image escaping, and in Spanish it also means a leak, a water or a gas leak. There is a kind of intellectual who is leaking, who is leaking everywhere, but who also has this task of the counterpoint; the book only uses two, but counterpoint – the use of many melodic lines in order to create a fugue by weaving them – is what I try to achieve, and it implies always; when there is a fugue there is always another progression, and with them you create a braid, the braid of baroque music . . . but, where is the other one? Of course, it is inside, a part of it, but different, and at the same time is the same, because it is the same, or similar . . . it is inserted . . . there is a kind of decolage between the start of one and the other, which is typical of counterpoint [. . .] So, in Spanish, there is the concept of the leak – a boat with a leak – and then there is the braid . . . Because the baroque structure is an almost perfect geometry, many pieces can be played from beginning to end, or backwards, it works very well . . . but if there is a leak, then that means the structure was not that perfect, the counterpoint fails, and strange, gushing things result; these are like liquids, that is, in such a solid structure there is a liquidity, something that makes it melt, pour out. Those three meanings are interesting.

The notion of the intruder which, in Spanish, implies meanings of transgressing and of stealing, is not the classic, conventional concept of the anthropologist who leaves his country and goes to another country to live or engage in long-term fieldwork. It does not imply a territorial dimension, a correspondence between a variety of territorialized social bodies, a variety of “ethnos.” I am interested in a kind of anthropology where the anthropologist chooses a place, an area where Malinowski’s dual notion of strange/familiar must be broken, and, as Bartra has noted, the intruder is not intruding in the sense that he enters the field and is going to discover something. Intrusion is about us, and it envelops us. The persistent problem is that there is no curiosity about other anthropological traditions, whether it is the Mexican, Turkish, Italian; that would be another way of developing an anthropology of anthropology in a double sense: a critique of dominant traditions – North American, British, French – from the perspective of the Mexican anthropological tradition, but not to stay content with the postcolonial jouissance one sees at work in those particularly young scholars who reclaim their identities. In this sense, one can extend the same critique, the same historical inability of Mexican anthropologists to go beyond Mexican anthropology. Bartra shows us that no one owes anything to their own country, at least from an ethical perspective understood as an experiment on oneself, as a collaborative experiment; that goes without saying. From a political perspective, or from an epistemological one, I can understand the sense of responsibility that calls on one to stay or to return to one’s country in order to participate in debates or become involved in the critique of official institutions. That is an important Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



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task. But Bartra has staged his intrusions between academia and the public sphere to connect with larger assemblages functioning as antidotes to the melancholy of national culture. To me, this has been one of the most invaluable lessons learned from the pos-Mexican condition. About his appreciation of the literary and cinematic orientation inaugurated in the United States by Writing Culture, of which I’m a progeny and staunch defender (see Chapter 6), Bartra comments on the challenges posed by experimenting with forms, research mise-en-scènes, and the task of assemblage-work beyond the naturalism that consists in linking between geography and thought. I don’t know to what degree they understood what they had gotten themselves into when they proposed writing culture, because “to write” is not just any verb, it has a great tradition in the different modern cultures, and in some ancient ones as well . . . Writing Culture is full of contradictions, there are different positions, and I read it because I felt that was what I had wanted to do. That is probably related to my having grown up in a literary environment. I am the son of a poet and a storyteller, I always considered experimental writing to be my heritage when you were in a literary workshop you had to write, and I wrote, not poetry, that was a different area, but it came almost naturally . . . it is still difficult in Mexico, but not so looked down upon, it’s somewhat tolerated in academic circles . . . I think it is more difficult to survive in the United States . . . because of all that discussion I have also entered about the death of the intellectual and so on. Here it is easy for an academic to write essayistically from early on in one’s career; what is NOT so easy is to work on non-Mexican issues. I think that is a little changing, it is still done covertly and in fear. I think a Mexican anthropologist who goes abroad thinks that if he writes about Mexico he has a certain advantage because he is a Mexican and knows more than “they” do, like Claudio Lomnitz, who by the way, wrote to me yesterday; ours is a friendship that started with a quarrel, because he wrote a terrible review of The Cage of Melancholy, he ripped it apart, viciously, he opposed the book with a vengeance. I think it is very symptomatic; you should read it. Later on, since we have a common friend, we got together, we liked each other, and I think he thought it over and doesn’t feel the same way any longer, and now we are good friends. But there is a thing, that use of comparative advantages, which is how economists justify strawberries or tomatoes be grown in Mexico because we have more advantages for it, and we should not get into other things the ‘gringos’ do better. So an anthropologist, once over there, can become a specialist on his own country and compete with Mexicanists there with certain advantages, at least over those from there; compete, but, of course, if he gets into American or European issues or matters of history he always feels at a loss because he carries the stigma Fanon liked to talk so much about, “the colonized,” right? [laughs] (. . .) Well, I read them back then; yes, there is a stigma of the colonized, the underdeveloped, the one who gets to the Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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The Incurable-Image banquet to eat the spoils, if he devotes himself to certain topics --I don’t know, like classical Greek literature-- he is not going to be able to compete with the Germans or the French; these are absurd things, but they operate that way and create the bubble you talk about; you are inside the bubble of the nation. With Gamio, since his is the time of the revolutionary origin, it is different, because he contributed to the creation of the bubble; it is amusing, he is very conscious of inventing the motherland and that it is an invention, it has merit being part of a trend that invents an identity, a nation; it has a considerable political effect, it’s even enviable; we are at the opposite end. I have felt part of a group not just of intruders, but one who is demolishing, trying to demolish identity, seeing it in crisis and being happy about it, even trying to contribute to a larger crisis; in that sense we are the opposite of Gamio, we want to destroy what he built.

Notes  1. See Roger Bartra, Cultura y Melancolia: Las Enfermedades del alma en la Espana del Siglo de Oro, 2002.  2. Eso que llaman antropologia Mexicana, Colectivo Batalla, etc., 1968.  3. See Gonzales-Mello, 2005, p. 161.  4. The chance encounter with Bartra is owed to the editorial skills of Rogelio Villareal whose talent is to bring together elective affinities. In the very early months of residence in Mexico City, Rogelio suggested I accompany him to attend an interview with Bartra that Rogelio was conducting for the cultural television channel Canal Once. This encounter with Bartra would not have taken place without Rogelio’s compulsion to bring elective affinities into the life of his friends. I thank him for his precious fieldwork gift.  5. See the now canonical debates generated by the crisis of representation and the dialogical/monological modes during the 1980s in US and Western European academic anthropology. In particular, Gregory Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Kevin Dwyer’s Moroccan Dialogues, Vincent Crapanzano’s Tuhami, Paul Rabinow’s Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco, and Paul Sullivan’s Unfinished Conversations, to name only the most prominent interventions.  6. Trendy, open-ended questions are not rigueur here. See Claire Bishop for a trenchant and timely critique of Grant Kester’s “dialogical aesthetics” and Nicolas Bourriaud’s “relational aesthetics.” Bourriaud’s glossary defines the latter as “an aesthetic theory consisting in judging artworks on the basis of the inter-human relations which they represent, produce or prompt.” Bartra’s work doesn’t lend itself to representing interhuman relations. Perhaps we ought to bid a respectful farewell to a dialogical mise-en-scène, haunted by the task of representing multiple viewpoints, and return to Gregory Bateson’s notion of a metalogue, a variation on dialogue, to be sure, but, above all, the potentiality to think and live life “without an outline.”  7. Another form of research-based conversation – the banquet – is examined in Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



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Chapter 4 in relation to Olivier Debroise’s work on Sergei Eisenstein in Mexico (in general) and (in particular) his fascinating experimental documentary, A Banquet in Tetlapayac (2000).  8. This tradition is often associated with the canonical cultural and political magazines Nexos or Letras Libres. Before these, Paz’s cultural magazine, Vuelta, had long served as a forum and mouthpiece for distinguished servants of the nation and, needless to say, with a level of sophistication and refinement rare these days.  9. See Alberto Moreiras. 10. Had the concept of the minor not been majoritized and erroneously conflated with “minority” in contemporary culture, Bartra’s deterritorializations and collective assemblages could easily said to be those of a minor anthropologist. The concept of the minor once proved to be useful and an opportunity to deterritorialize both dominant and minority conceptions of the “native.” Much of Bartra’s work and personal trajectory, conducted primarily in Mexico but also out of the collective Catalan experience of exile to Latin America, display elective affinities to the concept of the minor. But this has less to do with Bartra’s multilingual and bicultural location than was the case, for instance, for Kafka’s from which the concept was extracted. It is rather Bartra’s emplacement within the political, visual, and curatorial unconscious of Mexico that enables us to read his postMexican diagnosis in a minor key. As Greg Lambert recently noted: “this is why the concept of minor literature must not be understood as a genre that naturally belongs to minorities, since these groups can often assume an expression of a a ‘major’ and ‘dominant’ form of literature as well (particularly in its critical representation).” See his “Once More for A Minor Literature: This Time with Feeling,” in Greg Lambert, Who’s Afraid of Deleuze and Guattari? (Continuum, 2006), p. 30. Bartra’s project connects in this sense to collective enunciations but not from the political or epistemological standpoint that fabulates on a people. The post-Mexican diagnosis connects to collective processes of ethical enunciation. The cluster of deterritorializations at work in Bartra’s work steers clear from those of organic/specific and universal intellectuals. See also “Intellectuals and Power: a Conversation between Michel Foucault & Gilles Deleuze.” http:// postcolonial.net/@DigitalLibrary/­_entries/35/file-pdf.pdf 11. Some of these include his essay in the exhibition catalog of El Corazon Sangrante, his visual essay Axolotiada, and his curatorial project El Salvaje Europeo at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània in Barcelona. 12. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines the physiological and evolutionary process of neoteny as 1. the retention of some larval or immature characters in adulthood; or 2. as the attainment of sexual maturity during the larval stage. Bartra plays on both registers. 13. Moreirás, 2001, p. 144. 14. See Roger Bartra, Cultura y Melancolia: Las Enfermedades del alma en la Espana del Siglo de Oro (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2009). 15. Cited in Claire Colebrook’s Irony (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 136. 16. See Bartra, “How to Escape the Hermeneutic Circle,” in Blood, Ink, and Culture: Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

The Incurable-Image Splendors and Miseries of the Post-Mexican Condition (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002). See Elhaik, “Metalogo Con Roger Bartra,” in Revista de Antropologia Social (Madrid, 2008), pp. 221–47. See the section on seduction and erotics in Chapter 1 and Olivier Debroise’s excellent essay “Resistance and Seduction: The Case of Mexico,” in SITAC: the Third International Symposium on Contemporary Art Theory, pp. 149–53, Mexico City. Ibid. Quetzil Castaneda, “Stocking’s Historiography of Influence: The ‘Story of Boas’, Gamio and Redfield at the Cross-‘Road to Light’, in Critique of Anthropology, 23 (3), 2003. Ibid., p. 236 Ibid.

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CHAPTER FOUR

Post-Mexican Fugue1 (Farewell to ¡Que Viva Mexico!) Taking its title from the late Olivier Debroise’s watershed book Fuga Mexicana/ Mexican Suite, this chapter is the fruit of long conversations with interlocutors who are passionate about the legacy of Soviet Russian film director Sergei Eisenstein’s ¡Que Viva Mexico!. Through their curatorial, artistic, and scholarly work around Eisenstein’s part-ethnographic, part-essay, and part-nationalist symphonic film, they have painstakingly and rigorously examined some of the images and clichés that have constituted the canon of Mexicanist visual and inter-medial culture. For this, their anthropology of images is no visual anthropology as we know it. Moreover, their ethics of curation is animated by a desire to be on the lookout for the Achilles heels of Mexicanism and by shedding doubt on the preponderance of such nationalist and cosmopolitan cultural forms as the maguey plant, volcanoes, pre-­Columbian pyramids, the Day of the Dead, the Virgin of Guadalupe, and more. I have conceived of this chapter as a stage that calls for a very specific form of concept work and theatrical thinking. Indeed, the actors – and conceptual personae – featured on this post-Mexican stage have spent their lives evaluating and bidding farewell to this magnetic and decaying legacy in the context of the splendors and miseries of the post-Mexican condition. And yet, as we bid farewell to them, these incurable cultural forms and images retain nonetheless an attractive2 appeal, an affective iconicity and hold on our psyche and experience of modernity. Speaking about the impact of Mayan cultural forms and cosmology on the cosmopolitan and nationalist modernist imaginary in Mexico – from Sergei Eisenstein’s foundational ¡Que Viva Mexico! (1931–2) to Robert Smithson’s Hotel Palenque (1969) – one of the most futurist scholars of the Mexican avant-garde notes that “in time, these modern constructions fall into ruins. As problematic as many of these attempted projects may seem in retrospect, the ruins that modernism leaves behind endure as enticing, fascinating sites of decay.”3 These anthropologically driven artists, curators, and scholars, whose work is featured in this chapter, are primarily interested in the relation between ethno-racialized political imaginaries and the aesthetics of the historical avant-garde. They are particularly skeptical about what has been Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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i­ndiscriminately called Third World, peripheral, hybrid or alternative modernisms and modernities, as well as non-Euro-American or non-Western avant-gardes tout court, as these are usually negatively articulated in the ideological idiom of cultural authenticity and resistance to cultural imperialism. Moreover, the diacritic “American” poses another sets of problems, and it goes without saying that this geographical dialectic of the particular and the universal has been very much contested by the various historical avant-garde movements from Latin America: from the Ultraistas in Argentina, to the Estridentistas in Mexico, to Antropofagia in Brazil, and from a documentary film studies perspective, to the manifestos of third and political cinemas in the 1960s and 1970s and, more recently, intercultural cinemas. As recently underlined by a perceptive historian and anthropologist “the mores and intellectual traditions of Latin America have been called ‘non-Western’ despite the fact that they have as much of a claim to Europe as does the United States. Latin America provided images of proud and superstitious men, beautiful señoritas and tejuanas, venal tyrants, and whimsical revolutions. The category of the non-western is the category of the particular; it is not a suitable place from which to think through either human universals or events of world– historical significance.”4 Seen in this light the aesthetics and politics of the historical avant-garde in Mexico ought to be addressed as a contested liminal zone and as an area of friction between the categories of so-called Western and non-Western modernity. The aesthetics and politics of the historical avant-garde in Mexico require, in the words of Michel Foucault, a crossing over of these “blackmails of modernity.” What is at the stake here is not simply to state that the diacritic “Mexico or Latin America” is a counternarrative to Europe and the United States, or to be content with the claim (which by all means has lost its radical quality) that Mexico is a composite of hybrid cultural forms, a syncretic and polyphonic mix of Western and non-Western epistemologies. The task at hand is not only to historicize the emergence of the hybrid and mestizaje as effects of revolutionary nationalist political and visual culture but also how it continues to be productive of seductive capital and affective attachments. It is thus that I approach my Mexico material, through what art historian, curator, and filmmaker Olivier Debroise has called “Mexico: A case of seduction.” It is thus that I understand the blackmails of Mexican experimental and avant-garde media arts, both historically and in terms of its contemporary resonances and echoes, continuities and discontinuities. Furthermore, this type of intellectual approach, rather than a purely sensual one, this type of careful deconstruction not only of the sources of the artists but of their goals – and goals were extremely important to artists so aware of the politiNot for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



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cal concerns of their art as were the Mexican muralists – is rarely attempted. Official institutions, the sponsors of so much that happens in the field of Mexican visual arts, are adverse to any critique of their national heroes – the artists – because such critiques go against the diplomatic and touristic objectives of the exhibitions.5

A foundational case in point is the nationalist film aesthetics instituted by Eisenstein’s ¡Que Viva Mexico!, an ode of Mexicanism that has been elevated to the status of an untouchable totem of Mexican arts and visual culture. It would not be an exaggeration that one can place it alongside other icons monumentalized by the film: the Virgin of Guadalupe, the Day of the Dead and the Mexican’s alleged intimacy with death, the maguey plant, pre-Columbian artifacts, and the supposed sadness and melancholy of the Indian, and other foundational myths that have had an affective hold on the r­evolutionary– nationalist–cosmopolitan psyche. Many lessons have been learned from the contemporary disarticulations of this legacy. The inter-medial and curatorial visions which underpin the works explored here flow from a seductive and conceptual set of interconnections that exceed the immediacy of cross-­ cultural and sensory ecstasy. Something else is at stake in inheriting and forging futures for these icons, as the initial attraction and seduction morph into the courageous gesture of “singing the swan song”6 of a project like ¡Que Viva Mexico!. One way of achieving this goal would be first to make sense of the form of iterations at work when each of these conceptual personae and inter-media events – from Eisenstein, the emblematic figure of the avant,; gardist artist who collaboratively composed and sang his ode to Mexico, to Manuel Gamio, the emblematic figure of the anthropologist who set out, as early as 1916, to link Mexican anthropology to the nationalist project of “forging a motherland” – are staged, today, through film work, assemblagework, and curatorial work.

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Mexperimental Seeds of this post-Mexican theater can be dug out from the rich inter-medial curatorial platform Mexperimental: 60 Years of Avant-Garde Media Arts from Mexico. Programmed by Rita Gonzalez and Jesse Lerner in 1998, and touring various venues from the Guggenheim to the Harvard Film Archive, Mexperimental ought to be approached as the first conceptually driven and comprehensive retrospective of Mexican avant-garde cinema and media. Its careful mode of curation reveals the profoundly inter-medial dimension of the Mexican historical avant-garde and its enduring impact as a cluster of incurable-images that create resonances between the ethnographic and technological imagination of the 1920s and 1930s with post-1968 and c­ ontemporary counter-cultural Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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medial forms. A composite of anthropological, artistic, and cinematic media material, Mexperimental creates a singular iterative assemblage of images and works that points to the iconic and ideological status of the historical avantgarde in contemporary Mexican visual culture. In doing so, this curatorial platform reconfigures and remediates an “aniconic”7 future in the heart of the post-Mexican condition. In their introductory essay, Lerner and Gonzales outline their curatorial objective, firstly in geographical terms and secondly in terms that complicate the very notion of “experimental”: There is no doubt that the films of Mexico’s ‘Golden Age’ have made an indelible mark on the popular imagination throughout the Spanish-speaking world. But Mexico has also produced another cinema, one dubbed here with the neologism Mexperimental Cinema. Distributed erratically, informally, or not at all, created often less by filmmakers than by visual artists, photographers, activists or amateurs, and frequently ignored by the film archives and retrospectives that define the cinema output of the nation, Mexican experimental cinema is largely one that has fallen between the cracks. The written history of the international avant-garde focuses predominantly on Western Europe and the United States, though from the silent era on artists were creating a vanguard cinema in other parts of the world.

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Mexperimental’s dedication to this postrevolutionary inter-medial background generates a singular “multi-attentional” (Boyer, 2007) curatorial mode: one that assembles, in the same gesture, revolutionary political culture, anthropology’s constitutive role in shaping ,; Mexican modernity, and the tensions between nationalist pathos and cosmopolitan ethos. In light of this, Mexperimental’s media history and form of curation enable us to “hold multiple attentional foci simultaneously [in order to] understand media beyond poeticist, medial, and formal partisanships.”8 Mexperimental foregrounds curation as an inter-medial balancing act and as the ethical substance of the post-Mexican assemblage it diagnoses and cares for, as it bids farewell to it. Lerner and Gonzales’s curatorial mode is innovative not only for historiographical reasons but also for its contribution to making sense of the mode in which iterations of this historical inter-medial scenario reappear in certain contemporary experimental media arts in Mexico. Mexperimental is a curatorial instance of post-Mexican assemblage-work. In addition to a more traditional “comparative arts”9 approach in which, for instance, art history and cinema studies inform one another, the curators of Mexperimental have managed to create a complex composite of media historiography and media anthropology that surveys and reassembles the figures, imagery, and conceptual personae traveling back and forth between the historical avant-garde and contemporary Mexican experimental media arts. They have installed, within the dispositive of the Vanguardia, an assemblage that reconfigures

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the link between the incurable-images of the nationalist cosmopolitanism of the Vanguardia and the uncertain futures of contemporary post-Mexican experimental media. The future in question is always posed in terms of an assemblage that links up the singular constellation of anthropology, cinema, and art that constitutes Mexican modernity. As the curators note in their description of program # 4: A significant aspect of Mexican intellectual thought has reflected on the tragic dimensions of national identity, with specific figurations of the indigenous as long-suffering and stoic. Mexican anthropologist Roger Bartra has dissected the discourse of Mexicanness, and pointed to the disparities between the philosophers and those who they claim to represent. The films and videos in this program employ the signs of Mexicanidad with irony, social gest, and excess. (1998, p. 167)

This tragic dimension is the very curatorial substance of Mexperimental. As James Clifford once observed,10 Latin American modernisms – as effects of an uncanny Western modernity – have been more comfortable than their European and US counterparts in designing styles of inquiries and visual art practices that blend, in innovative ways, the aesthetics of the historical avantgarde and the analytical categories of the social sciences. Mexperimental shows us how Mexico is a marvelous case in point and a fascinating site in which to study the various media incarnations of the anthropologist, the artist, and the curator and their affiliate personae and characters from the indigenous to the philosopher. Unlike most ,; academic anthropological traditions, Mexican anthropology is not only profoundly essayistic in narrative mode but also inextricably bound to the politics and aesthetics of the international and historical avant-garde, and vice versa. Finally, by creating curatorial linkages between Mexican experimental cinema,11 art history, and anthropology, Mexperimental had to begin not only with the foundational and constitutive moment of postrevolutionary nationalist and avant-gardist activity of the 1920s and 1930s but also with the fractures initiated by the recent culture wars and institutional critiques that have characterized intellectual and curatorial activity from the late 1990s on. It would be senseless to pursue studies of these affective icons and legacies of the avant-garde from a strictly historical perspective, unaware of the global projections on the Mexican art and experimental media scene during the 1990s. Mexperimental is refreshing because it is cognizant of the pitfalls and trendiness of the art world and the army of academics, including anthropologists, who have ignored the

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negative consequences, especially for younger artists who are beginning their careers during Mexico’s 15 minutes of fame in the global spotlight. A Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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The Incurable-Image sad situation, as Mexican art critic and curator C. Medina has pointed out, considering most artists do not realize that Mexico’s place in the spotlight will soon be over, and tomorrow the global art world’s attention will turn to Turkey or Belarus.

Ruben Gallo concludes with a powerful remark that drives the point home: “One thing that this sudden wave of interest in Mexican art has not produced is a body of solid criticism.” (p. 12) It is in this site-specific sense that Mexperimental eschews the pitfalls insightfully underscored by Gallo. In light of this, we can perhaps surmise that both historiography and criticism can be combined but only with an ear attentive to the “echoes” (see Chapter 6) of contemporary media life. The media historical approach usually relies on a form of cultural critique where political history and revisionist art/film/new media criticism coincide. Mexperimental’s assemblage-work goes one step further. It also seeks to unmake and recompose, today and in new forms, the intra-institutional and inter-medial entanglements of experimental practices and the legacy of dominant tropes and symbolisms of post-1920s and 1930s revolutionary visual culture. To make sense of the mobile assemblage that binds art history, avant-garde film aesthetics, and ongoing post-Mexican assemblage-work, the curators of Mexperimental didn’t shy away from featuring experimental works known for their virulent critique of nationalism and nationalist anthropology. Through these contemporary experimental media art works it inaugurates ,; pursuing this remedial orientation, a denationalization of media history. By Mexperimental becomes thus an antidote. The Guggenheim iteration of the program drives the point home:

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A roller-skating nun spray paints prophecies of the death of rock and roll on the walls of Mexico City high-rises. The angular leaves of the maguey plant dance to the rhythm of Shostakovich’s 11th Symphony. A Feminist prankster wreaks havoc in a monastic order by adding LSD to the friars’ drinking supply. Experimental Mexican cinema jests with established forms and anarchically subverts the conventional. The Mexperimental Cinema begins in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution, when the movie camera became a tool for the nationalistic, utopian projects of artists and intellectuals. The series extends the traditionally exclusive North American and European focus of avant-garde film and features a range of alternative filmmaking practices in Mexico, tracing the influence of Sergei Eisenstein and Luis Buñuel’s Mexican periods and examining Mexican experimental cinema’s affinities to the films of European Surrealists, abstract animation, and more recent oppositional film practices from Latin America and beyond. The series moves from the countercultural works of the 1960s to the newest generation of noncommercial, formal experiments and also features works by U.S. experimental Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



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Figure 4.1 Mexperimental poster (design Rolo Castillo, courtesy Jesse Lerner).

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The Incurable-Image ­ lmmakers for whom Mexico was a site of exploration and a source of fi mythic imagery.

In addition to La Fórmula Secreta (discussed in Chapter 2), the inclusion of another of Rubén Gámez’s key works – Magueyes (1962) – wrestles with the nationalist– cosmopolitan legacy of Eisenstein’s ¡Que Viva Mexico!. Through such gestures, Gonzales and Lerner do not confine their post-Mexican curatorial struggle to mere disciplinary expertise or a conflation of experimentalism with avantgardism. An expanded understanding of inter-mediality and of experimentalism was of the essence, and creative research strategies were needed to address the curatorial contingency generated by the gold-rush mentality of the global art and film world. Their strategies built, but eventually moved beyond, mere deconstructionist textual exegesis, the narrow focus of the artists’ monograph, or the single-film analysis to satisfy the curiosity of the art lover. Mexperimental’s curatorial orientation performs a radical displacement of those traditional models of “curatorship”12 that are often underwritten by a preservation-driven ethos and historical sense that at times result in disciplinary and institutional border patrolling. Moreover, Rita Gonzales and Jesse Lerner’s assemblage-work complicates the modernist dichotomy of “experimentalism vs. realist mode of representation” and the paradigm of “counter-culture vs. imperialist ideology”13 typical of third cinemas and post-1968 political media works. Mexperimental seizes on the radical potential of these media artworks by flaunting a mode of research that engages the complex historical and contemporary linkages between avantgarde media and the social sciences, and ,; the transformation of those links amid the post-Mexican condition. By rigorously looking at the intersections between anthropology and the avant-garde, Mexperimental modifies and expands the narrow focus of visual anthropology and ethnographic cinema beyond mere questions of representation of alterity, subaltern subjectivity, and ontological difference measured on a cross-cultural and civilizational grid. Mexperimental provincializes the question of representation tout court, and zooms in, instead, on the inter-mediation of post-Mexican assemblages. By adopting an incisive naming strategy, the very term “experimental” is smuggled into the concept of Mexico: MEXPERIMENTAL. Rather than harnessing and taming the turbulence of the concept, Mexperimental’s curatorial constellation overflows the reductive claim that sees visual and media anthropology in Mexico as only concerned with ethnographic cinema, indigenous media, and mediations of cultural difference internal to a postcolonial national culture. It reorients, curatorially, “art history toward cinema and an anthropology of images, and vice versa.”14 It is this reorientation that causes the concept of Mexico, understood as a zone of turbulence, to release Mexperimental’s unpredictable montages and assemblage-work.

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Soy Mexico: An Incurable Stage One cannot make sense of these gestures without an understanding of the “theatricality” of the conceptual personae of the curator, the anthropologist, and the artist as well as the singular adaptation and installation of these personae on the effervescent post-Mexican stage. As Samuel Weber notes, theater is a medium that has been regarded with suspicion – but also fascination and desire – by a [Western] tradition seeking at all costs to keep the ground from slipping out from under its feet. The twists and turns of this medium, in its theory as well as its practice, are perhaps even more acute today when the notion of “media” has become more ubiquitous and more elusive than ever before. What we call “theater” and, even more so, theatricality provides an instructive arena for the examination of those “twists” and “turns.”

If Mexperimental is such an inter-medial stage, which welcomes the vanishing of the ground of Mexicanism, then one ought to understand curation as precisely that tension between the biography of the curator and the more elusive conceptual persona that overflows the organicity of the curator’s life. Indeed, while conducting research in Mexico City, I became increasingly intrigued by what a curatorial companion to Mexperimental might look like. I became interested in creating “curatorial designs”15 that would establish conceptual interconnections between the historical Vanguardia and a con,; temporary anthropology with a strong inter-medial vocation. While I had initially approached Mexico through a cosmopolitan modernist sensibility and geopolitical standpoint which explored what Mexican cultural historian Monsivais called “aires de familias, family resemblances,” I nonetheless was looking for something that complicated both postcolonial and EuroAmerican imaginaries that normed and overwhelmed cross-cultural media anthropology and anthropology of art. I began to look for another curatorial pathos-formula that would reconfigure the link between experimental/ avant-garde cinema and cosmopolitan–nationalist film aesthetics in Mexico. The curatorial work of Jesse Lerner and Olivier Debroise has been key to this endeavor. This resulted in a film program titled Soy Mexico16 I curated in the context of the centennial for the Mexican Revolution. Mimicking Debroise and Lerner’s strategies in their “performative” documentary and curatorial work (Nichols, 1994), Soy Mexico was conceived as a play, a visual essay, and an assemblage-work around intense encounters and conversations during more than two years of research. Like my interlocutors, I, too, was interested in the Achilles heels of the post-Mexican condition and in the affirmative farewells generated by the gradual disappearance of the technocultural

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horizon and nationalist ethnographic culture imagined during the 1920s and 1930s as “Mexico.” The farewells of this post-Mexican fugue invariably took Eisenstein’s ¡Que Viva Mexico! as liminal and obligatory points of departure. It is well known that, in the summer of 1931, the Russian director stayed at the pulque Hacienda Tetlapayac in Mexico to shoot QVM, and that personal and political circumstances forced the director to leave Mexico before the film was completed. Eisenstein’s stay at the hacienda became one of the most famous legends of film history. The unfinished project would lay the foundations of a Mexican nationalist film aesthetics that celebrates an iconographic repertoire indigenous to Mexico. Eisenstein’s ¡Que Viva Mexico! (QVM ) inaugurated the signature juxtaposition of affective icons, including the maguey plant and the spectacular volcano, Popocatepetl, in the form of a nationalist symbolic montage that captures, it was believed, the cultural and civilizational synthetic essence of post-revolutionary Mexico. The maguey plant, in particular, had caught my attention as one of the incurable-images that haunted the post-Mexican stage. I was fascinated by its iterations from early twentieth-century Mexican landscape paintings to its monumentalization in QVM, to its banalization in Mexican features from the Golden Age, to the interesting reassemblages of the maguey in the filmwork of Lerner and Debroise. As a result, I decided to design a poster for Soy Mexico based on these maguey variations and iterative assemblages. I had already learned from my archival research and screenings at La Filmoteca de la UNAM that Rubén Gámez (discussed in,;Chapter 2 ) had shot a short film that would become one of the first conceptual and visual counterpoint to QVM. In 1962, Gamez made the short experimental film Magueyes where he animates the icon of Mexicanidad by sending the plants off to a civil war. Gamez’s film stands in sharp contrast to the ‘Magueyes’ episode in Eisenstein’s ¡Que Viva Mexico! There he reworks the supreme symbol of Mexican iconography, the maguey plant (out of which the alcoholic beverage pulque is produced, “the nectar of gods”), with a sense of the sublime and the absurd. While Gamez’s historical moment may have afforded a metacritique of the images that fueled the nation’s psyche, artists of the revolution, including Sergei Eisenstein’s some years later upon his stay in the pulque Hacienda Tetlapayac, took more seriously this rural iconography and the utopian project it came to symbolize. As Masha Salazkina notes in her historiography of Eisenstein’s Mexican episode and, especially of what she calls the “pre-history of ¡Que Viva Mexico!”:

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If this cultural history of the 1920s and 1930s still holds a meaning and promise for us today, then it is extremely important to see it precisely in terms of its often irresolvable contradictions, internal tensions, governing anxieties, and unavoidable inconsistencies. ¡Que Viva Mexico! is more than just another

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Figure 4.2 Adolfo Patino, La Muerte del Maguey, gelatin print, 1976 (courtesy Armando Patino).

Figure 4.3 Jesse Lerner, Magnavoz, 2006. The iconic maguey plant heroized in ¡Que Viva Mexico! and nationalist Mexican visual culture is substituted by the Estridentista phonograph (courtesy Jesse Lerner).

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European’s vision of the exotic land, but rather provides evidence of an intense dialogue between the filmmaker and some of the main figures of the Mexican art scene. (2009, p. 14, my emphasis)

In light of this, it appears as if ¡Que Viva Mexico! formed an assemblage that brought together the constitutive elements of an intense primordial scene, prefiguring, as it were, the more recent ethnographic turn in contemporary art. But if the recent ethnographic turn is replete with the very projections that Eisenstein avoided or at least could not avoid, his “fascination with the indigenous culture of Mexico” (Salazkina, 23) can only be curated as intense collaborative dialogues that stage contemporary iterations of the conceptual personae of the Mexican and international avant-garde, today. The program Soy Mexico explored these other options and futures, indeed, the uncertainties and inconsistencies perceptively underlined by Salazkina. Having benefited from this future-oriented historiographic work, these futures past, Soy Mexico set out to find these echoes and traces17 in the curatorial and inter-medial activity of contemporary Mexico. Lerner and Debroise, in particular, gradually emerged as incarnations of those conceptual personae and figures, and their filmwork, especially, as multiplying the sequence of figures reminiscent of the Vanguardista mise-en-scènes. Far from being authors of their films and curatorial practice, Lerner and Debroise are, in fact, haunted by these ghosts, these non-human forms of life and revenants from the avant-garde: at once curators and media artists in flesh and,; blood, and non-organic inter-medial actors and personae that take hold of contemporary media art and curatorial practice in Mexico. The curator thus theatricalizes the post-Mexican fugue on which assemblage-work takes place. It triggers, if not secession from, at least a fugue (escape, leak, counterpoint) between the professional practice of the curator and the conceptual persona that hovers around us.

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Jesse Lerner The singularity of Jesse Lerner’s work stems from his enviable ability to blend multiple strategies, including intellectual and media history, archival research, film and photographic curatorial practice, polyphonic documentary, found footage, and experimental filmmaking. By means of a cartography which exceeds postcolonial modernity’s geographic–territorial determinations, and through a refined mode of attention toward the entanglements of colonialist and nationalist historiographies, Lerner’s work takes the form of a passionate and patient interdisciplinary archaeology of the aesthetics and politics of the historical avant-garde(s) and of contemporary media arts in the Americas, specifically in Mexico and the United States. Described by film historian Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



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David James as a “vital component” of the avant-garde film scene in Los Angeles, Lerner is also actively involved in watershed collaborations with key Mexican intellectual figures. Lerner trained in the fields of cultural studies, visual anthropology, and nonfiction and experimental film history. Straddling the humanities, social sciences, and avant-garde media arts, his filmwork, curatorial work, and scholarly work track, diagnose, and reassemble contemporary transcultural movements across the rich interface between cosmopolitan modernisms and the experimentalist cultural productions of “peripheral” or “alternative” modernities. His montages and collages weave together iconic images, photographs, ethnographic objects, newsreels, archaeological artifacts, futurist manifestos, and essayistic fragments. Lerner is always on the lookout for intensive sites of experimental cultural activity, in both small provincial towns and cosmopolitan cultural capitals, from Mexico City to Xalapa, from Mérida and Tijuana to Los Angeles and New York. His work connects nodal points that condense, displace, revise, and contest the historical and geopolitical tropes of center and periphery, north and south: indeed, the very modernist trope of copy and original. He is an indefatigable searcher of objets trouvés and found-footage evidence of The Shock of Modernity (the title of his 2007 exhibition on criminal photography in Mexico City). He takes delight in underscoring the affinity between the fakeness of documentary filmmaking and the practice of forging archaeological artifacts, complicating, in the process, the dialectic of cultural authenticity ,; and internationalism characteristic of the historical avant-garde in Latin America. In the tradition of found-footage filmmakers, such as Bruce Conner and Emile de Antonio, Lerner’s work mines the interface between visual culture and media historiography. His fascinating recent experimental films, Magnavoz and T.S.H., convulsive cine-meditations on the Dada-inspired and futurist group, Los Estridentistas, create a tense coexistence of two modes of imagining the past, present, and futures of cosmopolitan modernism in the context of the post-Mexican condition. His own assemblage-work has created interesting performative and experimental documentaries in which the curator, the anthropologist, and the artist act out their conceptual personae. In 2005, Jesse Lerner set out to turn former Estridentista poet Xavier Icaza’s 1926 essay “Magnavox/Phonograph” into an imaginary experimental film. The Estridentistas were a Dadaist-inspired, avant-garde group of 1920s and 1930s Mexico, known for their exaltation of technology, radio and other wireless forms of communication. As in Debroise’s experimental documentary, A Banquet in Tetlapayac (2000), Lerner also invited contemporary experimental filmmakers, visual artists, and art historians to make similar connections between the historical avant-garde and the contemporary

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Figure 4.4 Jesse Lerner, Magnavoz, 2006. MUAC curator Cuauhtémoc Medina in the role of Diego Rivera. (courtesy Jesse Lerner).

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visual art scene, including asking the experimental theater director, Juan Jose Gurrola, to narrate the poem and art historian, Cuauhtémoc Medina to play the character of the Mexican muralist, Diego , Rivera, who figures extensively in Icaza’s poem. Magnavoz elegantly adapts Xavier Icaza’s Estridentista essay on Mexico’s future. Writing in 1926, Icaza fused poetry with polemics in an attempt to distinguish Mexico’s “true voice” amid the cacophony of those who would presume to speak for the nation. Lerner illustrates this vanguard text with archival images, reconstructions and a complex mix of audio elements. Direct without being didactic, this film presents a lively picture of a nation and a people in flux prefiguring the convulsions of the post-Mexican condition.

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Olivier Debroise18 (1952–2008) One may dwell on and resist the distinction between “ordinary” and “exceptional” but this would be a vain exercise whereby to frame the singular and ungovernable life (alas, too short) of Olivier Debroise: art historian, filmmaker, writer, curator, fellow traveler, and intruder in peripheral cultures of nationalism. Debroise took anthropology’s modernist concept of going native to an extreme form during the three intellectually prolific and intense decades he spent in Mexico, blurring, through his innovative curatorial pracNot for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



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tice and scholarly work, the very distinctions of strange and familiar, native and foreigner, home and faraway places. Debroise uneasily belonged to that illustrious lineage of cosmopolitan modernists and avant-gardists – artists, filmmakers, writers and intellectuals whose work he would nonetheless passionately disarticulate – who have crisscrossed the political, affective and aesthetic landscapes of so-called alternative modernities: Sergei Eisenstein in Mexico; Jean Genet in Palestine and Morocco; Franz Fanon in Algeria; Marcel Duchamp in Buenos Aires; Maya Deren in Haiti; Miguel Covarrubias in Bali; to name only the most prominent ones and the ones with whom he would no doubt feel elective affinities. Why exceptional, and not ordinary? Because these eventful geographic displacements troubled and intoxicated both sides of the travel and, indeed, Debroise’s multipolar geopolitical and affective crossings do not lend themselves to easy categorization. Unlike these fascinating cosmopolitan modernist lives and figures, Debroise’s curatorial practice and scholarly production could not be nationalized by official discourse. Not only does his life enact a singular blurring of north–south, south–north, north–north, south–south characteristic of the sentimental and aesthetic peripatetic journeys of cosmopolitan modernists and avant-gardists escaping to faraway places to seek something more than mere exotic reenchantment, Olivier’s crossings (geographically and through his curatorial vision, art historical research and writings as an experimental novelist and filmmaker) can be seen as a patient and passionate weaving of a connective tissue across peripheral modernities and the ,; construction of a curatorial dispositif understood as a counternarrative to both nationalist and neo-colonial forms of domination. But Debroise’s three-decade detour through Mexico exceeds the economy of departure and arrival characteristic of the ethnographer’s vocation of conducting short- or long-term fieldwork (whether at home or abroad) with the aim of ultimately carving a reflective space upon removal from one’s site of research. Debroise’s intervention privileged permanent becoming over the geopolitical and academic privilege afforded by ethnographers who rely on reflexivity after the fact: he was always in the midst of things, a unique non-academic ethnographer not unlike the Mexican avant-gardist visual artist and amateur anthropologist, Miguel Covarrubias, he so admired. And, though not an ethnographer by training, Debroise can be considered to have mined institutional and official anthropology of post-revolutionary Mexico. As anthropologist Guillermo de la Peña remarks in his perceptive essay, “Nacionales y Extranjeros en la historia de la antropologia Mexicana”:

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The Incurable-Image work in purely academic terms, whereas their Mexican colleagues tend to view anthropology in political terms, and not only for ideological reasons.

A “Mexican” anthropologist of sorts, Debroise was committed to politicizing present-day traces of the constitutive assemblage of Mexican post-­ revolutionary modernity: the link between Mexican nationalist anthropology, the aesthetics of the historical Vanguardia, and the non-academic ethos of contemporary art. He belonged to that generation which saw in contemporary art practice the hope to invent a non-academic form of critique, even if his own academic research was conducted with a great deal of rigor, surgical precision, and innovation. Debroise managed to initiate liminal spaces between academic and non-academic forms of interventions. This gesture is particularly visible in his experimental documentary, Un banquete en Tetlapayac, a film I consider, from the standpoint of mining Mexican nationalist anthropology’s fascination with a “deep Mexico, Mexico profundo,” to be one of the most important film experiments in Mexico since Rubén Gámez’s irreverent piece La Fórmula Secreta (1965), explored in Chapter 2. In 1998, Debroise returned to the hacienda to research the Russian director’s Mexican episode. He then invited contemporary artists and scholars, including filmmaker Lutz Becker, artist Andrea Fraser, and art historian Sally Stein, to re-enact scenes from Eisenstein’s visit to the hacienda and to play the main characters involved in the making of ¡Que Viva Mexico!. This experimental film chronicles and stages the events in the life of Sergei ,; in Mexico at the height of postEisenstein during his controversial stay revolutionary avant-garde and nationalist activity (1930–31). Debroise invited fourteen experimental artists, filmmakers, critics and art historians to join him for a banquet at Tetlapayac, the desert hacienda where Eisenstein stayed while working on his unfinished film masterpiece. Guests are introduced through a fascinating tracking shot that establishes a connection between contemporary figures of Mexico’s curatorial, artistic and academic scene with key historical figures of the cosmopolitan avant-garde and post-revolutionary Mexico of the 1930s. As in Jesse Lerner’s Magnavoz, MUAC (University Museum of Contemporary Art) chief curator, Cuauhtémoc Medina, takes the role of Diego Rivera; artist Silvia Gruner, the pioneer figure of the anthropological turn discussed in Chapter 1, plays the role of Frida Kahlo; the art historian, Serge Guibault, plays the role of avant-garde film critic, Jean Epstein, and so on.

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While Eisenstein focused on the folklore of Mexico, lending it a mythic quality – which critics consider symptomatic of European romanticism – but also trying to insert the country into a modernist discourse, Debroise in A Banquet in Tetlapayac presents an overload of constructions of the “Mexican.” Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



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For his film, Debroise invited his friends to stand in for the historical characters that visited the Tetlapayac Hacienda while Eisenstein was staying there. Some of these visitors were asked to give speeches about Eisenstein, without specific dialogue; Debroise wanted his guests to base their performances on their own interpretations of the role they were playing. One of the main sequences of the film is a dinner. Twelve people sit at a table drinking pulque and eating chiles en nogada (what else?) and other exotic Mexican foods, discussing art, communism, and revolutionary icons. It was an act of reflection, adaptation, representation, revision, and even rejection of the roles they had been asked to perform. (Torres, 2013)

The banquet hosted by Debroise for his friends and colleagues has no formal structure. Fluid, it moves as a polymorphic form of conversation between the classic philosophical banquet and the Salon des Indépendants in the Western tradition to which Eisenstein’s Mexico belongs, even as it makes it tremble. Debroise’s banquet is also performed and enacted over a substantial and pleasurable meal that interrupts the Western scenario by sumptuous preColumbian dishes. It is against this sensuous background that the participants were invited to continue transdisciplinary acts, encounters, and conversations initiated in their professional lives. It is as if Debroise’s banquet is an occasion for making room for – to install – a form of criticism both inside and outside of the academy, an engaged forum unrestricted by disciplinary and vocational expectations. Un banquete en Tetlapayac ought to be understood as such: a transdisciplinary zone of dialogue,;and exchange, of wonderment and reflection, humor and playfulness, frivolous feasting, that, while inviting in a spectral Mexicanist life, fashions post-Mexican futures. It never comes out as a manifesto. Its aim is not the forging of an avant-gardist project where Debroise and his guests would be seeking something new. It is as if its only aim is to seek genuine conversations that could be likened to those taking place in spaces of devotion and the workshops of conceptually oriented media artists. In Un banquete en Tetlapayac Debroise and his guests complicate the relationship between past, present, and future, and thus collectively enact a futurist spirit the contours of which have yet to be delineated. The relationship between health and curation is striking given the density of curators, anthropologists, and artists participating in the conversation. Sitting around the same table to fulfill a wish: both to simplify and enrich their lives. Could Debroise be experimenting here with a new mode of curation through the banquet form? Part mise-en-scène and performative documentary; part contemporary banquet with intellectually driven guests that reformulate philosophical questions of friendship and love; part polyphonic voice-over, blending Eisenstein’s autobiographical notes with contemporary reflections on the

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post-Mexican condition; part critical analysis; the film is structured into two main parts. The first is a murder/incest mystery at the hacienda; the second, the one of interest here, a banquet where what comes under investigation is the nature of representation, historiography, and the connections between avant-garde aesthetics, Mexican nationalism, and what art historian Renato Gonzales-Mello has called “the role of Manuel Gamio’s anthropology as a tool of social engineering.” As we have seen in the previous chapter, Manuel Gamio is considered to be the “father” of Mexican nationalist anthropology and author of the watershed political ethnography, Forjando Patria (Building the Motherland), that, in addition to the muralists, would have a deep influence on Eisenstein’s iconography. Moreover, the film offers a provocative and, more importantly, a contemporary return to the cosmopolitan activity of postrevolutionary Mexico that connects the tribulations of present-day aesthetic and cultural politics in Mexico to the nationalist anthropology that fueled the avant-gardist activity of the 1920s and 1930s. Through a multilayered representational strategy, and in non-linear fashion, the film points to the endurance of a deep-seated anthropological and ethnographic sensibility in contemporary Mexican visual and inter-medial culture. By rereading Eisenstein’s monumental, yet incomplete, tribute to Mexico from the standpoint of a contemporary location, Debroise was echoing the curatorial vision at work in Mexperimental, curated that very same year at the height of the ethnographic turn in contemporary art. Un banquete en Tetlapayac unpacks the history of ethnographic,;and documentary film, interrupts Eisenstein’s Mexican nationalism and the erotic appeal, the sensuous appeal, hybrid modernities may have had on avant-gardist visual artists, such as Eisenstein. There is no doubt in my mind that more work of cultural history is required but it is the perceptual dimension of cross-cultural encounters that Debroise’s film exposes with a great deal of affection and humor, as it bids farewell to it. It helps us to understand how certain things distract us while others require a different perceptual economy. Debroise’s Un banquet en Tetlapayac signals the mourning process of the very idea of a particular form of visualizing and eroticizing cross-cultural encounters amid revolutionary nationalist culture, indeed inaugurating the mourning process of the very singular form of ecstatic, political cinema one sees at work in the fragmentary footage of ¡Que Viva Mexico! It takes issue with a particular type of images often recruited and celebrated by visual anthropologists and film historians to blur the boundaries between ethnographic, political and experimental cinema: namely, eroticized and ecstatic imageries of cultural otherness. It is in this sense that both Debroise and Lerner have informed my own curatorial strategies. In Soy Mexico I proposed a diagonal look: a genealogy of the complex assemblage that emerged in the 1920s and 1930s binding

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and unbinding, in delirious fashion, the politics of anthropology, nationalist culture, and the historical avant-garde’s anti-aesthetic imaginary. Like Mexperimental, Magnavoz and Un banquete en Tetlapayac, Soy Mexico is nothing more and nothing less than an attempt to wrestle the ghostly presence of the assemblage anthropology–avant-garde–nationalism. Along with the guests invited by Debroise’s banquet in Tetlapayac, Soy Mexico is a post-Mexican fugue that “sings the swan song,” as one of the participants observes in the film, of the nationalist and avant-gardist culture of post-revolutionary Mexico that so fascinated Eisenstein. Can one be, today, not so much ecstatic about the other but be able to create an ecstatic relationship between self, other and the cinematic apparatus, as did Eisenstein? Or is it perhaps that the very idea of ecstatic is an antiquated and fossilized way of looking at the intersections between ethnography, politics, and cinema, even more so in the midst of the contemporary post-Mexican condition in which Olivier Debroise shot his banquete in Tetlapayac? Is this post-Mexican condition a farewell to these chronicles of distraction and attention that so fascinate contemporary researchers in their attempt to write counternarratives to western European and US modernity? The play and the stage of the post-Mexican fugue exceed the context of post-revolutionary Mexico. At work between the characters of the anthropologist, the curator, and the artist is, indeed, a complex love affair that no cosmopolitan and nationalist remedy can cure. It is a play in which anthropologically driven, distracted foreigners and ,; attentive natives, and vice versa, sing their songs beyond politicized cross-cultural encounters. The erotic appeal of these banquets ought to be explored as what they are and have always been: at once, libidinal, political and cinematic. Like the curatorial and media art experiments it learns from and, through repetition, steals from, as Deleuze once noted, it operates a jarring reversal of the naturalized alliance between Vanguardista aesthetics and the nationalist–­ethnographic imaginary of the 1920s and 1930s in Mexico. Through painstaking curatorial and assemblage-work Debroise created the possibility of a future to come, political and affective, through the precious gesture of linking secret geopolitical affinities. This was his enigmatic gift: exceptional anthropologically driven curator19 and intractable intruder meandering through a territory that has ceased to be an ideological horizon and has morphed instead into an assemblage of silent affinities across modernities that can no longer be reduced to the adjective “peripheral”.

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Notes  1. I play here on the generous etymological registers of the word fuga in Spanish. As Roger Bartra notes, it indicates, at once, a leak in a hydraulic system (fuga de agua), the baroque contrapuntal form, and escape. See Chapters 1 and 3. There are, of course, striking affinities that could be explored with Deleuze’s concept of line de fuite/flight. Fuite in French has the same etymological and conceptual resonances as the Spanish fuga. These convergences point less to issues of linguistic and cultural translation than to conceptual tactical moves.  2. I use the word “attraction” less in the sense of Tom Gunning or that of Sergei Eisenstein. It is precisely the fascination with “infancy,” as that which agitates the “contemporary,” that creates an inflated and unproductive fascination with the incurable. The incurable is equated with an undifferentiated, pre-organic state of affairs that then becomes perverted by rupture and entry into a Lacanian symbolic–narrative state of affairs. “Attraction” is an inadequate concept with which to answer the life and evolutionary pathways of the image. Through these presuppositions an emphasis and return to the delights of “spectacle” and “attraction” remain operative and generative of a form of conceptualization that doesn’t muster radically the more volatile work of the “incurable.” The image and the historical sense of the incurable-image, in particular, cannot be reduced to a relation between kronos and kairos, on the one hand, and the imaginary and symbolic, on the other. Nor between spectacle and narrative. These distinctions rest on a “dogmatic image of thought” and blackmails of the Enlightenment (Foucault) that norm contemporary historiographies and theories of the moving image. They ,; privilege an alleged existential and civilizational loss as point of departure. By astutely/strategically avoiding to engage the early cinema period, Deleuze’s Bergsonian metaphysics of duration bypasses the organicist and teleological trope of “attraction” and explores/ endures the coexistences enabled by montage. The troubles and crises of the movement image are not served well by adding “attraction-images” to the mix of movement and time images as suggested by Martin-Jones. This is not to say that Deleuze’s ontology of the image doesn’t present us with epistemological shortcomings Deleuze and World Cinema sets out to correct. The periodization of the cinema books is, in my view, problematic for both its Third World-centric and Eurocentric perspectives. Postcolonizing Deleuze exacerbates the problem it sets out to decenter.  3. See Lerner’s The Maya of Modernism (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2011), p. 5. Lerner has particularly in mind the systemic marginalization of Mayan cultural forms (as opposed to the official and nationalist acknowledgment of Aztec forms) in the Mexican national psyche. This civilizational nuancing is more than mere archaeophilia but a fracture at the heart of Mexican nationalist and cosmopolitan aesthetics. See Aurelio de los Reyes, Manuel Gamio y El Cine, and Masha Salazkina for additional historiographic work on the subject.

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 4. See Claudio Lomnitz’s Deep Mexico / Silent Mexico (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2001) p. xvii.  5. See Olivier Debroise, “Mexican Art on Display,” in Carl Good and John V. Waldron (eds.), The Effects of the Nation: Mexican Art in the Age of Globalization (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2001), pp, 20–36, 23.  6. The expression is Olivier Debroise’s and it can be found in his key experimental documentary El Banquete en Tetlapayac (2000, 70 minutes). See below for a detailed description of the video.  7. See Laura Marks’s Enfoldment and Infinity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010).  8. See Dominic Boyer’s Understanding Media: A Popular Philosophy (Chicago, IL: Prickly Press, 2007), p. 102.  9. See Angela Dalle Vacche’s Cinema and Painting (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1996). 10. This is nicely articulated in a very interesting footnote in his classic essay On Ethnographic Surrealism. 11. Mexperimental features media artworks ranging from filmic gems of the Mexican historical avant-garde in the 1930s, to unknown experimental films from the 1960s, to 1970s Super 8 mm works, to contemporary video art and installations to handmade and amateur films, and videos. 12. Though mainly consisting of films and still relying on a relatively classic strategy of programming, the curators of Mexperimental, both savvy in contemporary art and cinema converegences, are nonetheless fully aware, if not proud of, the visual and new media studies orientation of their platform. In this sense, they do not shy away from the usual condemnation of the larger and more inclusive ,; category of “moving-image” found in such conversations around “curatorship” and “archives.” Mexperimental’s use of the archive is staunchly contemporary and futurist, all the while it rescues the experimental film gems it brings into public life through memorable screenings. 13. See Mantecon “Super ocheros,” in Antologia del super 8 en Mexico, 2008. 14. See George Didi-Huberman’s work in general and his preface to Michaud’s Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion, 1998, p. 13. 15. See Elhaik and Marcus, 2012. 16. The title is taken from Chris Marker’s little-known eponymous essay published in Commentaires 2. Written in 1965, “Soy Mexico” is an essayistic meditation that takes the reader through iconic visual culture of Mexico, including references to Eisenstein’s ¡Que Viva Mexico!. Unlike “Letter from Siberia”, the late Marker revealed to me in a generous email note, the text was never intended to be turned into a film essay: it was a meant to remain a film imaginaire. 17. See Montezemolo’s meditation on the iconic visual culture of Tijuana and the US–Mexico border in her video essays Traces (2012) and Echo (2014). 18. I recently organized an event at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art to pay tribute to Debroise’s oeuvre. See http://www.sfmoma.org/exhib_events/ events/2060 19. His curatorial work is vast but special attention should be given to his watershed

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The Incurable-Image El Corazon Sangrante (which includes a wonderful essay by Bartra on the postMexican condition) and La Era de la Descrepancia. See C. Medina’s obituary on e-flux.

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CHAPTER FIVE

The Incurable Park: Fundidora

There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons. Gilles Deleuze

The context of this collaborative experiment is a six-month seminar and lecture series programmed by Javier Toscano at the Escuela Adolfo Prieto in Monterrey in the state of Nuevo Leon in Mexico. Toscano had secured the support and funding from CONARTE (Consejo para las Artes de Nuevo León) to initiate a series of pedagogical workshops/seminars led by twelve scholars and curators with different backgrounds and research interests and agendas. The research and intellectual interests ranged from media anthropology and theories of the image, to Guattarian schizoanalysis, to questions of site-specificity and social art practice, to documentary film practice, issues of cultural geography, and to the legacy of Marxist thought in contemporary labor practices. Among the guests were Lucía Sanroman, Brian Holmes, Franco Berardi, Lourdes Morales, John Holloway, and others. Toscano framed the seminar around the theme of “Curaduría and Crítica / Curation and Critique.” All the guest lecturers were asked to participate in this project in order to help the same group of nine participants rigorously to develop new conceptual tools to think about alternatives to those exhibition-oriented and site-specific curatorial gestures that bring “aesthetic relief” in urban landscapes marked by the aura of “emergency.” The seminar and lecture I was to give set out to be “adjacent” (Rabinow, 2003) to these pressing issues of “emergency,” “crisis,”1 and intervention in situ, in relation to the specific urban landscape of Monterrey. The participants2 – artists, curators, educators, and writers involved in the cultural and art life of Monterrey – were interested in experimenting with conceptions of curation beyond those dominant curatorial modes at work in contemporary art worlds. The point was not only to theorize curatorial work. Rather, the aim was to perform a series of conceptual exercises that would: 1. anchor the proposed concept of the “incurable” as a limit and outside to curatorial practice; and 2. rethink the question of “intervention” by remaining alongside the “emergency” that anchored the city of Monterrey. Captured by Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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sensationalist and neo-liberal forms of mediation, Monterrey was, indeed, a city that ailed from the very trope of emergency: emergency had acquired the pathological status of an incurable disease. The aim of the seminar was to remain, for a moment, alongside and adjacent to this “emergency.” Not to pretend that the emergency did not exist or that it can speak for itself but rather to embark on a thought experiment and a collaborative–narrative essay that would begin in one of Monterrey’s landmarks but also singular site, Parque Fundidora. Located alongside our seminar classroom at the Escuela Adolfo Prieto, Parque Fundidora became an excuse to think through our intrusion alongside the “emergency” from which Monterrey needed to be “cured.” As an extension of the book’s curatorial diagnostics and critique of organicist thought, the seminar, out of which this collaborative chapter grew, aimed less at curing than at accessing and mobilizing the “incurable” and non-organic capacity of this living organism waiting in the emergency room. Fundidora became both scalpel and point of intrusion, a remedy and illness3 that rendered inoperative the distinction between inside and outside of an alleged urban living organism. In other words, Parque Fundidora gave us the possibility to diagnose Monterrey, and the curatorial practices which target it as a site of intervention, beyond its reduction to a clearly identifiable living organism in need of medical, psychotherapeutic, and surgical care. The problem was not medical care and surgical forms of intrusion in themselves but the twin sacralization of the “concept of life” and the trope of the living organism. Critique and Crisis The choice of the concept of emergency did not come as a surprise to me. First, Monterrey has, over the past years, been the stage for a wave of murderous drug-trafficking-related violence, surpassing at times other Mexican cities, such as Tijuana or Ciudad Juárez, in the scale of its spectacular internecine war among rival drug cartels competing for hegemony at the national and municipal levels. A state of emergency had become the norm in this highly volatile and ghettoized (along class lines) post-industrial capital heart of Mexico. Second, Toscano is a member of the Mexico City-based curatorial collective Laboratorio 060. The nominalist strategy has not escaped me: ‘060’ is the emergency number in Mexico City, a number written in red on those police patrol cars under which the words “Quejas y Emergencias” are inscribed. I was, of course, already acquainted, during the course of my ethnography of curatorial laboratories in Mexico City, with Laboratorio 060’s programming and curatorial vision. But given the larger global context of curatorial laissezfaire, I was particularly struck by the continuity at work in Toscano’s curatoNot for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



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Figure 5.1 Detail of a police patrol car, Mexico City (courtesy Laboratorio 060).

rial and intellectual vision. Along that vision, the “emergency” characterizes at once a fragile and unstable state of affairs within Mexican political culture and cultural politics: an explosiveness of social protests4 that airs a variety of perceived injustices – rooted in a corrupt judicial system that maintains a high level of impunity – and the feebleness of a territory shaken year after year by natural catastrophes heightened by a human-driven devastation of the environment.5 That sense of “emergency” acts also as a counternarrative to the optimistic and neo-liberal view that emphasizes the never-ending possibilities of an “emergent” economy and an “emergent” art scene. The “emergency” is thus a reminder that wants to set up a resistance against the tales of the happy few. It is thus a critical stance, an (im)probable point of departure. While acknowledging this highly mediatized stage of emergency, Curaduria and Critica aimed instead at displacing the relation between critique and crisis characteristic of the Enlightenment,6 of the “blackmails of Enlightenment” (Foucault, 1984), substitute the word curaduría for crisis, and make room for potential pedagogical experiments that not only endure the crisis (by being adjacent to it, what else to do, we cannot simply wish it away) but to find space and time to do a pedagogy of the concept and concept work. It was the only way to work through the crisis, in the form of a critique and mode of curation that exceeded the “social” and “historical” determinations of Monterrey. This form of curation would have to learn from the critique of dominant models at work in the social sciences that subsume the “emergent” under the “social”: a balance needed to be found. “According to Paul Rabinow, a social science bent on explaining away Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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the emergence of new forms by condensing them into a set of historical or social determinants is unable to acknowledge the singularities – that is, assemblages that ‘make things work in a different manner.’” (Keating and Cambrosio, 2012, p. 10). The juxtaposition of “curaduría” and “crítica” casts doubt on an actuality marked by a proliferation of curatorial acts deployed under the banner of the “social.” The public talk I was to give at the end of the week insisted on this point: it is, in fact, still unclear how social art and site-specific practices have emerged as the dominant creative horizons for resisting capitalist forms of mediation and curation. In light of this, the seminar/­workshop proposed the concept of the “incurable-image” as a point of departure for thinking and working through the malaise of contemporary curatorial and moving-image culture. This malaise seems to be specific to Deleuze’s “societies of control”. Acceding to this incurable, the seminar proposed, would illuminate the rapport between curation and control, on the one hand, and the rapport between curation and repetition, on the other. Curation and Pedagogy As I understand it, Toscano’s Curaduría and Crítica was framed in these terms to invite a reflection on a rich constellation of concepts and practices usually only superficially explored in the current curatorial–political economy of contemporary art worlds: The aim of this program is to encourage participants to construct critical readings and interpretations about contemporary cultural production. Over the course, recent positions and discussions will be presented in order to provide students with an approach to current debates in terms of artistic and cultural production from multiple dimensions and perspectives. The materials under examination range from exhibitions and theoretical reference points to specific cases of contemporary cultural practice, such that participants are able to situate the conditions and possibilities of their own contribution. As well as presenting theoretical concepts and debates, the course will be accompanied by a reflection on specific works and events, with the presentation of visual documents and bibliography, exhibition visits and discussions with producers in the field, together with discussion sessions within the group as part of a methodology for constructing knowledge on the basis of continual questioning and interrogation of the social, cultural and epistemological structures of our day.7

The thematics of Curaduría and Critica have enabled me to return to the “critical and clinical” direction explored in Chapters 1 and 2 of this book. This is a point that matters a lot, given the nature of this collaborative text Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



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written around an urban walk which takes Parque Fundidora as a clinical case. Moreover, this chapter raises doubts about the curatorial entanglements of contemporary art worlds and social life by pointing to the limits of both exhibition-oriented and site-specific forms of interventions: that is to say, a form of curation that de facto assigns for itself a social and political role in the context of participatory democratic culture that conceives life only in purposive terms. By insisting on the pedagogical vocation of curation, I find the framework of Curaduría and Critica to be a line of flight in this context. It doesn’t have the pretension to intervene through a subordination of thought to social life. Its objective is neither to create a new imaginary nor to respond to a public moral outrage by seeking to change directly the living conditions of citizens. It is aware of it, needless to say, but it fulfills thought’s task to go also against “life” in order to make curation become something else. I believe it extends and illuminates some of my previous reflections on the curatorial and conceptual work of groups such as the Mexico City-based Curare and Teratoma. But it is here achieved from a less chilango-centric perspective. Indeed, Monterrey offers another perspective, one different from that afforded by cosmopolitan Mexico City with its international hub of contemporary art networks, with its powerful cultural institutions that overshadow regional productions and art scenes (as well as scenes internal to Mexico City), its internationalist traditions of Vanguardia and connections to other historical avant-gardes, and so on. Monterrey is not peripheral nor is it marginalized. It is not cosmopolitan either. It is post-cosmopolitan. Curation beyond Exhibition and Site-specificity The geopolitical mise-en-scènes that activate center–periphery dynamics are more pronounced in the case of the binational public art event InSITE (Tijuana–San Diego). These mise-en-scènes are also significant in curatorial responses to InSITE, as in Laboratorio 060’s curatorial experiment Frontera. Esbozo para la Creación de una Sociedad del Futuro.8 The Spanish word frontera means border in English. The project took the name of a small settlement in southern Mexico, on the border with Guatemala, where Laboratorio 060 worked with a number of national and international artists (Ariel Guzik, Pablo Helguera, Enrique Jezik, Jesús “Bubú” Negrón, Ronald Morán, Yasmín Hage, Tercerunquinto, Beatriz Santiago, and Héctor Zamora, to name but a few) to undertake a series of interventions from 2006 to 2008. A simple statement cannot acknowledge the complexity of the project. The way it was constructed shows in itself part of its critical structure. The collective chose Frontera Corozal, in Chiapas, as a place to develop a series both of Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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poetical and critical utterances, mainly due to the fact that it is the only settlement in the south where the border with Guatemala lies completely to the north. This geographical trifle constituted an excuse to rethink and reflect on many of the symbolic and ideological conflictive elements that structurally underlie social, political and artistic discourses. From questions of ethnicity and identity construction to those of inner antagonisms within an indigenous community; from thrusts towards utopian ventures to self-critical notes that worked out prejudices and misconceptions, Frontera brought divergent perspectives into a melting pot that simmered the vitality of an encounter between two contrasting cultures and world views (Western–Mexican versus indigenous–Mayan, specifically Cho’l). If Mexican poet Octavio Paz once said that “Geography is the mother of History,” Laboratorio 060 wanted to expand this assertion by showing how a psychogeography could be the mother not only of a psychohistory but also of many of the ideological discourses that traverse the self. From its inception, Frontera grew out as a counterproposal of sorts to the art and curatorial practices symbolized by InSITE and every kind of international biennale, only to become aware of its own restraints as a residual outcome of those same discourses. Therefore, in many ways, Frontera was not only a border but a threshold, a path that could not be followed nor repeated, a single experience that had to explode in a multiplicity of unstable narratives and divergent testimonies; an escape but also an edge that urgently demanded something from the participants: a decision, a political positioning; the demand to stop thinking and structuring (art) business as usual. Frontera thus became a liminal curatorial practice. This is reinforced by the fact that the collective decided not to make an exhibition out of its documentation but to generate a film narrative (Frontera, to be released in 2016) that would consciously transmit part of that experience, leaving the non-narratable, to a certain extent, as a publication with a considerable number of field notes. This is a complex response as an outcome of a complex situation. It is out of that experience that Toscano’s proposal is now structured. Crítica and Curaduría seeks to be an inception grown out of a specific territory, another geopolitical standpoint where a specific and urgent reflection could take place. In light of these curatorial repetitions, Monterrey seems to be an outside to the logic of the national and provincial, or national and cosmopolitan. It seems, in the end, that the aim of Curaduría and Critica, and its location in Monterrey, is not to make Monterrey into a paradigmatic instance. It is repeatable elsewhere and, therefore, has affinities with a Deleuzian “whatever space.” Site specificity and the “whatever” are more than two sides of the same coin. They point to differential repetitions and other futures of curation. Curaduría and Critica is not only different from those exhibition-oriented Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



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forms of intervention but also different from site-specific mise-en-scènes. It is above all a pedagogical experiment that makes the “whatever” and genericism of the “pedagogical” repeatable elsewhere provided one engages with the non-repeatable as a link to a certain psychogeographical vitality and to processes of subjectivation that coalesce around conceptual pedagogies and intellectual affinities. This pedagogical form of care of the self in relation to others does not imply the reinsertion through the back door of specificity as a paradigm but means, instead, to play with the notion of difference as an intrinsic and unfoldable (dépliable) latency. It is in this context that a walk in Fundidora became the anchor point of our discussions and a point of departure for this collaborative text. It is at this point that the question was no longer one of site-specific curatorial pedagogies but rather one of pedagogy as form of curation. It adds a pedagogical vocation to the expanded field/ground of curation and to the etymological registers of the “clinical” and the “ethical” explored in previous chapters. In light of this, curation emerges as a concept of repetition. It even presents us with a case in which, unlike those moves by contemporary art curators who seek ever more peripheral cities along the cosmopolitan continuum of contemporary art worlds (Medellin or Cali, Cluj or Tangiers),9 one can begin to think beyond the trope of province and cosmopolis. Monterrey gives us the opportunity to think about the futures of curatorial practice beyond the cosmopolitan–­ province doublet that norms postcolonial-oriented forms of curatorial practice. In this sense I take issue with those curators, such as Okwui Enwezor or Cuauhtémoc Medina’s highly geopoliticized notion of “North Atlantic”10 art scenes that allegedly overshadow peripheral modernities’ cultural life. Monterrey seems to fall between the fissures of this north–south-north axis of evil. Thinking about curation in Monterrey is for this reason salutary. It is a strategic mise-en-scène that deactivates the geopolitics of cosmopolitanism versus province. Indeed, it is not only unlikely that Monterrey will ever be one of those cities whose art scene will be “discovered” by a maverick curator who – upon waking up from a curatorial nightmare where New York, Paris, São Paulo, and Mexico City have long ceased to be world capitals – would set out to, from his/her position in a powerful institution in the “North Atlantic Alliance” countries, to be identified as the next big thing. The day Monterrey becomes added to the sequence of newly discovered urban art scenes (as is now the case in cities with benevolent and ambitious mayors and municipalities, such as Sergio Fajardo in Medellin) will be the day it has been “captured” by the curatorial operation characteristic of societies of control, a bad mode of repetition, and by the non-differential repetitions of the political economy of curatorial worlds. It would miss the rendezvous with its more promising future: that of being, within the larger assemblage of cities captured by the Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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political economy of curatorial worlds, a repetition in itself. A good repetition that, regardless of the social difficulties it traverses, will perform its own “assemblage-work.” This is a good thing in the age of blurring boundaries, cross-cultural exchange, ethnographic and documentary turns, and increasingly vague notions of interdisciplinarity, social and public policy-oriented curatorial teams where the curator, with a Kantian cosmopolitan purpose, has emerged as the new figure of the public intellectual. Having first secured exhibition-oriented forms of curation in traditional cultural institutions, having then deployed the museum, in particular as the site for puerile and farcical projections of Jacobin revolutionary tactics, the curator now also “want[s] to get out of the museum and induce alterations in the space of everyday life, generating new forms of relations.” (Rancière, 2009) The new international public sphere produced by what can be called a “curatorial double bind” – we want both the museum and the social – has become the new majoritarian/dominant culture. It is in this context that I believe Curaduría and Critica introduces something of the order of a differential repetition. It seems, indeed, different from these two majoritarian forms of intervention (museum/white cube and the social art practice/site specificity). It is not site specific, it is clinical and pedagogical specific, and it aims neither at exhibition nor at public policy-making. It is, for better or for worse, a pedagogical space of experimentation with concepts. It can be said that Curaduría and Crítica has opened the possibility of avoiding two of the major traps at work in the mutations of contemporary curatorial practice. It took place in a “classroom” at the Escuela Adolfo Prieto, a classic pedagogical setting far from the contemporary abuses of the term “experimentation” (as in pedagogical experiment). The form of the experiment was unmoored from the usual discussion regarding white cube, black box, largescale public installation, and so on. This in itself is not inherently radical but it is worth noting that the classroom is located in the locale that served as the school for children of workers employed in the former steel works across the street, in what is now called Parque Fundidora. Fundidora was the name of the steel factory where steel was smelted. It is the very pedagogical setting that is site specific which is the interesting innovation. We were o ­ ccupying – Toscano, myself, and the participants – a room which has served an educational vocation since its inception as an architecturally eclectic building that hosted a primary school for working-class kids in the 1930s. Far from making an orthodox Marxist argument which would praise the working class as inherently ontologically radical, I find the notion of clinical-specific pedagogical intervention fascinating, perhaps even more so than the common gesture of artworks commissioned in the context of a site-specific location. We were in a classroom, in a school, adjacent to the Parque Fundidora. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



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Parque Fundidora: Control and Curation I walked every day from my hotel to Escuela Adolfo Prieto via a twentyminute itinerary right through Parque Fundidora. I was struck by the colossal scale of the park: with its skyline dotted with old steel factories and their towering shafts, factories turned into a museum of steel (acero), lit at night as if it were a son et lumière spectacle. The park was an assemblage of all sorts of spatial components and coexisting temporalities: a museum of steel built on the ruins of factories; a high-tech auditorium; a colossal screen which can be seen from the road that circles around the park; a concert space; gyms and bike lanes; outdoor activities; convention center; benches where lovers make out and kiss in privacy; hideouts where. in the past, raves took place; occasional police patrol cars and a station nearby; spaces where, as Kathleen Stewart says, “public sentiments” and the logic of security, leisure and work, enter into an uncanny blurred zone. I asked the participants whether we could use Deleuze’s continuum of “control and becoming” as a conceptual map to walk through Parque Fundidora. How could we explore, for instance, the interplay of control and curation in the very layout of the park? How would we reassemble the mode in which the park was “curated” along the lines of a form of curation that untangles itself, as much as it could, from control but beyond the dialectic of “liberation and control, public and private” (Ravetto, 2013)? For instance, a continuous flow and blanket of elevator music, distributed through an elaborately sequential sound speaker system, covered the entire surface area of the park. This highly coded and continuous sonorous dispositif, in particular, both amused and troubled me. It brought to mind the superimpositions of features from both disciplinary and control societies diagnosed by contemporary thinkers from Robert Castel to Michel Foucault: In the societies of control, on the other hand, what is important is no longer either a signature or a number, but a code: the code is a password, while on the other hand disciplinary societies are regulated by watchwords (as much as from the point of view of integration as from that of resistance). The numerical language of control is made of codes that mark access to information, or reject it. We no longer find ourselves dealing with the mass/individual pair. Individuals have become “dividuals,” and masses, samples, data, markets, or “banks” [. . .] The disciplinary man was a discontinuous producer of energy, but the man of control is undulatory, in orbit, in a continuous network. (Deleuze, 1992: p. 6)

The point that emerged from conversations in the seminar coalesced around questions of modernity, control, and curation. I was also struck by how each of the participants and individual projects were grounded in a Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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language that troubled issues of site specificity. Parque Fundidora was often interpellated as an “outside,” a limit, that at the same time appeared as an emblematic spatial figure of control. This double capacity to be perceived as both a figure of the “outside” and a figure of “control” suggested that the becomings which were promised by dominant forms of curation had more the appearance of control. Were the figure of the flâneur, and Foucault’s figure of the modern man, relevant for our “individual” and “dividual” walks in Parque Fundidora? Was Parque Fundidora an optical, technological, and political unconscious of the societies of control? What form of curation was at work in the architecture and planning of Parque Fundidora itself? How was Parque Fundidora curated and what experience of modernity did it generate? Could Monterrey be thought of as one of those future capitals of the twenty-first century, turning inside out the constructivist and industrial unconscious and signaling the imperial reach and increased capacities of societies of control? Was the very industrial figure of the “factory” metaphorized by the mode in which Parque Fundidora was curated, and cared for, by the municipality? What form of curation was at work in projects such as the FEMSA11 Biennial? What form of intervention – what form of interplay of control and curation – is set in motion by key regional art events such as the FEMSA Biennial? Two of the participants, Indira Sánchez and Marcela Torres Ibarra, kindly organized a walk through the Poligono district, a lumpenized neighborhood. The tour, both by car and walking, was conducted under the generous guidance of Cornelia, a social worker employed by FEMSA to oversee the execution of socially engineered public programs in this area. It is well known that, when approaching the “social,” curators and artists alike show either a disposition towards relief, towards the removal of a certain pain, or towards its opposite: a stark criticism concerning such practices, deemed as superfluous under this view. Consequently, the first type of practices revolve mainly around the possibility of either showing the systemic mechanisms that inherently cause the injury, or proposing devices that would pretentiously deter suffering. The second type of practices tend usually to mimic cynically the exploitation practices allowed by the system, and fall short of proposing any kind of alternative. In any case, without the long-term commitment needed just to begin to understand complex situations, or the technical formation that could provide more “effective” interventions, “social” artworks barely construct their content around situations of need, without building up forms for its successful surpassing. With all her energy and goodwill, this paradox also traversed Cornelia’s practice, as her company – one of Mexico’s largest – could be said to be part of the economic oligarchy that maintains and bolsters the socio-economic status quo on a national scale.12 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



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Given the short-term nature of our tour, and given the conceptual problems which transcend the temporality of intervention, we were able to raise a few questions that some of the participants explore in more detail below. Did the tour quickly begin to show the deeply entrenched Durkheimian conception of society as a living organism? Indeed, it has been argued by many that Émile Durkheim introduced a form of sacralization of “society” from which our conception of intervention continues to ail today: Religion was a collective social representation. But at the same moment that this theory desacralized religion by seeing it as fabrication, it actually also sacralized the social. The social sciences become devoted to the study of all phenomena that stand for what now we call society, social relations, or indeed simply the subject. The reason was simple enough. Durkheim felt that we could manage without God as long as we believed in society. The problem, from the point of view of something that could have been called material culture studies, was not just that persons and societies were put on this semi-divine pedestal, but that this was achieved through distancing them from the vulgarity of the material. In this tradition, the study of persons’ relationships to things should always finally be reduced back to social relations. This was not Durkheim’s doing. In fact, his compatriot Mauss was highly respectful of the potency of things in his analysis of the gift. This anti-materialism was something that long pre-dates Durkheim. It was rather the abiding legacy of the roots of this secular ideal of society in religion itself. (Miller, 2010, pp. 76–7)

Is Cornelia’s intimate, personalized, and familial mode of relation to the residents of Poligono akin to what Foucault once called “pastoral power?” Are we cynical by virtue of simply raising these questions? What affective mode would be appropriate in our search for “new weapons beyond fear and hope” as suggested by the epigraph to this collaborative chapter? How do we relate to the good intentions, long-term commitment and long-term fieldwork research, and moral outrage posed by the Polygono’s specific emergencies? Shouldn’t our pedagogical task, equally hinged on an ethics of the care of the self and others, be always beyond morality? In light of this, the goal of both my seminar and the first part of this chapter was to prompt a collaborative critique of the “organicism” running through most contemporary curatorial practices. It fulfills, thus, the vocation of pedagogy as a form of curation that wrestles, obliquely and adjacently, with this enigmatic force of the “incurable.” To this end, as if gathered in an assembly of monads, all of the participants, each a dividual amid our societies of curation and control, contributed a two-page reflection around contemporary curatorial issues in which “the social” is always already invoked. Parque Fundidora – our clinical case – is powerfully captured by these forces. On the one hand, it is captured Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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through curatorial business as usual, in the form of an automatic sacralization and moralization of the social understood in organicist terms. On the other, it is captured as an outside/limit of organicist curatorial thought – as the inorganic side of the social. In light of this, the incurable appears to be a force, within the social, that splits “curation” into two capacities, into two functions, as if it were two sides of the same coin. As a new weapon beyond hope and fear, the “incurable” not only always haunts the conceptual relation between “curaduría” and “critica” but it also crisscrosses such social spaces as Parque Fundidora. It is the task of conceptual pedagogy to access the inorganic and untimely side of curation. It is the vitalist imperative of pedagogy as curation and curation as pedagogy. The second part of this chapter consists of nine short individual responses by participants enrolled in my seminar at the Escuela Adolfo Prieto in Monterrey. I asked each participant to test this book’s central concept – the incurableimage – in relation to the case study explored through this collaborative pedagogical and curatorial experiment: i.e. Parque Fundidora. Collectively, these responses enabled me to see how assemblage-work resonates within, alongside, and beyond our ethnographic mise-en-scenes. Fundidora S.A., Invisible City Futuro Moncada Fundidora is a city within a city, or rather, it is the idea upon which the city we know – Monterrey, Mexico – is erected. There is nothing that is Monterrey that Fundidora has not also been; except possibly drugs trafficking, though authoritative commentaries claim that the current violence is the result of the wage levels and worker–boss relations that succeeded the closure of the Monterrey Fundidora (Monterrey Steel Foundry Company) in 1986. The fact is that Fundidora is a ghost of the Golden Age of production when people came looking for work and found it here. Or rather, Fundidora is the skeleton of an animal called modernity which, in its time, marked the daily rhythms of this city with the sounding of its factory whistle, and saw grow up around it the working class neighborhoods, cantinas, plazas and parks, the company crèche, the schools bearing the name of one of its founders, Adolfo Prieto, man of worth, patriarch, patron saint, like all the entrepreneurs who created this company. Fundidora is also a trophy, a site for illustrious visitors where presidents, ministers, diplomats, bankers, cultural attachés, and personages of every cut of cloth descended to witness the miracle of a lost village in the north-east Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



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of Mexico that had become a progressive metropolis, the Latin American dream come true: a modern company that had materialized in the middle of a premodern settlement. Without the need to look elsewhere, the well-known story of migration from the countryside to the city, based on the promise of development, became a reality here when local firms attracted thousands of rural workers from around the country and brought about the city’s growth. Fundidora is also an enormous advert, though people don’t know for what exactly. This may be due to its 110-year history, during which it has been a private company (1900–77), para-statal company (1977–86), public park via a trust granted by the federal government to the state of Nuevo León (1988), and subsequently converted into a decentralized public body (1988 and 2006 to date).13 Fundidora is, as mentioned, an advertisement used to earn money in many different ways, a “duty-free zone” for investments, a terrain under negotiation, but bearing the label of cultural zone, industrial archaeological park and public recreation area. Fundidora de Fierro y Acero Monterrey S.A., whose logo displays a powerful African elephant, aimed to move at the pace set by innovators in technological development, something that demanded no little effort. Specialists from around the world trained the locals in the steel-making profession, exemplary labor in those optimistic times. Thus, generations of workers, who had measured their existence by their work, inhabited a provisional settlement that gradually became a city,14 though an invisible city, with no other history than that of the factory itself, one that could barely be sketched out on the basis of corporate ideals: hard work, simplicity, honesty, punctuality and effort. Fundidora is a souvenir not unlike Machu Pichu or Tenochtitlan, to mention spectacular examples, or a souvenir like the Castillo del Morro in Havana, Cuba, the palace of La Moneda in Santiago de Chile, the San Telmo neighborhood in Buenos Aires or La Candelaria in Bogota, or Corcovado in Rio de Janeiro, but more recent. A place of work rather than a center of worship, defensive site, government building or colonial city center, we might call it an industrial ruin that, like all these tourist sites, demands confirmation by travelers’ visits, recorded in photographs and videos. We may be surprised by the lack of a merchandising plan that sets out a symbolic commercialization of the site. This young and prosperous society, noted for the productive ingenuity of its people, remains unaware of the important role played by Fundidora in its own identity – and of just how profitable this can be. Fundidora, the first steel mill in Latin America, was made possible by (mostly foreign) private investment, federal tax relief, and its proximity to the United States. The company was undergoing rapid growth upon the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution but was able to weather the social uprising thanks Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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to skillful maneuvering by local business leaders who, despite the deep recession, were able to maintain a constant position vis-à-vis the revolutionary groups and governments of the day. Another survival strategy enabled the company to supply steel for manufacturing guns and ammunition to the United States during both world wars (especially the Second World War). It also served this purpose for the local market, as well as supplying materials for building Mexico’s railroads and the structural steel for innovative works of engineering. Fundidora reached its apogee in the 1950s and 1960s when the world steel market was expanding rapidly. It underwent two phases of modernization, backed by loans from United States banks, between 1957 and 1968 and 1974 to 1975. The company’s decline began in 1973 when steel prices and production entered a global crisis. There followed protectionist measures, on  the part of the United States, Europe and Japan, which further complicated the picture. To this was added the rise of the steel industry in China – today the  most powerful on the planet – which had seen its technical assistance agreements with Russia curtailed. The parabolic course of capitalism entered one of its periods of decline, before growing once more. After the 1910–20 Mexican Revolution, the closure of Fundidora in 1986 was the event that had the greatest social impact on Monterrey in the past century, with the immediate loss of fifty thousand direct and indirect jobs. The city received a decisive lesson in neo-liberal economics: “companies in public hands are not profitable.” Note one: profitability may be viewed from many perspectives, above all when it is valued in social terms. Note two: Fundidora is a site with a history that evokes both pride and shame, since a large sector of the public still views it as a bad example of neglect, theft and irresponsibility on the part of the company employees who are seen as the sole cause of its closure even though we can explain its administrative failure by the proliferation of the political practices of the dominant Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) that were rife in para-statal companies.15 Visiting Fundidora gives rise to a number of thoughts. Once it was a factory and a trophy; now it is a ghost, an advertisement and a park; in the future it may become a mere souvenir. 1. There is no eating in Fundidora. Just a few months ago a concession was granted to set up containers in a number of sites around the park, selling pre-prepared food and sodas – nothing appetizing, nutritious or otherwise to be recommended. So if you work in, or visit, Fundidora and want to eat something here, it would be best to bring something with you.16 2. In Fundidora you walk/think/exercise along with a soundtrack. The park is under the sway of an audio signal that emerges from strategically placed speakers which usually play new age, bossa nova and classical music. 3. There is no crime in Fundidora. The park’s security arrangeNot for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



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Figure 5.2 Inauguration of Parque Fundidora: handshakes (courtesy of Futuro Moncada).

ments are very effective. 4. In Fundidora, your free time is productive. It might be said that, as visitors to the park, we are still, in some sense, within a company, perhaps in its recreation zone. 5. Fundidora is diverse, even though it doesn’t appear to be. Fundidora Park is a scale replica of the city, or at least of its desires. It is a place where the three principal managers of this society are easy to find, occasionally greeting each other and making deals: workers, executives and business people, central characters and figures of care and curation of a society of control like that which today constitutes Monterrey. The park, which covers 1,137,836.58 square meters, has at least one-third of this area given over to private enterprises. Today, Fundidora houses a convention and exhibition center (Cintermex, 1991), a theater (Teatro Fundidora, 1994), a water park (Plaza Sésamo, 1995), an aviary (Parque de los Loros, 1995), a generic hotel (Holiday Inn, 1995), film, photo and painting collections (1998/2002), a site museum (Horno Tres, 2001), a skating rink (Mabe, 2006) and two concert auditoriums (Arena Monterrey, 2003 and Auditorio Banamex, 2011). All these sites have been granted in concession and all require an entry ticket, except for the photo and painting collections. Fundidora has over seven thousand parking spaces and just 10,500 trees (ecologist groups claim that the figure is as low as between 2,500 and 4,000). The Incurable Park? Roberto Salazar Throughout the park we can find pieces of industrial archaeology. Exactly twenty-seven large-scale structures and 127 minor structures are scattered throughout the park. While walking, you are immediately struck by the scale Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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of the structures, frozen, useless and obedient only to their own ergonomy and logic. One of them, the tallest, is used today as an observation deck and extreme sports circuit with climbing routes and zip wires. The structures, reminiscent of the gigantic skeletons of dinosaurs and mammoths found in natural history museums, are now available and open to different forms of interaction. Visitors can move around them and experience them beyond the possibilities of mobility permitted to the employees when they were in full operation. What is interesting, however, is the apparent benevolence of these industrial remains which appear conquered, tamed or domesticated. As if a civic and recreational space has been taken away from the circuits of capital generation, a space that transmuted suddenly and became a social service. It feels as if past times, tougher and darker than ours, have been transcended, at least, in the space of the park. At first glance, Fundidora park feels like a victory, a victory over rampant industrialism, worker exploitation, highly polluting industrial entities, and so on. It feels, at first instance, as if a giant has been shut down. But then a doubt arises: what if, instead of being in the graveyard of one of the city’s industrial landmarks, we are in a shrine? What if, instead of paying respects (to the dead) we are paying homage? Because, when we walk through the park, we start realizing its true vocation and nature. The first structure developed in Fundidora as a public park was Cintermex (an international business and convention center) in 1991, which raises doubts in light of the park’s self-proclaimed public and ecological vocation. There followed a concert arena (now there are two of them) and later a five-star hotel. Then an Elm Street Park franchise opened up. It seems, especially considering that Monterrey represents the industrial heart of the country and one of its most important economic drivers, that Fundidora park is an ode to industrial capitalism, that the industrial archaeology is really an industrial totem. Thus, the industrial moguls of the city built a temple to themselves, with an international business center included. Fundidora park could be seen as an industrial forest which reveals the city’s true idea of what should be protected and taken care of: the factory, the enterprise, the corporation. It reveals our notion of what should be cherished. It is as if the park became a curated space with industrial remains as its chief object of curation; as if capitalism needed care, oxygen, space and other nurturing practices; as if it needed curation. Its gardens and public spaces then become background and accessories for the colossal structures themselves; as if the park was built for the pleasure of hearing chimes and the sound of factory bells, and the ovens, and the steel record of its own body and bones. These green and recreational spaces inside the park thus act as a buffer that mediates the experience of the structures themselves, making them appear Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



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friendlier and in a softer and more politically correct light. Thus, it is a recreational park for industrial complexes and factories where human interactions are the spectacles themselves, like a civic theater unfolding as a show beneath the gaze of the towers and the ovens. If Fundidora park is at the city’s heart, then Monterrey’s heart is made of steel. The House of Steel: an Encounter with the Incurable Mario Alberto García Rico One of the great difficulties with architecture is that it must both exist and rapidly be forgotten. That is to say: inhabited spaces are not made to be permanently contemplated. Jean Nouvel

At the beginning of its post-industrial phase, Monterrey not only became a major center for business but also acquired the status of a multicultural center. It incorporated corporate interests into its built areas, including its many public spaces. Perhaps the most important of these is Fundidora park, created on the site of a disused steel foundry. It accommodates much of the city’s public life, while also serving as a center for the arts, with museums – as well as an international business center – distributed along an expanse of closely cropped grass dotted with flower beds, glass facades and red-brick buildings. The most notable feature of the site is its architecture and the way in which the gardens are arranged in harmony with the remains of the industrial machines. These interlink to make way for the fantasy of a responsible space for recreation, with a theatricality to the pathways and courtyards which makes for an act of reintegration that forges a unitary sense of security and containment. The park becomes a symbolic fortress, leaving the unwanted corruption of the city outside: a bubble within the urban horror and excessive noise of the surroundings. Fundidora carries with it the experience of its journey, enveloping us in the nostalgia accumulated in the many details scattered across the space. The park becomes a disciplinary circuit, where the pathways which have been laid out and the old warehouses reveal factories of interaction for visitors who pause constantly to take photos in the railroad wagons sited between the manicured gardens. People are making constant interventions in the park, with acrobats climbing the walls of the buildings and displaying the non-linearity of space, along with performances and exhibitions that influence the atmosphere of the site. Meanwhile, you can drink beer on top Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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of a former factory building with industrial elevators and gaze over the landscape, on a mechanism that momentarily dissipates that part of us which is impossible to cure, granting us a moment of truce in the repetition of a gentle experience that quietly captivates us. The spaces between the steel structures like a lethargic curve conceal the design of a nodal point that gives rise to a pause. I see it as a mechanism for slowness, where the velocity of the city gradually diminishes. The theater appears in a sinuous manner and the replacements of the ruins are themselves living buildings that invite us to explore them. The city falls beneath the charms of this nymph; the park, full of families and constantly updated functions as a dream-like model, as a place of recreation which allows us to open up a different kind of space, cured of the rest of the machinery, and of the social body. This fractured space is one of the few socialization resources in the city, one of the few flow-regulating defenses that generate uniformity. These refer to the connective model, the concentric model of reactivation which stores the empty spaces in order to recover them. It is difficult to speak of the park without mentioning the financial and real-estate project on which it is based, and without mentioning its size, which is greater than that of a small village. The park is a void which is not something negative; on the contrary, it is the site of complicity, of encounter, of letting yourself go. This site was designed out of sync with its surroundings. It is separate from the city and presented to us as an artifact of a bureaucratic organization focused on an ideology of progress where repetition conceals any symptom of personalization. It presents a constant, well-planned image where coexistence is like a scene in a play. For local residents, accessing this frame of reality is something like a stage set in which the park presents a distinct ethical character, one that would be well worth analyzing in detail. Every corner of this reintegrated structure postpones disorder, soothes us; availing of the amenities becomes an extraordinary, orthopedic pleasure in which the comfort and splendor serve as vehicles inducing fragmentary memories of a latent entrepreneurial dream. We are always looking backwards to the lost object, even at the level of meaning and of language. We use language, and it is always simultaneously nostalgia, a lost object (Jean Baudrillard). The factory becomes a lost object, and is later redesigned as the house where thought lives, transforming it, and using the model of the park to formulate the disciplinary grid. The paths I followed there gave me the sensation of affirmation, of content, in this fiction built for this purpose, for the distinctive leisure of capitalist societies. An affirmation of empowerment would be the project to be pursued on the basis of the encounter with this construct which, though presented to us as a creative Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



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center, remains part of the tempestuous symbolic economy which flows like the steel that was forged here. Fundidora: the Factory of Delirium Oneiros Cordovero The Modern Dream of the City At the outset, Fundidora functioned as a space that opened a new perspective on the city of Monterrey, a new identity. The steel industry, with its vast smelters, factories and other metal Titans, was a decisive step towards the creation of an industrial society, focused on mass production, large-scale commerce and the adoption of a work ethic. In short, Fundidora was a symbol of modernity and progress for Monterrey. The arrival of the steel works in the city led a new spirit of enterprise to come to dominate society in the region. Hard work, efficiency, punctuality: these were among the new virtues that came to form part of the personality and identity of the inhabitants of Monterrey. Fundidora, as a steel factory, came to symbolize all these modern ideals with an ingenuous optimism, bringing about the modern dream. Foucault was well aware of the impact of industrialization on society and shows us the dark side of modernity which drags us blindly towards an “iron cage,” as Max Weber put it. For the former, modern societies are disciplinary societies that impose order on persons, on bodies, on individuals in an exploitation of human energy that coverts it into goods, profit, and capital. And it is in the factories, precisely, that Foucault finds the clearest example of the establishment of these centers of confinement. This project of domination is “particularly visible within the factory: to concentrate; to distribute in space; to order in time; to compose a productive force within the dimension of space–time whose effect will be greater than the sum of its component forces.”17 Thus, the Fundidora factory came to symbolize the arrival of modernity, bringing with it as it did an image, a certain visual culture that take industry and the factory as a late manifestation of disciplinary societies while introducing the seeds of the society of control. Once the factory is established, it is only a matter of time before the disciplinary regime, together with the formation of a society of control, are deployed and envelop the city in their cultural dynamic. Once the steel foundry ended its life as a factory, and became a public park, a new spirit took control of this symbolic space of the factory. This park includes concessions to private companies that have gradually altered how it is managed. The factory, as a symbol, is replaced by the company and this implies, for Deleuze, a transition from the disciplinary Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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society to the society of control, given that “the factory was a body that contained its internal forces at a level of equilibrium, the highest possible in terms of production, the lowest possible in terms of wages; but in a society of control, the corporation has replaced the factory, and the corporation is a spirit, a gas.”18 Thus we might say that disciplinary societies exercise control by means of closed spaces where agents of order are required to dominate and control individuals. Disciplinary societies, meanwhile, correspond to open spaces, given that order has been instilled within the individual, and control no longer needs to be enforced by an external agent. In societies of control, domination is invisible and unconscious. The rules and discourses which govern and dominate behavior are assimilated as part of consciousness itself, as something natural and inherent in the individual. While Fundidora operated as a factory, as an institution which exercised control by means of the closed spaces that reflected the processes of operation of a disciplinary society, in the new incarnation of Fundidora as an open-air public park, there prevails this other form of domination typical of societies of control. Monterrey’s Unconscious Currently, Fundidora park is a space for recreation, leisure and cultural events of all kinds. The factory, towers and other industrial structures are now monuments to an apparently glorious past. These monuments of steel form part of the aesthetic experience offered by the park while also functioning as vestiges of the former factory regime. They express the dreams of modernity and, though they no longer operate as a mechanism, and no longer produce steel, they continue to produce signs, iconographic monuments that permeate the visual culture and configure its “image environment”19 in which Monterrey’s inhabitants see themselves reflected, as a mirror of signs in which to look at themselves. These industrial monuments are the external layer, the manifest content of a whole subterranean mechanism, a collective unconscious in which they reside as signs and references within the visual culture of the region. They are, in other words, the psychic foundations of the city. The psyche, this region of the individual that is the domain of psychoanalysis, can also be understood as a collective, rather than individual, region. If we have tended to relegate it to individuals, it is because psychoanalysis presents it to us in this manner. Gilles Deleuze writes of how the institution of psychoanalysis has served as a model of production of this “unconscious” zone in the individual. Like a kind of machine, psychoanalysis assembles and produces the “unconscious” through its various institutions and spaces of production. Psychoanalysis is “a [machine] that produces the unconscious by a regular rhythm inserted into the interstice of speech and silence: sympNot for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



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toms, transference, interpretation, the incessant rumblings of unconscious desire”20 In the manner of a institution that creates symbols, Fundidora plays a significant role in the production of the city’s unconscious, as a symbolic factory that brings together desires, intentions, emotions and dreams. It is for this reason that we should attempt to analyze Fundidora as if it were a dream in order to understand the mechanisms that unconsciously move within Monterrey society. Given that outbreaks of drugs-related violence have occurred recently in the city, together with the corruption of politics and other power relations, the dream of modernity has become a delirium in which the startling gap between social classes, the insatiable consumption of a sector of the population, the indifference towards poverty, extortion as a quick money-earner, and the ever-increasing cost of daily life, are all a reflection and symptom of a city out of balance. The delirium is not a matter of the individual psyche but the vision that holds sway in the city. “Delirium properly concerns classes, peoples, races, and masses . . . We say that schizophrenia has to do not with the family but with a global affair, not with the parents but with whole peoples, populations, and tribes.”21 Fundidora, as a physical space of signs, is the ideal place to begin to dig down and lay bare the psychic foundations of the city, in order to locate the site where the delirium in which we live has its origins. Exercising the Void Martin Leal From the moment we set in motion our bodily mass in a given physical plane, we unfold a whole series of interrelated signs that circulate inside and outside the body, generating continual interactions with the environment. Fundidora park is a site that walks a strategic line between the public and the private, while laying bare the political and economic alliances between business and government in the city of Monterrey. It is both complex and interesting to trace non-binary lines of correspondence between the park as an inside– outside of the city and the effects produced on bodies. That is to say, something from outside remains with us as we enter the module of Fundidora park but, at the same time, the modifications that arise inside it continue when we leave. Something powerful pursues and questions us. This something is a kind of persistence that mobilizes the intensities in our bodies which are magnetized by specific situations that provoke modulation effects which are intentionally targeted at the malleability of bodies. It was in thinking about and feeling the malleability of my own body that I took an interest in examining the park as a site where the practice of sports and physical exercise in full Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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public view reveals a series of connections with the politics of public health, its commercialization and our own performance. Any day of the week people may be observed in Fundidora park jogging around a track and exercising on machines that seem to be there to tell us: Get fit! Look after your body! Do sports! Be healthy, eat well! All these phrases orbit around the practice of physical exercise as a means of achieving the optimal state of bodies. The athletic body circulates in different media as the idealization of healthy, well-shaped, capitalizable, desirable bodies that are simultaneously and, by their very nature, distant, foreign, absent. This is taken on as a multifaceted necessity by the broader population who try to satisfy it via techniques administered in equal part by commerce and by the government. In relation to public health, the state launches ceaseless campaigns on proper eating, holding up overfed, poorly nourished or malnourished bodies as social evils that require remedying, and establishes indexes and measurements to be taken into account for preventing or reducing the diseases associated with these conditions. Children are given physical education in schools with time set aside for exercise and its importance in subjects that deal with the body in a biological sense. The public parks, managed by the state, are spaces both for recreation and for physical and civic education which, in some cases, are intended to reduce levels of violence and crime in problem areas. It is plain to see that all this combines with the commercialization of sporting activities as a mode of modeling bodies, partly driven by an insecurity about their own bodies among those who do not practice sports professionally. Sports marketing is targeted at the creation of bodies with specific lifestyles and modes of consumption that promise achievements beyond those of personal care. Competition between bodies in sports challenges the limits of their biological capabilities, with vitamin supplements, hormones and proteins on offer that boost energy, increase and tone muscle mass, and raise the pain threshold to tolerate the constant physical effort required to mold the body to a competitive level. All of the above generates an overall panorama in which the care and training of our bodies have interiorized an imaginary connected with health through physical exercise and sport as means of curing our individual and social ills. Health fluctuates between the vital and the banal, depending on whether the idea is to achieve longevity or to reach a desired physical appearance. These borders are blurred today in terms of the adaptability of codes that enable or impose limits on achieving particular living circumstances for bodies. We have adopted measures and tools set out by society as possible solutions to the idea of the appropriate management of our bodies in such a way that we deploy a whole series of protective behaviors which supposedly Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



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preserve our state of well-being, though, in reality, they only temporarily mitigate the incurable. It is commonly said that physical exercise helps to activate chemical and psychic mechanisms in order to improve mood. Practicing sport to alleviate the effects of depression or avoid sedentarism which triggers bad thoughts: to run in order not to think or perhaps to think in healthier ways. All these ideas circulate in the same sphere as a range of therapies and pseudotherapies in the culture of healing bodies through physical exercise. These practices also distract from the matter of confronting the void into which we are thrown by trying to posit movement in our field of existence as a possible means of encountering truth. There is no such thing as a suitable management of our bodies by curing them through sport or physical exercise that serves to overcome this void. There is no image of our bodies that is defined or resolved from outside that can serve as a model for our malleability. If there is something I glimpse in this fragment of experience, it is to learn to live with the incurable, this void with which we move around the world that forms the outside in our concave, incomplete existence. The Park: Freedom and Desire Indira Sánchez, Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Monterrey Where are we located? To understand the boundaries of the place where we are now, we might begin by explaining that the Edison district is a group of eight neighborhoods located in the center of Monterrey, affected by drugs trafficking, violence and prostitution. In 2012, private initiative set up a trust that aims “to be an agent of change contributing to improving the quality of life for the community, driving economic growth and promoting comprehensive and sustainable human development among local people. This program is governed by five key guidelines: citizen activation, environmental culture, human development, education and quality of life. All of these operate projects that involve the participation of local people.”22 With the aim of providing this area with spaces for free expression, the Monterrey Contemporary Art Museum (MARCO) joined the Edison District Trust (Fideicomiso Polígono Edison, FPE) in 2013 and embarked on a partnership based on art education programs for the local people. The goal is to create spaces that can function as a starting point for exploration and experimentation, where art is a tool that enables the existence of special forms of human experience where art reminds us what being alive means when we experience the world. It is not irrational to seek to provide the conditions for those whose lives may be enriched by art can enjoy this experience of freedom.23 Artists, educators and anthropologists have prepared a series of projects in Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Figure 5.3 Poligono District (courtesy Indira Sánchez).

which the experience of art acquires meaning for participants, mainly children and young people. How does this affect, however, those who live in the area and those who do not? In 2012 the FPE reported an investment of $35 million pesos ($2.6 million US dollars) in social work including workshops, cultural activities, education and sports scholarships and health campaigns. This figure also includes urban amenities, lighting, landscaping, refurbishment of the Talleres Health Center, an education center, and renovation of the Paseo Edison park where, prior to the program implementation, “only the median strips functioned as a park . . . it lacked infrastructure like many such spaces in the city. It was mainly used for selling drugs.”24 A second stage of this project involved motivating the residents of this complex community to cross the imaginary boundaries of this geographical area and visit different parts of the city, including the MARCO and Fundidora park, known as the Museum of Industrial Archeology.25 During the first half of 2013 the sixteen schools in the district visited the MARCO, meaning over 1,600 primary and secondary school children experienced art through the presentation, enjoyment, evaluation and understanding of the different forms of art shown in the museum. Meanwhile, the invitation to visit Fundidora park was presented to the local residents as a recreational and cultural outing for families that would serve to expand their range of movement within the city and lead to a cultural experience that views art eduNot for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



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cation as a collective process which shapes our ways of thinking and seeing things. This project fully believes that an experience of freedom is one that changes the way people perceive the world, and consequently brings about a paradigm shift. How may teaching practices be used to intervene in the social realm when this latter is the starting point? How can this marginalized community be connected with Fundidora park? The local residents of the district had expressed a desire to visit Fundidora park some day. The notion of the intruder is useful to understand their concerns. The aim of this intrusive action is to connect their space with other spaces. The body of work produced by Tarek Elhaik is key to contextualizing the question of the incurable as a pedagogy of intrusion in the experience generated by the MARCO education department, taking the concept of the “intruder” as a starting point, “where the anthropologist is viewed as an intruder in so far as he provokes a sense of uncanniness within the prevailing discourse . . . by underlining power relations operating on different scales.”26 Even if curation views all forms of intrusion as negative, artists and communities are often connected by conflicts or interference. With the notion of the “intruder” we can see how the anthropologist selects a site, a field where the duality strange–familiar disappears together with the meaning of entering in order to discover “something.” The intrusion in reality concerns ourselves and envelops us. This notion of the incurable as a pedagogy of intrusion is supported by the space of negotiation put forward by Elhaik which includes a new form of observation. In these pedagogical practices we thus encounter a multidisciplinary posture on the part of the artist–pedagogue who engages in the fieldwork, generating interdisciplinary exchanges and dealing with projections and reflections that can also give rise to problems of a more ethical than methodological order. As Tarek Elhaik rightly points out in his lecture and seminar, “social curation stammers when faced with the incurable and its intrusions, pacifying its virulence perhaps in order to let the social organism live.” For the resident of the Edison district the visit to Fundidora Park is viewed as a journey, as a production of images related to desire, as a place where different subjectivities are constructed. From the Edison district, Elhaik’s theory of the incurable is applied and turns out to be a landscape beyond the boundaries of its inhabitants; it is the border. The social spaces of the Edison district confront us while, in Fundidora park, a process of proximity and distance arises with the intention of understanding our forms of contemporary life. From the Edison district we can understand the nature of our desire, this desire submerged in the social dimension, in the uneasiness at the marginal nature of certain urban areas in a city like Monterrey. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Thinking about the park and what it contains from a pedagogical point of view means persevering in order to find something. Perhaps, as Elhaik proposes, inventing new forms of linking territory to creativity, and once there to explore new experiences, and new affective dispositions on the basis of these experiences. Fundidora: Landlocked? Marcela Torres, FEMSA Biennial When I think about Fundidora park the first thing that comes to mind is not the large gardens, the extensive running tracks, the lakes or the amount of oxygen generated by its trees. When I think about Fundidora park I imagine it from the perspective of its enclosed spaces, the institution and particularly those created for the dissemination and promotion of culture. My work has led me to be directly involved with four consecutive Monterrey FEMSA Biennials27 (working with different administrations) which are held in one of the most iconic cultural venues within the park, the Arts Center, which is directly dependent on the Nuevo León State Arts and Culture Council (CONARTE). The dynamic in these exhibition spaces is a curious one. Though it is a state body – rather than a municipal one – CONARTE has focused a substantial portion of its activities in Fundidora park which is itself operated by a separate trust that sets out the procedures to be followed. For the “State of Progress”28 this site is viewed as a symbol of identity and tourist landmark while, at the same time, it is disconnected from much of the state’s population, embodying as it does concepts that intersect in a to and fro of contradictions, counterclaims and subjective perspectives. Discussing the dynamics of this space with Graciela Kahn,29 we agreed that a good analogy to describe it would be to view the CONARTE spaces as a “landlocked territory,” that is, like those countries that lack a coastline. Countries in this situation suffer a geographical disadvantage because they depend on their neighbors to be able to carry out operations and transactions which directly affect their daily lives and have an impact on their economic growth. In the case of the Arts Center, basic actions, such as arranging the entry of a vehicle transporting work for an exhibition, requesting assistance and access for suppliers or individuals, or distributing publicity in other parts of the same park, become highly complicated matters owing to the bureaucracy and lack of rapport among institutions. The Fundidora Park Trust is the border on which CONARTE depends, at least on territorial issues, and, though the former was set up by the state government itself in order to Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



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preserve and improve the land previously occupied by the Fundidora steel works, and to design and build the park, in its everyday running, the two bodies would appear to have nothing to do with each other. Like a landlocked territory, culture within Fundidora Park appears limited, misunderstood, isolated, with unreciprocated relationships and a lack of sovereignty in its decision-making, in the dynamics of its activities, in the connection between its cultural activities and the surroundings, and the development of infrastructure within its spaces. Public and private are blurred in these institutions which coexist more in a struggle for power than as a true collaboration, where the decisions taken by each have a direct impact on the operation of the other. The institutions are able to forget their purpose while they try to maintain control over the enclosed spaces and what occurs within them (CONARTE) or alternately control all the details of the exterior spaces (the Park Trust). Artistic expression is confined within four walls while the exhibition space expands outward, designed more for the visitor outside than within the museum. Meanwhile, the concept of the (inaccessible) coast also recalls the Littoral Art movement applicable to artistic practices which distance themselves from institutions and are active in the public sphere and in socially committed projects that foster critical thinking which redefines the very concept of art. In this regard, the Monterrey FEMSA Biennial would have to be analyzed specifically as the result of each of the implicit dynamics rather than as the project in itself. As a cyclical event, the Biennale has its own rules and rhythms. It is only relatively stable and repetitive – organization, calls for entries, logistics, involvement of juries, artists, participants, and the public. It, indeed, also pursues actions that exit its territory of intervention and therefore depends in large measure on unpredictable projects entered into the competition. The process that the institution engages in is what gives it durability and visibility as a showcase for national art from a decentered part of the country such as Monterrey. The regulations governing the space of the exhibition exclude projects that might “intervene” in other geographies. A socially committed project would have to be translated into objects, which runs the risk of being diluted into a heterogeneous selection. Aiming for the Biennial to bring together an artistic, critical, regional or national community which creates its own connections and networks in order to act directly on processes that go beyond its scope would mean both expanding and dissolving its own territory. What roles would have to be played, by whom, and from what standpoint? Is the Monterrey FEMSA Biennial a landlocked territory? In a very genuine sense, art is thought of as one of the transformative events in our societies, whether these are in transition from the so-called disciplinary societies or the societies of control. The artist feels, thinks, Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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creates and we may believe him/her, identify with him or question him but, in one way or another, we are involved in this becoming. Let us suppose that art may be the narrows or channel that connects us to the sea and allows us to inhabit the territories in a free manner. But these tools are not enough. We lack memory and thus start over, committing the same errors over again. Almost without realizing it, we become a border. We think about the public in terms of numbers (the Arts Center, for example, receives over ten thousand visitors per month); we gather data and produce statistics; we live with the feeling that there is always more to do, that it will never be enough, that culture inside or outside Fundidora will continue to be a landlocked territory. In the end I wonder who we are, we who walk the paths of art and culture, as if exercising on the tracks of Fundidora park, letting ourselves be carried along by the sensation of advancing – and we advance – while we return to our starting point. We become integrated into the landscape while resisting becoming part of it; we want to be canal, narrows, sea; we question our lack of sovereignty while searching for our freedom. Who are we when standing in a vigilance tower? we remain immobile for a moment, curating ourselves while we articulate the curation of the incurable. Absent Minded Erick Vázquez I have never enjoyed going to Fundidora park. I have an idea of what a park should be like: somewhere I can go with my dogs without worrying about what might happen; a public place where I don’t have to worry about social etiquette. My discomfort was clarified by the observations made by Tarek Elhaik: that Fundidora park is a strange hybrid between the society of control and the ruins of modernist society. In Fundidora park not a blade of grass is out of place; there is nothing surprising in the plants or roots. In Tarek’s expression, it is a hypercurated place. Given that our appreciation of a location largely depends on how we are introduced to it, I asked some friends to show me the park. An activist friend told me that the park wardens kicked out her group for demonstrating in support of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) league, and that the park practices a kind of conservative censorship through which it aspires to a First-World image. People have been kicked out because of the way they look, if they have tattoos, if they are lower class. I don’t doubt it for a second. On the other hand, I have seen groups of jugglers and acrobats who perform at road junctions practicing within the park; there are groups of all social backgrounds coexisting without Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



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trouble. It is an identity that is hard to define with a single palette of colors, a site where clear contradictions coexist. Now, this can mean at least two things: while it is true that coherence in contradiction is the expression of a desire, it may reflect the effort to resolve social unease without friction while enunciating it; or it may be that the park reflects the schizoid aspect of rampant neo-liberalism, with its unprecedented generosity and its disproportionate monstrosity. It is a situation that demands we take into account numerous layers, with the historical layer doubtless the most important, though certainly the Futuro Moncada text will be able to say more about this. So, and though it may not be of particular interest, I want to explore the peculiar feeling I have when I step into Fundidora park and which I suppose lies at the root of my dislike for the place. It is a sensation of being exposed, slightly defenseless. It is a striking feeling because it is not one I have, for example, in a nightclub or in the Zocalo plaza in the center of Mexico City, or in the metro, but one that does arise at an art gallery opening or sometimes when I am writing. The first thing that comes to mind is the vast fence that surrounds the park, meaning that I am no longer able to do whatever I like – escape whenever I feel like it. I don’t normally feel the desire to escape from wherever I am but perhaps it resembles vertigo: we don’t feel drawn to jump from a great height until we are standing on the cliff edge. We might call it a vertigo of being surrounded. A kind of overprotection that makes me feel defenseless, that prevents me from feeling at ease. This overprotection, the extreme care taken in planning this site, resemble that of a gallery or museum, these strange places that should, given their contents, be endowed with a certain absence of control. There must be a connection. It is like a symbolic trap that says “here you will be safe, nothing you do here will have the least significance.” A happy death, a dreamless sleep. It is diametrically opposite to the defenselessness experienced when writing which is a pleasurable exposure because something may actually occur in the infinite discretion of an invaluable solitude. And now I know: this park, in its immensity, in its many empty spaces and many hidden corners is a place in which I could never be alone. It is not an issue of being unable to escape beyond the fence but of the impossibility of not being there while being in this space that is so aware of itself, where the fine grain of constant observation is constantly materializing, for one of the deep economic contradictions of these days is this organization that creates ever more forms of isolation while a radically hostile persecution of solitude becomes entrenched.

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The Impossibility of Being Invisible Miriam Ramos Gándara I come to the park because I want to be invisible. But here I find it impossible to be invisible. The park is the eye that sees everything. From the entrance by Adolfo Prieto school I can see that the vegetation is rich, with large trees and well-kept bushes, flowers and regional plants, together with a lake filled with murky water on which swim a few ducks. The peculiar, slightly strangelooking grass is always green. There are no ups or downs, everything is on a single level, with carefully laid-out pathways. Nothing has been left to chance. We have been taken to visit the park since we were children, and it is presented as a kind of museum that houses great secrets from the city’s past. We know that this park was originally a factory that produced steel. The ruins of the factory are vestiges of the human labor that was once a part of this place but now the presence of these machines is what prevents me from flowing naturally: I feel that they are watching me from all sides, rising up like an unblinking eye. The giant furnaces are lit up at night, and these useless machines leave me uncomfortable and, as I walk, I am ill at ease. I can’t stop wondering at the fact that everyone here looks the same: they are all going to the same place, walking on the same paths; they must all be listening to the same music. They all play the same game and all seek happiness. In here the people have an undeniably human appearance, immersed in a hyperreality constructed especially for them . . . and for us. This park is a utopian oasis in the middle of the city. Walking through it, I see myself different from the others, like a zombie that resists being an average human: abnormal and sick, my only desire is to be invisible. I am aware of my antagonistic, reflexive figure, and I cannot play the game of faking happiness. At first glance the park is very different from the city: there is an unquestionable normalization that does not exist outside. The established rules of the game ensure the harmony of the previously manufactured humans. In this park, built over the real, the happiness felt can only be ephemeral. For me, the search for truth is not a search for authenticity but, rather, for a zombie-being. Here and now, it is impossible for me to interact in a real manner with other people, and even more difficult to be in step with the city. Is that where we are really lost? In this apparently chaotic city, can we really be invisible? The city itself is just as green, and the surrounding mountains have the same effect as the heavy machinery in the park, watching over us at every moment, bearing witness to our acts: this is why we are capable of harming them. There is a clear crossover between natural history and industrial history. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



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Now I understand that my invisibility is not cancelled out by the placement of these machines but by the vast number of people who fight to be visible, all full of desire to be seen and validated by others. The longer I stay in the park the more alienated I feel. The idea of a built park spreads rapidly throughout the city. This city which imposes on us such a real park can only be the same thing in the end: the city has always manufactured us in order to enjoy a park with a too-human reality that promises happiness in the open air, a reality that does not allow invisibility. It imposes suitable education and behavior, tells us how to dress, what to do, where to go, our desires and what to call happiness. Here we learn that happiness is easy to imitate, and we never question its truth in the society of control. I for one don’t want to be part of parks and cities created by others: I prefer to remain a zombie; I am tired of pretending to be happy. Over time the city becomes more like the park; the park and city become one and the same. In this incurable city in which we are observed, we all have a predetermined role to play and it becomes increasingly difficult to be invisible. This impossibility of being invisible is what allows me the possibility of escaping. Notes  1. Interrogating the very concept of “crisis” has now become de rigueur. See Janet Roitman, Anti-Crisis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013). It is not yet clear, however, whether this questioning will dissipate its double, critique, or whether it will require only that we rethink the relationship between the critical and the clinical, and assign it new form.  2. Indira Sánchez (Department of Education, MARCO, Museo de Arte Contemporaneo); Marcella Torres Ibarra (Monterrey FEMSA Biennale and Collection); Futuro Moncada (Colectivo Estética Unisex); Roberto Salazar (writer); Mario Alberto Garcia Rico (Cinoteca Critica Blog); Oneiros Cordovero (writer); Martin Leal (independent scholar); Erick Vasquez (writer); Miriam Ramos Gandara (artist/writer).  3. As in previous chapters, I see here a potential exploration of the affinities between the “pharmakon” in the Derrida sense, and the concept of “nonorganic life” in the Deleuzian sense.  4. These protests took different forms: an assemblage of traditional forms of demonstrations, public installations, and exhibitions that attempted to reclaim the political upheavals of post-1968 political culture and cultural politics. The last includes Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s problematic Voz Alta, a large-scale public installation in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas that relies on an intricate technopolitics, confessional first-person enunciation by ordinary citizens and public figures, and the inscription of collective desire in public space. This public installation was the object of a rich and passionate conversation with the participants. It was mainly criticized for its quasi-official rhetorical style and its non-repeatability in Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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another setting. It was addressed through the central notion of the seminar: the incurable-image.  5. From a political point of view, this “emergency” stretches along the lines of the continuous “state of emergency” by which Walter Benjamin characterizes the pre-war state of capitalist societies. This definition can be maintained up to our time. Cf., Benjamin, “Thesis of History.” From a different affective register and historical sense, the seminar’s central concept of the “incurable” can be said to have affinities with what Benjamin called a “real” state of emergency. I have discussed this elsewhere. Cf. T. Elhaik, “The Incurable-Image: Curation and Reptetition on a Tricontinental Scene,” (Ashgate, 2014). There, I diagnose Carlos Castro’s public installation in Bogota, That Which Suffers Doesn’t Live (2010), in which pigeons devour a disappearing Bolivar statue made with bird food. Castro’s images evoke Benjamin’s “Thesis of History” and the melancholic/ mournful figure of the Angel of History.The seminar and participants seemed to be divided around the task of curation and its historical sense: redemptive, futurist, cathartic, social, public policy-oriented, and so on. The incurable-image was proposed in this context as an image that wrestles with the concept of “repetition” elaborated in the book’s last chapter. It goes without saying that affinities do exist between the Deleuzian time image and Benjamin’s dialectical image that are beyond the scope of this chapter and this book. Cf. Stefania Pandolfo, Impasse of the Angels: Scenes from a Moroccan Space of Memory (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997); R. L. Rutsky, “Walter Benjamin and The Dispersion of Cinema,” in Symploke, vol. 15, nos 1–2 (2007), 8–23.  6. Reinhardt Koselleck, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998).  7. http://www.conarte.org.mx/prensa/lanza-conarte-programa-de-formacion-para-criticos-y-curadores/  8. www.lc060.org/frontera  9. In a previous collaborative essay, Dominic Willsdon and I tried to draw attention to the arbitrary curatorial economy in which cities are assembled by those curators who cannot find room in the competitive geographical imagination of contemporary curatorial practice and its saturated political economy of capitals of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, from London to São Paulo, to Mexico City. We concluded our essay (2011) with a severe critique of the postcolonial obsession with the dialectics of Province and Center. 10. See Cuauhtémoc Medina, “Contemp(t)orary: Eleven Theses,” in e-flux, 2010. 11. FEMSA is the Mexican bottling company for Coca-Cola and other soft drinks. 12. Even more when FEMSA has an enormous responsibility in many of Mexico’s current economic and health problems. As a country, Mexico is the largest per capita consumer of bottled soft drinks (and only second to the United States in the total amount). Recently, it also became the country with the highest percentage worldwide of morbidly obese persons. The role played by FEMSA in these concerns is undeniable. It is worth noting that the FEMSA Biennial, important at a regional scale, is another of the instruments with which this company hopes Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



13.

14. 15.

16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

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to clean its name. This shows less that curation and biopolitics have entered into a dangerous zone of indistinction, in Agamben’s terms. Rather, it points to the very task of curation as always already biopolitical beyond negative and positive formulations. Curation is immanent to the politics of life under the aegis of our societies of control. It is a sign of the profound mutation of our societies of control into unstable states of curation. Though the trust agreed to create a public park on the site of the former factory, the ideas expressed in the original document about what was to be done in future were so vague that it speaks simultaneously of the preservation and improvement of the site, the creation of an eco-park, the construction of a park and technology museum and also the urbanization of the property. Thus, in 1988, the building of the CINTERMEX international business center began and, in 2006, the law was signed to create the Fundidora Park Decentralized Public Agency. After Mexico City and Guadalajara, Monterrey is the third largest city in Mexico, with 3.7 million people in its metropolitan area which comprises nine municipalities. The Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Institutional Revolutionary Party, PRI), was created in 1929 by President Plutarco Elías Calles and a handful of politicians. The party remained in power until 2000 when Vicente Fox Quesada of the Partido Acción Nacional (National Action Party, PAN) won the presidential elections. The entrenchment in power and political practices of the PRI were defined by Mario Vargas Llosa as “the perfect dictatorship.” There is also a restaurant (El Lingote) within Horno Tres, the site museum, though the prices are well above those the average citizen can afford. Together with this restaurant there are several food outlets in CINTERMEX and a catering company offering buffets and set menus for the approximately one thousand annual events held here. Deleuze, Gilles. “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” October, vol. 59, 3. Ibid., 4. Roberto Tejada, National Camera: Mexico’s Image Environment (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). Gregg Lambert, “De/territorializing psycho-analysis”, in Deleuze, Derrida, and Psychoanalysis, p. 195 Ibid., p. 208. http://www.femsa.com/es/sostenibilidad/nuestros-programas/nuestra-comu​ nidad​/fideicomiso-poligono-edison.htm Elliot W. Eisner, The Museum as a Place for Education, 2008. Cordelia Portilla, project coordinator for Poligono Edison, Femsa, January 2014. Cuya misión es, de acuerdo con sus propios estatutos: brindar un espacio para el conocimiento y la diversión en un ambiente de armonía que enriquezca y retroalimente la vida de nuestra comunidad. http://www.parquefundidora.org/node/164 “Tarek Elhaik: Intrusiones Mutuas. Metálogo con Roger Bartra,” in Revista de Antropología Social, vol. 17, 2008, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, España, 221–47. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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27. The Monterrey FEMSA Biennial is a visual arts competition aimed at strengthening, stimulating and disseminating art in Mexico. 28. The slogan used by the state government to position Nuevo León in the national panorama. 29. Graciela Kahn worked for CONARTE/the Arts Center between 2009 and 2012.

EDL\JBURGH University Press ,;

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CHAPTER SIX

Untimely Futures

Installation The post-Mexican incurable-images, collaborative dialogues, and conceptual constellations interwoven and installed in this book belong, perhaps, to a nascent ethical orientation that examines the relationship between assemblages, truth, and the future. This ethically driven form of curatorial work eschews the form traditionally taken by the relationship between subject and truth: confession, meditation, essay, reflection, and autobiography. This curatorial ethics of assemblages orbits around the conceptual territories of a new vitalism and the etymological registers of “installation.” It is an ethics of endurance specific to our current states of curation that continuously demand us “to manage to fold the line and establish an endurable zone in which to install ourselves.” Thus framed, “installation” is less an art historical form or a narrative genre inspired by our recent anthropological inquiries, cinematic and media art experimentations, research-led art practices, moving-image montages, paradigm shifts, and conceptual headaches. Rather than aiming to be displayed, exhibited, screened, and curated in the traditional sense of the term, this difficult ethical practice of installation shifts registers from recognition and visibility to that of imperceptibility.1 It recruits and cultivates forms of expression attentive to the singular mode of anthropological inquiry enabled by curatorial work. More importantly, this ethics of installation is expressed in the sense of wrestling with the temptation to “impose a form on the matter of lived experience.” The questions which arose from this experience are posed insofar as they strive to convert this intervention into a stage exit of sorts, connecting at various points a series of detours initiated years ago in the anthropological, artistic, curatorial, and cinematic archives. These archives have already morphed into uneasy methodological mise-en-scènes and an increasing disenchantment with the epistemological and pedagogical conventions serving as the decidedly solid ground for experimental regions of life. They have turned into fields and disciplines, into hardened and competitive territories and material cultures, into matter divested of radiant memories. The Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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d­ isenchantment had to be met with creativity and formal and relational experimentation and on more than one occasion some of my interlocutors – from artist Eduardo Abaroa to anthropologist Roger Bartra – felt anthropology, even under the sign of experimental ethnography, was a discipline not equipped to meet the challenges posed by the direction our intellectual lives were taking. This malaise was amplified with anthropology’s anxiety over its national, diasporic, and cosmopolitan vocation, on the one hand, and in the form of the old question of whether anthropology is art or science, on the other. Torn between the secular imperatives of the empirical and the postsecular contours of the speculative, my interlocutors were fashioning a form of contemporary anthropology that could only fracture these “blackmails of Enlightenment.” In the midst of ethnographic turns, cross-cultural euphoria, and interdisciplinary exchanges we nonetheless reached the conclusion that the ontologically posed question “What is anthropology?” remains a relevant one. The last ought to be posed beyond identitarian politics and the logic of representation. It would thus shift our attention away from concerns about disciplinary boundary patrolling to questions of how anthropology-as-curation, specifically, connects with our current “reconceptualizations of life” (Rabinow, 1996) and to the procedures of foreignness and intrusion generated by this non-organicist vitalism. In an era when even the most critical of thought remains passionately attached to the pride of its identity, post-Mexican curatorial work responds with another form of caring for the link between life, affect, and vocational practices. Amid our dissonant cartographies of difference and affinity, it is affinity, in particular, that emerged as the most complex form of difference. Indeed, it emerged as a site of curatorial struggle and as the lugar/place that hosts what I have called “the incurable.” The linkages constituted by family resemblances, in their anti-Oedipal and im/personal intractability, generate the inter-medial milieu of this book. The task at hand: an ethics and aesthetics of life that will try to evaluate and problematize anthropologists’ obsession with audiovisual images and words, including mine, via an experiment of a different kind. I was one of those both inspired and exhausted by the reflexive turn associated with the “Writing Culture” moment, just like the army of anthropologists in the making who had entered anthropology at the instant where “Writing Culture” and its concern with narrativity and authorship became – unfairly I would say – a punching bag within all sorts of traditions of anthropology, the United States included. Its originality stood on its keen attention to past experiments lodged in the anthropological and artistic archive. Things were not so new when one took a closer look at the minor tradition that was foregrounded (Leiris, Bateson, Clastres). Its rising success fastened on to market forces in the wake of interNot for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



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national and late capitalist reconfigurations of anthropology departments (in particular) and the humanities and social sciences (in general). Something irritated the British, the Mexicans, the Italians, the Brazilians. The French not as much since most examples given by “Writing Culture” harkened back to early experiments associated with French ethnologie and its affective mixed economy of abjection, fascination, wonder and “aversion” in the interstices of heroic acts of writing up fieldwork research: suffice to mention the most commonly used examples of Leiris’s experience in Djibouti or Lévi-Strauss’s aversion in the early paragraphs of Tristes Tropiques. The latter’s affective economy has been popularized in Caetano Veloso’s wonderful song, “The Foreigner.” As we have seen, irritation, an affect, often took the form of postcolonial national wars and ethnographic turns in contemporary art. Some of these irritations might have a claim to legitimacy but, alas, only if understood in their resentful and envious sense of the term, legitimacy referring to poorly posed questions of origins: for example, did questions of writing/écriture in anthropology “begin” with the US-based moment associated with the poetics and politics of culture debated in a seminar room in Santa Fe? After all, Manuel Gamio, the “father of Mexican anthropology,” Franz Boas’s prodigy and enfant terrible, had already written short stories, some good ones other clumsy and insignificant.2 Roger Bartra had written his trenchant critique of Mexican nationalist/colonial anthropology – that is, of the primordial scene of the Mexican ethnographic turn of the 1920s – in the form of that great literary experiment we seldom read in core anthropology courses in Paris or Berkeley: The Cage of Melancholy. The same can be said of Peruvian Arguedas’s experimental ethnography, El Zoro de Arriba y el Zoro de Abajo. One ought unfortunately be seduced by the specialized area-studies enclave of Latin American studies to encounter these key ethnographic experiments and anthropological interventions. Behind this economy of envy and origination lies the most important problem space: that of vocation beyond geography. Calling Recent attempts have been made to remediate the zone of friction between the social sciences and contemporary art. For instance, anthropology-trained artists Susan Hiller and Fiamma Montezemolo, and the cultural geographer and artist Trevor Pagdlen have courageously been leading a double life via an “ethnographic turn” unexpectedly found on the side of the road. Others, including the author of this book, prefer to follow Eduardo Abaroa’s iconoclastic installation and pursue their disciplinary work while fabulating and fantasizing on the destruction of anthropology. Some have already turned away from the conventional visual and media anthropology towards Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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anthropologically informed experimental media arts and forms of curation enabling the affinities George Marcus has perceptively identified between the procedures of conceptual art and those of experimental ethnography. With this in mind, it should come as no surprise that, down the line, below the telos of our trainings, the urge for another vocational turn, indeed another form of ensouling, becomes irresistible, insisting like an intolerable refrain. We can here learn a great deal from our former nemeses: philosophers. Bernard Stiegler’s answer to the self-posed question How Have I become a philosopher? is illuminating: Becoming-a-philosopher, I first asked myself: is this a vocation and, if so, does it apply to me? Vocation, according to its original religious meaning, is a “name given to those who feel ‘called’,” writes Catherine Clement: “Vocare, to call, signifies that all vocations are addressed to the individual, called by his name, as himself.” Religious vocation is therefore individual: it is a moment of that which I am about to call a process of individuation. As for extending the religious sense of vocation to profane pursuits, it designates less the event of a call than the existence of a gift. One thus speaks of the vocations of musicians, or writers, or artists who devote their life to a special gift – in the sense of being something rare. In the philosophical vocation – if such a thing exists – there doesn’t seem to be this dimension of specialty: no one is devoted to philosophy in particular; all of us could be devoted to philosophy which would immediately constitute a gift, precisely common to all. All of us, precisely insofar as we form a we, would be devoted in potential to philosophy, in a way that is not the case for other kinds of knowing. And reciprocally, though we know certain people are gifted in poetry, drawing, or music, it seems more difficult to say that someone has a gift for philosophy. If there are people more particularly “devoted” to philosophy, this would be, then, insofar as they are capable of making the passage to the act from a common potential.” (p. 2)

Could this also be the real of anthropology? And, if so, has not the ethnographic turn in contemporary art in the 1990s – with its conceptual personae and vocational figures of the artist, anthropologist, and curator – not contributed to the unfortunate pacification of the transgressive passage to the act Stiegler locates at the heart of a calling common to these figures? There is no answer. Abaroa has shown his way, Bartra as well, Lerner, Debroise, and so am I following their footsteps and the philia, the friendship that creates the commonality of our potentiality. Rather, it ought to become clear to us that the task of our calling is to endure and filter the irresistible urge through an anthropological sensibility, to mediate it with practices involving something other than mere words and disincarnated, de-eroticized participation-observation. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



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Not only should we continue to mediate and extend the old avant-gardist question of the relationship between art and life in different forms but we also ought collectively to re-evaluate our calling beyond the professional ethos of culturalist and subjectivist approaches to anthropology. What else would animate Abaroa’s iconoclastic and anti-humanist gesture, or Bartra’s postMexican pleasures and bestiary? We can learn a lot from these experimental arts and experimental media. They can help us acquire a much wider sense of our calling beyond the professional enclaves of academic anthropology. The ethnographic turn in contemporary art is a wondrous robbery. Artists and curators “stole” ethnography, and they should be saluted for that. What would our counter-theft look like? We take curation in exchange, reappropriate it, make it our task, and turn it into another form. The anthropology we could start formulating would extend its reach at the convergence point not only between the usual fields of visual anthropology and the anthropology of art but also towards a wide variety of curatorial practices eventually informing and modifying our desire to produce a viable folding of the anthropological and the medial. This could even constitute a new weapon and a form of resistance returned by the real of anthropology amid a depressing, competitive, and adversarial economy of ethnographic turns in which art historians, anthropologists, and professional curators submit to their most primal desire: to reterritorialize their respective and disciplinary images of thought. Moreover, the disenchantment with anthropology under the regime of the ethnographic turn was sometimes met with paralysis, at other times with the formulation of experiments that bordered on the post-Malinowski, anthropological taboo of going native. “Native” in an ample sense: of allowing a sort of sympathetic magic to occur in relation to the moral, aesthetic and affective landscape delimited by the practices under scrutiny as well as with regard to the interplay of arrivals and departures we are told and warned to handle with a great deal of caution. In the end, what mattered was to design a patient style of intervention that would allow a redisciplining of the soul and a renewed attention to an urge for other, differently ensouled – that is, pedagogical, ethical, and formal – mise-en-scènes. Mexico City has been the stage for the experiment, an emplacement rather than a location. The reader was warned, therefore: what I offered will not quench a thirst for “things Mexican.” If it did, it would be a good surprise. If it did not: the stage would have been an experiment with the self in the company of others, artists, filmmakers, curators, who dwell in and out of Mexico City and whose vocation has provided me with a set of techniques ranging from moving-image-making, installing, researching, archiving, montaging, assembling, affecting public culture, and much more. As the political theorist William Connelly puts it, we ought to pay attention to Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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multimedia techniques at work in organizing perceptual experience, consolidating habits, composing ethical dispositions, and spurring new thoughts into being. And technique provides a medium through which culture and brains infuse one another. Like certain films that challenge linear conceptions of time, they encourage us to address the ethical and political implications of adopting a non-linear conception.

And, I hasten to add, this has implications to speak of the synthetic work of curation as a non-linear interface we inhabit with other interentangled forms of life ranging from images to bodies, from national cultures to postnationalist conceptualizations of life, from students listening in the classroom to the spectator assaulted by multimodal sensorial information during a lecture–performance in an auditorium or public space. We ought to return, time and again, to these questions of curation as a technique and cultivation of a non-linear mode of life, as a key question of our contemporary emplacements, enabling, when practiced carefully, humorously, and playfully, a form of living life at once pedagogical, ethical, and aesthetic, one beyond the twin forms of nationalism and cosmopolitanism we are trapped in as researchers. It is the reason why this experiment is much more than a mere Promethean story of anthropologists stealing the sacred fire from curatorial gods. Accentuation The futures of this assemblage work are, perhaps, not unlike the frightening cinematic form of life caught in a scientific experiment between past and future in Chris Marker’s La Jetée, or perhaps like the trance-like search for “the missing film fragment” in Raúl Ruiz’s Le Film à Venir. They have their own mortality, as assemblages do not last forever, lest they ossify and become fixtures of the interpellative dispositif they seek to deterritorialize in the first place. In light of this, the futures of a media anthropology which took post-Mexican assemblages as its object of inquiry ultimately unleashes an impersonal force that enacts a death and rebirth to come. In my view, this impersonal force is the very nature of what we continue to call today, joyfully, an experiment. This experimental mode has only one rule: to be animated by a recherché inquiete beyond the logic of identity3 and to practice a “passive vitalism”4 that deploys techne in order carefully to disorganize the organicist and humanist vocation of ethnos. Yet, the experimental work extracted from post-Mexican assemblages is more than a mere harbinger of another turn that could be called the curatorial turn in the social sciences, the humanities, and media anthropology. The very semantics of turns, as generative of the new, is, indeed, very problematical. We might perhaps want to consider instead thinking about the notion of “turning”: turning one’s back, turning Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



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away, turning toward, or just turning without a sense of direction.5 Turning rigorously without direction would be an appropriate research mode that incorporates the task of curation as a companion practice to ethnography, as we once deployed the cinematic metaphor of montage (Marcus, 1994). Curatorial work, and montage before it, is a form of assemblage-work in which ethnography modestly shares the floor with other technologies of intervention, listening, and observation. One could already tease out the inter-medial futures of anthropology in Borges’s wonderful and poetic short story The Ethnographer. Staged between a classic fieldwork experience and the medial horizon of a librarian, the tale’s protagonist holds a secret we are still wrestling with. An inter-medial form of life, Borges’s ethnographer’s secret carries with it the future of intense encounters. If these are not curated, cared for and hosted properly, they will remain ill and sick. The secret speaks not only of the obvious mutation of the subjectivity of the ethnographer, the details of which we are not informed about. Borges’s secret and its silence are tributes to the impersonal nature of our experiment and the affective economy of arrivals and departures that gives it its fleeting character and radical processual orientation. En la ciudad, sintió la nostalgia de aquellas tardes iniciales de la pradera en que había sentido, hace tiempo, la nostalgia de la ciudad. Se encaminó al despacho del profesor y le dijo que sabía el secreto y que había resuelto no publicarlo. -- ¿Lo ata su juramento? -- preguntó el otro. -- No es ésa mi razón -- dijo Murdock --. En esas lejanías aprendí algo que no puedo decir. -- ¿Acaso el idioma inglés es insuficiente? -- observaría el otro. -- Nada de eso, señor. Ahora que poseo el secreto, podría enunciarlo de cien modos distintos y aun contradictorios. No sé muy bien cómo decirle que el secreto es precioso y que ahora la ciencia, nuestra ciencia, me parece una mera frivolidad. Agregó al cabo de una pausa: -- El secreto, por lo demás, no vale lo que valen los caminos que me condujeron a él. Esos caminos hay que andarlos.6

The pathways of assemblage-work do not lead back to a passive nihilism, nor do they scorn the traditions that have produced “traveling anthropologists” or anthropologies that insist on their “accents.” If assemblage-work is nihilist, as Eduardo Abaroa’s installation The Total Destruction of the National Museum of Anthropology explored in Chapter 1 seems to be, it is only in this very specific sense: “nihilism is not lack, but, indeed, the extreme provision of intelligibility, values, gods, and so on. Yet what it provides is only nothing after all.”7 Borges’s secret is that nothing after all one realizes after the provision of things Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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brought about by assemblage-work begins to evaporate. For this reason, the secret, indeed, the potential Stiegler spoke of, is squandered by “anthropologies with an accent”8 insofar as these seem to understand “beginnings” as a radical, moral departure from the aesthetics and ethics of travel found in Calvino’s Marco Polo or from Lévi-Strauss’s dépaysement. The post-Mexican assemblage-work engages geographies beyond mere desire to provincialize what some continue to call anthropologists of “a Euro-American style.” After Mexico City, such postcolonial frames sound rather like verdicts. The immense welcome, and then respectful farewell, to Eisenstein, the traveler and foreigner, help tone down these pronouncements. Furthermore, the insistence on the accent would lead us to a secretless anthropology. Assemblagework, instead, helps me turn my head in other directions, and look for more welcoming articulations of arrivals and departure scenes: scenes that are neither cosmopolitan nor national in their reach. In a productive moment of distraction even Caldeira nicely observes, albeit with a residual resentment: “Marco Polo’s position, however, is not accessible to all. It requires an empire of cities to be described, an emperor eager to know about them, and a nostalgic describer interested in the image of his or her city intact.”9 Steering clear of the nostalgia of not only Marco Polo but also of the one that looms large over the fatalistically and ontologically framed form of relation Caldeira identifies with “post-colonial” and “national” ethnographers, I persevere in other directions. As a form of endurance, installation becomes a calling. Bondage to one’s city and national culture should remind us how nationalist cosmopolitan anthropologies with an accent can be reductive. My ethnography in Mexico City – and the assemblage-work that came out of it – would teach me that the secret of our arrivals and departures ought to continue to be the pedagogical and ethical substance of generations of ethnographers to come. Secretless inquiries are harmful and moralist forms of curation that overlook the violence at work in the link between political community and media. They are also nocive because they reduce and naturalize the act of writing, thinking, assembling, montaging – and in the end living – to the blackmail of “constraint versus choice.” Furthermore, the last is often used as a stiff civilizational grid and screen on which negative affects and sad passions are projected. The work of the incurable is generous and opens to unexpected encounters with affinities that exceed the stifling political technology smuggled through the dialectic of constraint and choice, radical alterity, and one’s home. Rather, anthropology – and especially inter-medial anthropology animated by curatorial work – is a de facto accentuation of the powers and potentials of one of the most experimental regions of “anthropos.” Anthropologists, like most creatures, are exiled species by nature. They treat their exile through adjacency and intrusion: an adjacent form of intrusion. They learn from their interlocuNot for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



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tor’s assemblage-work. They are above all, welcomed by other adjacent intruders who share with them secrets never to be revealed. The incurable-images created through post-Mexican assemblage-work are such secrets. They point to another anthropology in which the cultural is only a province of life, and the pathos of which steers clear from both colonial guilt and alleged south–south postcolonial and nationalist camaraderie. Lucien Taylor had already astutely hinted at these futures when he posited two ways in which to proceed: we are either moving towards a “post-cultural anthropology” or a “post-anthropological culture.” Post-Mexican assemblage-work is a reminder that we are fortunately moving towards the former: a non-anthropocentric, postcultural anthropology that is neither humanist nor culturalist, an assemblage-work that generate “future tenses” (Tejada, 2009) and other forms of curation; a curatorial work that releases untimely futures. This post-Mexican assemblage-work has undoubtedly been enabled by an ethnography understood as a medium harboring cultural translations and a mode of attention towards what people do, say, think, show, and/or don’t do, say, think, and show. It is always hinged on “an after the fact” that nonetheless remains faithful to its immanent ontology. It meditates on its intimate relationships with the series of enriching encounters and limit ­experiences – intoxications and cures – administered with prudence and at times with recklessness while residing and researching these fascinating curatorial laboratories and experimental media arts in Mexico City. I cannot think of a better way to connect ethnography and assemblage-work than to insist on the inter-mediality of our endeavors and those of our interlocutors. I learned this, in particular, when I had the immense chance to conduct, during the initial months of residence, straightforward film archival research at the Filmoteca de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and the Cineteca Nacional. There, and then, I viewed some gems of the history of Mexican experimental and avant-garde cinema and media arts. The experience of viewing these films through the medium-specific practice we call ethnography, in the intimate screening room at San Ildefonso near the Centro Histórico, has had an enduring impact on my way of looking at (Mexican) visual cultures and the tradition of experimentation with moving images and media. It initiated a reflection on the categories of the historical avant-garde and neo-avant-garde in Latin America and elsewhere. Behind the fascination for this tradition lurked a trenchant re-evaluation of the philosophical and anthropological underpinnings of revolutionary and cosmopolitan modernism. Out of this ethnography and film archival research emerged the inevitable: a farewell, reluctant at first, to an avant-gardist pathos and aesthetics. Not unlike the meditative and so-called organic effect Mexico had on the constructivist Eisenstein, this book’s assemblage-work signaled a shift to a Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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meditative and less interventionist mode of studying images and experimental media. We have seen in Chapter 4 how the rapport between the specific task of ethnography, assemblage-work, and the broader goal of an anthropology of images are expressed in Olivier Debroise’s and Jesse Lerner’s “film-work” that “sings the swan song” to that great experiment of the Mexican and international historical avant-garde: Eisenstein’s nationalist, cosmopolitan and unfinished masterpiece ¡Que Viva Mexico! (1931–2). Soy Mexico, the program I had curated in the footsteps of Lerner and Debroise, also explored these questions against the background of the technological imaginary and ethnographic–avant-garde experiments of postrevolutionary Mexico from the 1920s onward. Ethnography and the anthropology of images rarely reach or, as a matter of fact, converge, climaxes of excitement and intoxication. It reaches a zenith of pleasure when seductive moving images, as those born in the wake of Eisenstein’s Mestizo-futurist ode to Mexico, are handled. These are handled in the way we handle nitroglycerine. It is the volatile nature of incurable-images. If one endures their volatility, these images eventually, though unpredictably, will release untimely futures. Far from being the kairotic stage on which an alleged affinity between the infancy of ethnos and the spirit of the avant-garde is rehearsed, post-Mexican untimeliness is not a relocated future’s past.10 It is the calling of an ethnographically based assemblage-work to extract and reappropriate – indeed, to steal – this untimely. It intoxicates itself with its virulence. Its pact with the contemporary resides in this act of theft. Its gifts (ideas, concepts, images) are then put back into world circulation by a robbery of constantly changing hands. We are all fleeced in the end but for a good cause. Modernist in spirit (at least in the beginning), assemblage-work blurs the distinction between copy and original, burns itself with the intense alchemy at work in the processes of intellectual exchange and experience of experimental media. The outcome of the encounters, their secret, exists in volatile zones of conceptual and affective turbulence – the Achilles heels of the melancholic post-Mexican condition – with interlocutors who handle dangerous categories and forms of life. After being exposed to these dangerous forms, from the tumors of the curatorial group, Teratoma, to the antidote concocted in Gámez’s experimental film, La Fórmula Secreta, one begins to realize that these non-organicist forms of life are endogenous to the bodies we chart, navigate and attempt to transform, including our own. I could think of no other word than “incurable” to characterize the passages opened by these forms of contagion. Incurable-Images nonetheless, and eventually, have to go through a cooling-down effect that enables this heated platform of concepts, sensations, and conversations slowly to give rise to the untimely and convert into a healthier mode of research attention, desire, pleasure, and Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



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curiosity. This mode of experimentation will not be repeated, needless to say, at least in the same form. Deleuze’s “critical and clinical” lesson is loud and clear: “Il faut boire sans produire un alcolique, utiliser la schizophrénie sans produire un schizophrene.” Each experiment is haunted by a harmful limit. This book and the post-Mexican lives that accompany it are no exception. Indeed, curiosity is not a pure gem, just as a gift is seldom free. Pure wonder and fascination for the past – or a presentist and humorless political concern and an activist sense of duty before the moral weight of disastrous current events – are affects and ethical substances we ought to look at with some suspicion when lacking the ethical support of perplexity. The value of perplexity resides perhaps in evaluating the productive dimension of power and the incitements it enacts – revolutionary movements, new and old, community struggles, minority struggles, anti-imperial sentiments, nationalisms, new and old, an emerging global affectivity. This ought also to teach us how to temper enthusiastic endorsements of identitarian impasses brought by ethno-futuristic inclinations smuggled into contemporary life. The future ceases to be as such when inflected by the question of the organism and the material culture of a people. Overwhelmed by elite and popular expressions, the future is never given a chance. Words, such as “material” or “index”, become the moral ground for images impatiently celebrated by responsible elites and the people on whose behalf they wish to curate and speak. As Elizabeth Grosz explains: Materialism is an ontology, one that is often set up in opposition to the ontology of idealism. I would not call myself a materialist at all because of how strongly this opposition has figured in the history of Western thought in framing what materialism is, whether it is understood in terms of atomism, of physicalism, or in terms of dialectics. I am interested in an understanding of the real or the universe that does not reduce what is there to matter, but is capable of conceptualizing the nuances and layers of ideality that matter carries within itself. For me, this ontology is a politics (and an ethics) to the extent that this is the open ground on which we exist and forms the horizon of possibility for all our actions. It does not give us a politics (or an ethics) in itself, but it does orient us toward political and ethical action.11

Echoing Roberto Tejada’s meditation on the legacy of Mexico’s “image environment”, assemblage-work also opens a pathway “in the intervals and pauses afforded by scrutiny [where] the aim is not to deny the fact of historical inheritances but to point, perhaps optimistically, to present uses and future tenses in which that weight can be transvaluated.” (p. 8) There is, indeed, no point in flogging a dead horse: today, nationalism’s alleged doubles, cosmopolitanism and its ethno-politan avatars, are no longer useful conceptual points of departure. Of course, from the perspective of historiography, “another Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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revolution” was, indeed, brewing alongside the official culturalisms of the Mexican elite as well as affirming our secret desires to provincialize these “nationalist obsessions in favor of a cosmopolitan avant-gardism.” (p. 2) These wishes are key to denationalizing media scholarship. The 1920s futurist Estridendistas, explored today in the work of media artists Jesse Lerner or Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, didn’t mince their words. In an idiom reminiscent of the very clinical etymology of the word “curation” one can, in fact, still hear the screams and pronouncements from a 1928 manifesto signed by the poet Manuel Maples Arce: In the name of the contemporary avant-garde, and in genuine horror at the signs plastered on the doors of chemists and dispensaries subsidized by state law, I affirm my position at the explosive apex of my unique modernity, [and] I categorically demand Death to Hidalgo, down with San Rafael and San Lazaro . . .

As we have already seen, this anxiety over a future cured from the spell of founding father figures would later constitute one of the stickiest of iterative assemblages – the incurable – of both Mexicanism and the post-Mexican condition. In the polemical and irreverent manifesto “De Eso que Llaman Antropología Mexicana,” written in 1968 by Los Magnificos, The Magnificent Seven, a group of INAH (National Institute of Anthropology and History) avant-garde anthropologists disenchanted by decades of official indigenismo, another post-nationalist future was being forged, no less explosive yet already a notch more moralist and activist than that of its Estridentistas predecessors: Today we can contrast the reality of Mexican society with the ideals of the revolution and establish the distance between the two . . . It would be difficult to doubt that these days we can no longer do justice to the future by maintaining the same programs that were revolutionary sixty years ago. Those programs have either run their course or else they have been shown to be ineffective, useless, or worse yet, they produced historically negative results. (my emphasis)

On the contemporary post-Mexican stage, specifically, the old ethno-­ futurisms of cultural hybridity and mestizaje have long lost their synthetic potential. Indeed, we are witnessing a salutary mutation of the very collective in potentia of the nationalist and cosmopolitan vocation of avant-garde experimental media arts. On this post-Mexican stage one can still hear the receding echo of a singular mode of life that was not given a chance for a viable future: one that clamors its solidarity with those who persevere in a geopolitical world where the interval between nationalisms – the inter- of internationalism – has both morphed into strategic ethno- politanisms (from Afropolitanism to Chicano futurisms) and become rarefied in damaging Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



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forms. Today, two concepts strike me as having created an outside to the incurable-images of the post-Mexican condition. Beyond mourning and melancholia, two works display elective affinities with the futuristic ethos and pathos of post-Mexican assemblage-work. The first is the concept of echo, and the second that of ring. The first is extracted from the video work of artist, anthropologist, and border scholar, Fiamma Montezemolo. The second from the enigmatic “anthropological” installations of Mexico City-based visual artist Erick Meyenberg. Both artists produce images and objects worthy of the event at hand: a profound refiguration of the historical encounter between the figures of the anthropologist and the artist in and beyond Mexico. Echo As in her previous work,12 Montezemolo’s video Echo (2014)13 is set in Tijuana and creates another borderline assemblage that trouble the future of the dialogue between curators, anthropologists, and artists. There, she examines the afterlife and “echoes” of works that have been part of the two decade-old public art event called InSITE. The video’s diagnostic opening sequence informs us that InSITE has an important history in the border area between Tijuana and San Diego, which began in 1992 and carried on until 2005. InSITE has been activating an extensive dialogue with the area, commissioning artistic projects of various genres and focuses in its multiple editions. The nine artists and projects chosen here have all been part of the history and the dialogue that InSITE has established in this border. This video departs from that history and that dialogue and it follows the traces of those works, of what they left or didn’t leave behind, of their reverberations. This is not the history of InSITE or its artists, but of the becoming of its ECHOES.

The piece reflects on the transdisciplinary and aspects of inter-media work on the United States–Mexico border. Echo does so by first straddling various registers of the “border” concept and the multiple forms this work has taken over the years in Montezemolo’s long conversation with InSITE and other Tijuana-based experimental curatorial and inter-medial practices. The video is “multi-attentional” (Boyer, 2007) in approach. Her work over the years has been framing the border in geopolitical terms: with a particular emphasis on the fieldwork experience between Tijuana and San Diego; in cultural and metaphorical terms: with a specific focus on the different curatorial and artistic modes of representation in, alongside, and beyond the geopolitical border; in assemblage and montage terms, as an interplay of visual and discursive strategies in order to make sense of Tijuana, a city that has been hailed by Néstor Garcia Canclini as the futurist “laboratory of post-modernity”; in aesthetic Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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and formal terms: it explores conceptual affinities at the threshold between art and anthropology; and finally, in affective terms, it explores the potentialities and the limits of the border as a complex structure of feeling in need of alternate modes of curation. In light of this borderline frame, Echo combines ethnographic research, cinéma-vérité techniques, and art forms that create an assemblage of art, cinema, and anthropology. Echo refracts Montezemolo’s experience in the region by attempting to sculpt a living portrait of the afterlife of the nine selected works realized by InSITE in Tijuana. Alongside artworks commissioned by InSITE, we also encounter sites of post-industrial decay, images of a rusty wall, an “unruly topography,” decaying surveillance structures, furtive moments of undocumented migrant crossings, urban histories, dystopian landscapes, and the lives of maquiladora women workers, patients in a psychiatric hospital, and street kids problematically recruited in some of these “socially oriented” pieces. These incurable-images of the border are interwoven with Echo’s voice-over enunciated from a different time and place. The fate of the border and InSITE’s objects and subjects is sealed: they are remains to be collected like forensic evidence by a visitor, perhaps another anthropologist and artist, perhaps another undocumented migrant or maquiladora woman, perhaps a curator, from the future. Echo rehearses some of the key questions explored in this book. It highlights the procedures of intrusion at work in such a site as the United States– Mexico border as well as the now canonical deployment of the emblematic figure of fieldwork. It teaches us that intrusion is an ontological dimension of intervention, at once anthropological, curatorial, and artistic. The concept of echo evoked in the title points to a way of framing the futures of curatorial interventions and intrusions. By revisiting the scenes of these curatorial and artistic interventions “echo” emerges both as a concept and a practice that assembles the futures of artworks beyond the usual constellations of ruins and remains. An echo, produced through the ascetic practice of adjacency, throws us into the register of complex repetitions and arrives with us as another site of production of untimeliness. An echo becomes a companion to InSITE, the public art event that curates and commissions transient affinities between the intrusive strategies of anthropology and art. Rather than a supplement within a history of forms, a constellation of “echoes” recurates InSITE’s initial intentions and crossings, imagined as a curatorial form of victory over the juridico-political border. Positively, it amplifies the resonances InSITE sought within the region. It also redirects the ontology of intrusion towards the more difficult task of long-term adjacency amid fleeting curatorial and artistic acts. But this adjacency communicates in a non-organic form of life – what else is an echo? – in non-historical clouds, in virtualities, while showing the material culture and remains, the “ruination Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



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rather than ruin” (Stoller, 2012) of artworks invited by InSITE. InSITE, the uninvited and intrusive curatorial guest in the border zone, appears itself as the laboratory turned into a ruin, ruined like the other incurable-images of the post-Mexican condition. One of the video’s side-effects is its revitalization not of the geopolitical region – as most socially oriented bienniales seek to accomplish in their usual conflation of politics, aesthetics, and ethics – but of the relationship between our three conceptual personae. Rather than intervening through public programming this time, Echo does more than return to a site to mourn the ruins and remains. Because of the nature of her long-term ethnographic work in Tijuana, Montezemolo has never really departed and, as such, was able to channel the caring practice of adjacency, as an anthropologist and artist, attuned to those echoes that have a chance for a future swollen with untimeliness. The video zooms on the sites explored in the work of nine artists. Among these is Silvia Gruner’s poetic A la Mitad del Camino (1994), an installation work composed of small pre-Columbian figurines of fertility goddesses carefully lined up along the iconic wall separating Mexico from the United States. At first hand, the leftovers placed twenty year earlier appear as ruins, hollowed-out and rusty shells that bear the mark of the initial desire for fugacity and ephemerality, an allegory for a arqueologia fronteriza/borderland archaeology. One would be tempted to say that the untimeliness captured by Montezemolo’s meditation on the remains of A la Mitad del Camino is an archaic form and arrivant that shows the enduring affinity between avantgarde and experimental culture with the archaic and anachronistic survival of forms. The latter reading would underline the distinction between symbol and allegory and, consequently, praise the video’s redemptive attempt to revitalize the efficacy of a pre-Columbian constitutive outside. This would not be incorrect at all. But the reading would depend on the historical sense and affective disposition of the beholder. Echo, as a concept, an inter-medial practice, and an image of thought would be a sign of an arm wrestle with the force of repetition and the various iterations enacted by InSITE, the now twenty-year-old curatorial platform. So, what is then the sense in following the afterlife of a collaborative effort in which artists, curators, and anthropologists intervene? Nothing: perhaps, there is no meaning in these gestures, no mutations that are brought to us by these interventions. Nothing, of course, other than the historical sense that pushes us to see A la Mitad del Camino as an echo or as a ruin. The intuitive distinction between experiencing life as a ruin and as an echo is all there is. That is the inter-medial manifestation of the future between art and anthropology. What, in fact, separates these two ways of framing InSITE’s works twenty years after the fact is simply this: our relation to the future, as a return to ruined sites for some, and as echoes that resonates with postNot for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Mexican futures, as suggested by Montezemolo’s video. Similarly, the video follows Marcos Ramirez Erre’s gigantic wooden Trojan horse initially placed at the linea, the small buffer zone that separates the United States from Mexico and now an iconic memory of Tijuana’s visual and artistic culture. A highly visible structure of the border skyline for months, Erre’s ephemeral smuggling operation was eventually de-assembled, then stolen, piece by piece, part by part, for reasons the video explores humorously. Erre’s horse continues to resonate as an echo of a mythical form of intrusion (Trojan) and smuggling of forces along the edges of a well-guarded borderland. Towards the middle part of the video Ramirez’s exquisite drawings for the installation are humorously animated, pointing to the faith of assemblages: they fall apart under the weight of the dispositif, the juridico-political border, on the one hand, but also due to the sequential temporality of art events and the salutary cult of ephemerality that underwrites them. More importantly, as both the fate of Gruner’s figurines and Erre’s horse shows, assemblages are also submitted to theft by the impersonal forces of intrusion. Stolen pieces underline the logic of intrusion immanent to artistic, anthropological, and curatorial work. It is all there in the secret messages carried out by an echo. Moreover, and more importantly perhaps, Montezemolo’s piece doesn’t seek to answer the poor and grandiose question that animates relational aesthetics and activist art practices: “Does art change things and social life?” Echo is committed to a passive vitalism and non-utilitarian vocation of not only curation and art but also of assemblage-work. While certainly a documentary and ethnographic practice, Echo is, however, not a social art practice. Its assemblage-work places the social in a decentered position that enables a view on post-Mexican life beyond the dominant social frame of activist and artivist work. Montezemolo’s query is installed in the ephemeral and in the situational of art, in the experience of the fleeting, as there is a respectful gesture towards the mode in which the border has been able to absorb and to reinvent anything that strives to be permanent. Long-term ethnography, practiced fiercely by Montezemolo, the artist and anthropologist, hits the curatorial limit of InSITE, and vice versa. It is the sense, historical and conceptual, of their collaboration. And so the questions we hear through a softly spoken, almost murmured, yet firm voice-over, establish a relationship of adjacency between assemblage (InSite), dispositif (border), and the conceptual personae (curator, anthropologist, artist) in which the social is recalibrated from unidimensional frame to component of an assemblage: how does the processuality, initiated by given artists, continue when they and their works have left? What happened to the girls who worked with Itzel Martinez del Cañizo’s camera? Will the patients of the psychiatric hospital Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



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Figure 6.1 Fiamma Montezemolo, Echo, 2014 (courtesy Fiamma Montezemolo).

Figure 6.2 Fiamma Montezemolo, Echo, diagram sequence, 2014 (courtesy Fiamma Montezemolo).

who collaborated with Javier Téllez remain inside, or will they move outside the circle of our supposed normality? Will the gardens of Thomas Glassford and Jose Parral continue to flourish? Where has Marcos Ramirez Erre’s horse galloped to? And where have Silvia Gruner’s goddesses followed their path of fertility? What are the women who collaborated with Wodiczko doing today? Where did the Symparch’s waters flow to? Will Gustavo Artigas’ ball court continue to be reinvented by more games? Does the telescope of Christina Fernandez’ [sic] sailor continue indicating migratory paths? Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Rather than a Maussian “total social fact,” a work like Echo ought to be approached as a total assemblage fact. An echo is to an assemblage what a voice is to a subject. While the latter speaks, the former resonates. Rings The future tense of incurable-images can also be teased out from the various iterations of conceptual artist Erick Meyenberg’s “anthropological” installations: Regreso al Presente, Études Taxonomiques du Mexique Colonial et Contemporain, and Forjando Patria. Meyenberg’s immersive, data-driven installations create an uncanny spectacle of suspended polychromatic LED rings, asymmetrically arranged in space and carefully programmed to syntheticize the racial topologies gathered from both research on colonial and postrevolutionary nationalist racial topologies and the study of contemporary mappings of the ongoing Mexican Genome Project. By folding past, present, and future, by theatricalizing the incurable-images of the Mexican and post-Mexican condition, these installations invite us to conceptualize the image as a biopoliticized form of life that harbors and struggles with a futurist mode of care. Meyenberg’s symptomatology also enables a renewed encounter between the conceptual personae composing this book’s assemblage – curator, anthropologist, artist. Within this assemblage, Meyenberg’s images seem to whisper to us another orientation and set of demands, ones for which the stakes seem to be nothing less than the health of the future. At once ethical and clinical, Meyenberg’s incurable-images release untimely futures in which technology emerges as an ethics of immanence and as a new weapon that enables “us” to endure, work through, and take pleasure amid the post-Mexican condition and our societies of curation. When, in an interview, Meyenberg hints at “la incansable repetición de la historia” and notes that “creo que mirar atrás nos permite no sólo comprender el presente, sino también proyectar una respuesta hacia el futuro,” he sets in motion two curatorial operations.14 On the one hand, a relation between repetition and representation; on the other, a distinction between two forms of repetition. We must distinguish between these discrete elements, these repeated objects, and a secret subject, the real subject of repetition, which repeats itself through them. Repetition must be understood in the pronominal: we must find the Self of repetition, the singularity within that which repeats. (Deleuze, cited in Hughes, 2011, pp. 27–8)

The name “Meyenberg” itself is not immune to its authorization as it, too, is an aggregate that, in its repetition, founds the representation/exhibition/ display/objects/images generated for each of these iterations. Étude taxonomNot for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



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ique et comparative entre les castes de la Nouvelle Espagne et celles du Mexique contemporain, as the installation’s title suggests, is an assemblage that cuts through the anthropological, artistic, and racialized ideologies inherited from the colonial and postrevolutionary eras. Neither a social art practice, which takes people as its medium, nor the work of an artist as ethnographer intervening in a community, Meyenberg’s work is a data-driven form of conceptual art. Through this form of intervention into the actual it brings turbulence to the socially oriented avant-garde and humanist projects of historical mestizaje and its attendant mestizo subject, the enlightened “new man” of postrevolutionary Mexico. In these installations, “light is shed on the alignments and discordances between socio-historical and biomolecular mappings, between medical/ population genomics and national identity, between two incommensurable, yet intertwined, temporal and identitarian frameworks” (Martin, 2010). By accentuating the grey zone between these frameworks, these installations make us encounter the contemporariness of the post-Mexican assemblage, its effervescence. The non-anthropomorphic dimension of the rings has a powerful and salutary effect: “identification is not presented as having any deep meaning.”15 The rings can therefore first be perceived as a tremor accompanying the production of an unconscious that breaks the racial dialectic of Mexicanism and the continued affective force, today, of this ideological framework on the national psyche. Curator and critic José Luis Barrios has captured some of these unconscious waves through his recent dystopian curatorial platform and exhibit called, appropriately, Sueños de una Nación (2011). Meyenberg’s suspended LED rings would then perhaps capture this effervescence, real but not yet actual. The ring becomes a concept of the future, of its untimeliness. Meyenberg’s “data-driven aesthetics” (Hansen, 2013) and use of LEDs are singular in many ways and produce slightly different curatorial effects, iteration after iteration of the installation. Études, for instance, gives us differential clues, and invoke a complex mode of repetition across both the curatorial setup afforded not only by the specificities of the exhibition space (Laboratorio Alameda, House of World Cultures, Bayer plant, Barcelona) but also the curatorial tensions between history and becoming generated by the incurable-image of mestizaje itself. This is another mode in which the future tense discloses its symptomatology of the incurable-image: as a form of life always swollen with untimely futures which struggle, passively or actively, with historicist and culturalist interpretations and phenomenologies. This symptomatology of the incurable-image is hinged on a complex logic of ­curatorial difference and repetition that remediates the ethico-political stakes each curatorial iteration replays. The task of curation, indeed the mode of care Meyenberg’s work requires, becomes one of making us sense the imbrications of the incurable-image as always already an intempestivo16 mode of Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Figure 6.3 Eric Meyenberg, Études Taxonomiques du Mexique Colonial et Contemporain (courtesy Eric Meyenberg).

Figure 6.4 Eric Meyenberg, Études Taxonomiques du Mexique Colonial et Contemporain (courtesy Eric Meyenberg).

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repetition. In retrospect, it has been useful to look at varied curatorial statements, descriptions, catalog and online images, and exhibitions, to tease out a “deeper form of repetition which does not correspond all that well with our ordinary use of the word repetition” (Hughes, 2011, 26). This deeper form of repetition is obliquely and adjacently encountered in the iterative assemblage and curatorial logic of sense at work in Erick Meyenberg’s rings.17 While all of this dispositif, understood as assemblage, underscores the complex relation between data, LED, and a form of luminous synthesis haunted by the generic – RGBs (red, green, blue) programmed at the same frequency produce pitch dark or total white – each triggers a different relation between history and becoming. The one that is particularly striking is the Laboratorio Arte Alameda iteration (see figures in this chapter and book cover). The combination of ‘laboratorio’ and baroque architecture amplifies the tension and pressure of the non-historical cloud that elegantly inundates the space with monochromatic variations and unpredictability. Rather than a past which flashes up in a moment of danger, the suspended LED rings generate another affective constellation that gives a glimpse of the fog which stands between two versions of the Mexican Genome Project that Meyenberg’s piece remediates and reconfigures. What could be called Meyenberg’s Trilogy of Post-Mexican bios (Forjando Patria, Études, Regresando Al Presente) requires us to ask what form of life is brewing in the contemporariness of these untimely futures? Are these pieces a form of biopolitical resistance amid a new vitalist regime that exceeds the particular clinical case of Mexico? Do Meyenberg’s pieces offer us a way to both diagnose and treat the incurable-images of our societies of control and accentuated states of curation? How are these connected with Teratoma’s and Curare’s curatorial conceptualization hinged on oncological epistemology and the tropes of the pharmakon and auto-immunization explored in Chapter 2? Do these rings extend the tradition of Bergsonian vitalism and its well-acknowledged impact on Mexican postrevolutionary intellectual life, racial ideology, and hence visual culture? We, indeed, know how much “Bergson was instrumental in overturning the positivist ideology that prefigured Mexico’s modern state” (Tejada, 2009), its biopolitics, and its nationalist thanato-totems. In light of the context in which his anthropological installations are situated – the Mexican Genome Project – Meyenberg’s LED polychromatic rings are perhaps the cosmic progenies and neo-hybrid avatars of José Vasconcelos’s Bergson-inspired and ­ethno-futuristic doctrine of the Raza Cosmica? Meyenberg rings are signs of life in a quest to seek a line of flight between the “homogenizing discourse of mestizaje and post-colonial biopolitics”18 and new vitalist futures that would secede from Vasconcelan cultural hybridism, racialized vitalism, and ethno-futurism. Moreover, these illuminated rings should not be confused Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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with recent panegyrical calls for an “affirmative bio-politics” or the case of another bio-aesthetics. In a recent conversation on bio-art and biopolitics, Cary Wolfe provocatively notes: What everyone is after, it seems, is what Esposito in Bios calls an ‘affirmative’ biopolitics. Where people tend to get carried away is in embracing a bit too unproblematically the assertion in Foucault, and especially in the late Deleuze’s reading of Foucault and the “follow ups,” as it were, in the texts on “control society,” that “resistance is on the side of life.” [that is, not the incurable, my emphasis] Here, one can only say, I think, that resistance may be on the side of life, for reasons having to do with what Foucault calls the “aleatory” body and what Esposito calls “flesh.” But the actual political effect or amplitude of a particular act of biopolitical resistance depends as much or more on the dynamic state of the social system in question as it does on the act itself. What will perturb it and how? How will it react and why? No doubt bioart and the deployment of “life” in it can serve as a site of resistance to the manipulation, canalization, commodification, and so on of “life” under biopolitics, but that will itself depend on all sorts of other factors that do not find their origin or cause in anything called “life.” So this is a different way of taking our distance from the assumption that the biopolitical is always thanato-political.

In their infinite ecstatic beauty, and hence the dangers of their seductive appeal, Meyenberg’s rings are debris of a struggle, not unlike those rings of Saturn fictionalized in Sebald’s epigraph to his eponymous novel. The rings of Saturn consist of ice crystals and probably meteorite particles describing circular orbits around the planet’s equator. In all likelihood these are fragments of a former moon that was too close to the planet and was destroyed by its tidal effect.

Meyenberg’s rings are the debris of a “mediated community”19 born violently out of a collision of revolutionary forces. As tactically prefigured in his installation Forjando Patria – the 1916 title of a book by Manuel Gamio – they are like a supernova from the original cosmopolitan and nationalist project of forging a motherland. The rings look undoubtedly spectacular, and spectacle20 is an undeniable inter-medial expression of assemblage-work. Yet, as we know all too well, and as astrophysicists remind us, when we take a closer look at how the universe works, we realize that Meyenberg’s rings, like the rings of Saturn, are pulled together by the very thing that will eventually pull them apart: the planet’s gravity. Suspended and immobile in the air, at times chromatically hot, sometimes cold, Meyenberg’s rings intimate a connection with the singular malaise from which Mexico suffers and that, in turn,. informs the various post-Mexican attempts to “curate” it. Not only is Foucault’s question “What is Enlightenment?” of continued relevance but the repetitions and iterations at work in Meyenberg’s “anthropological” installations form a memory in the Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.



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strict Bergsonian sense of the term. The rings are blocs of overlapping temporalities set in motion by the explosive encounter between three conceptual personae: the anthropologist, the curator, and the artist. It is a sensation from the point of view of a post-Mexican assemblage-work and a theatricalization without a figure. The rings are, perhaps, the signs of a future less and less mediated by the very conceptual personae and incurable-images animating them. Meyenberg’s motionless rings are the soul of the post-Mexican assemblage. Passive, they index both a remediated figure of anthropos released from the sublime subject of Mexicanist aesthetics and the contours of a post-social anthropology of images freed from the identificatory logic and organicism of mediated communities. Notes  1. See also Rosi Braidotti, “The Ethics of Becoming Imperceptible,” in Constantin Boundas (ed.), Deleuze and Philosophy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), pp. 133–59.  2. Manuel Gamio, “De Vidas Dolientes,” (Mexico City: Ediciones Botas, 1937).  3. See Rabinow’s account of Canguilhem’s understanding of the biological concept of milieu, in A Vital Rationalist (New York: Zone Books, 1994).  4. “Vitalism has always had two possible interpretations: that of an Idea that acts, but is not – that acts therefore only from the point of view of an external cerebral knowledge (from Kant to Claude Bernard); or that of a force that is but does not act – that is therefore a pure internal awareness (from Leibniz to Ruyer). If the second interpretation seems to us to be imperative it is because the contraction that preserves is always in a state of detachment in relation to action or even to movement and appears as a pure contemplation without knowledge” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994, p. 213), quoted in Claire Colebrook’s Deleuze and the Meaning of Life (London: Continuum, 2010), p. 5.  5. I thank Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli for this perceptive observation.  6. “In the city, he was homesick for those first evenings on the prairie when, long ago, he had been homesick for the city. He made his way to his professor’s office and told him that he knew the secret, but had resolved not to reveal it.   ‘Are you bound by your oath?’ the professor asked.   ‘That’s not the reason,’ Murdock replied. ‘I learned something out there that I can’t express.’   ‘The English language may not be able to communicate it,’ the professor suggested.   ‘That’s not it, sir. Now that I possess the secret, I could tell it in a hundred different and even contradictory ways. I don’t know how to tell you this, but the secret is beautiful, and science, our science, seems mere frivolity to me now.’   After a pause he added: ‘And anyway, the secret is not as important as the paths that led me to it. Each person has to walk those paths himself.’” Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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 7. See Conor Cunningham, Genealogy of Nihilism (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 169.  8. Teresa Caldeira, City of Walls: Crime, Segregation, and Citizenship in São Paulo (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2000).  9. Ibid., p. 7 10. Giorgio Agamben, “What is the Contemporary?,” in What is An Apparatus and Other Essays (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009); Reinhardt Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). 11. “Significant Differences: An Interview with Elizabeth Grosz,” in Interstitial Journal: www.interstitialjournal.com (March 2013), 1. 12. See Tijuana dreaming: Life and Art at the Global Border (co-edited with Josh Kun) (prefaced by Iain Chambers) (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); Here is Tijuana (co-authored with Heriberto Yepez and Rene Peralta) (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2006); for an in-depth reflection on inSITE, see her “Tijuana: Hybridity and Beyond. A Conversation with Néstor García Canclini” (December 2009, Third Text, n. 101, Routledge). 13. Echo screened in various locations, often with lively and passionate after-screening round-table discussions with scholars and curators. It was launched at the Trinity Church in Los Angeles in 2014 and presented at the Getty Institute and the MAXXI-Base in Rome in 2015. Reviews of this work are numerous, among them Sabrina Ragucci’s “L’esistenza del Futuro nella Frontera Tra Messico e USA” (Il Manifesto, June 2015), and Mike Watson, Towards a Conceptual Militancy, Zero Books, 2016. 14. When, in an interview, Meyenberg hints at the “tireless motion of historical repetitions” and notes that “I think looking back enables us to not only make sense of the present but to also project an answer into the future,” he sets in motion two curatorial operations. 15. See Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli, “Shadowed by Images,” in Representations no. 111 (2010), University of California Press, 133. 16. Nietszche’s concept of the untimely usually translates into intempestivo in Spanish. 17. Curated chronologically by Daniela Wolfe, Lucia Sanroman, Esther Nunez, and Jose Luis Barrios. 18. Ernesto Schwartz-Martin and Irma Silva-Zolevvi, “The Map of the Mexican’s Genome: overlapping national identity, and population genomics,” in IDIS (2010) 3, 489–514. 19. See Dominic Boyer, Understanding Media: A Popular Philosophy (Chicago, IL: Prickly Press Paradigm, 2007). 20. For a timely critique of Guy Debord’s suspicion towards theater and spectacle see Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator (London: Verso, 2007); Samuel Weber’s reflections on theatricality explored in the previous chapter; and Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli’s “Shadowed by Images: Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and the Art of Surveillance,” in Representations no. 111, summer 2010, University of California Press, 121–43.

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Epilogue

Anthropologists are familiar with post-fieldwork mise-en-scènes. I am in Mexico City during one of those routine visits characteristic of fieldwork follow-ups, all the while already having one foot in the next research project. Once familiar, however, the location seems now, again, uncannily foreign; yet, not quite as strange as it was prior to my two-year residency in Mexico City, the city that had both fascinated and irritated me for years. I had arrived at the Cantina Centenario with Maria Ines, an Argentine exile and Foucault scholar from whom I had learned a great deal, in particular that research should be “algo placentero,” indeed, fieldwork as a use of pleasure. Later on in that afternoon, after lunch, I would go to an appointment with a curator who was one of my key interlocutors while I was conducting fieldwork, and who had become the director of an experimental art venue in Mexico City’s Centro Historico. Over lunch we shared personal stories and discussed current events. This was before the tragic massacre of Ayotzinapan and Ayala in which forty students were killed by the police and buried in mass graves.1 On that day, the news was dominated by an important announcement. Rumors were that Subcomandante Marcos, the charismatic leader of the Zapatista Liberation Front, was going to retire. A few days prior to this he had sent one of his many elaborate and intellectually driven communiqués in which he would announce his early retirement as leader of the movement. His announcement was enigmatic and, needless to say, of great significance to the anthropologist always on the lookout2 for old and new media forms. At once carefully montaged, animated, and curated, Marcos’s speech was broadcast in viral fashion, from traditional television networks to cutting-edge Internet platforms. Its message startled his large, local and global audience: The handover of command is not due to illness or death, not to an internal shift, purge or purification. Those who loved and hated Subcomandante Marcos now know that they hated and loved a hologram.3

Marcos took us all by surprise because of the insistence with which his message wished to update both the metaphorics and materiality of his Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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usual mask with the vernacular of digital media.4 Why did he choose to replace the mask with the meme and the hologram, and without removing the mask? Was he adapting, transposing, and translating the anonymity and charisma generated by the analog mask to the disembodied light projections and images of a hologram? Was he simply extending Zapatismo’s foundational techno-mediations of 1994 to the demands of the post-Mexican condition; or/and had he merely, in a moment of distraction, fallen into the trap of digital utopianism? Was he upgrading – as one upgrades a computer or a storage device – the montage of the mask, the face, and communiqué by carefully animating and curating a new conceptual persona for the age of a digital culture less and less mediated by Mexicanist aesthetics? We had no ready answer. The presence and warmth of friends connected the conviviality of philia with the techno-mediated ghostliness of a hologramic Marcos, and ultimately with a fieldwork that no longer was what it used to be. What will remain of Mexico is an assemblage of friends, incurableimages, a hologram, and the task of curating anthropos: an ars curatoria in search of an anthropology to come. Notes 1. The tragic events of 2014 beg for a contemporary anthropology of images but one beyond historicist returns to both the colonial and revolutionary moments. As Lomniz notes: “There is a mistaken tendency to attribute Mexican corruption to practices going back to the Spanish conquest. There is a deep history behind Mexico’s current horrors of crime and impunity that only Mexicans can deal with, but U.S. drug and gun policies are also responsible.” See his “Three Causes Behind Mexico’s Crisis of Corruption and Impunity.” See also the pioneering work of the 1990s contemporary art collective SEMEFO, named after the Mexican Forensic Services (Servicio Médico Forense), as well as Teresa Margoles’s videos and installations. 2. Dominic Boyer calls for a “multi-attentional approach” to understanding media, an approach that enables the anthropologist to hold, simultaneously, various “foci of attention: formal, medial, and poetic.” 3. Marcos’s speech, titled “Entre La Luz y La Sombra,” can be heard, viewed, and read at: http://radiozapatista.org/?p=9766 Of particular intermedial significance is section IV of the speech titled “Un holograma cambiante y a modo. Lo que no sera. / A changing and moldable hologram. That which will not be.” Holograms index, perhaps, an inscriptive logics that places the vernacular of new media and digital culture in close proximity with the “cultural politics” that mobilize people on various scales, from the national to the regional to the planetary. Marcos, the persona, has always relied on an indigenous / Mexicanist revolutionary iconogra-

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phy, from Che Guevara to Emiliano Zapata. Moreover, his reference to illness or death connects the inorganic registers of curation to the seemingly disembodied status of holograms. 4. See Gabriella Coleman, p. 492.

EDL\JBURGH University Press ,;

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Index

Note: bold denotes illustrations A La Mitad del Camino (Gruner), 173 Abaroa, Eduardo, 6, 10, 13, 35, 40–4, 40, 44, 45, 59, 64, 86, 160, 161, 162, 163, 165 adjacency, 34, 36–7, 42, 86, 88–9, 166–7, 172, 173, 174, 176 aesthetics, 8, 27, 65 “aesthetic relief,” 125 avant-garde aesthetics, 120, 121 “data-driven aesthetics,” 177, 179 dialogical aesthetics, 78 digital techno-aesthetics, 28 of the historical avant-garde, 103, 104, 107, 108, 114–15, 118 Mexicanist aesthetics, 3, 8, 181, 184 nationalist aesthetics, 38, 111, 112, 120, 121 relational aesthetics, 48 affinity, 27–30, 30–1, 160, 162, 166 Agamben, Giorgio, 32, 64–5 “age of discrepancy, the,” 47 agents, 68–72 alterity see radical alterity “Anatomy of envy, The: a study in symbolic behavior” (Foster), 31 Anatomy of the Mexican, The (Bartra), 82–3 animation, 22 anthropologists, 8, 9, 11, 19n27, 25, 40, 44, 78–9, 89, 90, 111, 115, 162, 174, 176, 181 anthropology, 7, 11, 24, 27, 34, 37 anthrointruder, 94–6 anthropological intervention, 25–6 “anthropological turn,” 1, 7, 11, 77 anthropology–avant-garde–nationalism assemblage, 121 anthropology of emotions, 28 archives, 159–60 distinction between anthropology and sociology of art, 68 of images, 7, 72, 168, 181 lack of curiosity about other traditions, 98–9 media anthropology, 2, 7, 10, 21–2, 106–7, 164 post-cultural anthropology, 167 rapport with contemporary art, 28–9, 30, 83 real of anthropology, 162–3

research projects outside home countries, 90–3 sensorial turn, 28 as a use of pleasure, 93–6 anthropos, 7, 17n22, 21, 23, 43, 45, 82, 166 apparatuses, 64–5 Arce, Manuel Maples, 170 archives, 46, 47, 80, 160 Arguedas, José María, 161 art, 68–9, 78, 83, 118 ethnographic turn in contemporary art, 7, 10, 21, 23, 24, 26–7, 36, 114, 161, 162 friction with social sciences, 161–4 as a transformative event, 151–2 Artaud’s Cave, 11 “Artist-As-Ethnographer, The” (Foster), 24, 27 artists, 8, 9, 11, 19n27, 25, 40, 44, 78–9, 89, 90, 111, 115, 174, 176, 181 assemblages, 3, 5, 7, 8, 24, 50–1n2 anthropology–avant-garde–nationalism assemblage, 121 arrivals and departures, 163, 165, 166 art-cinema-anthropology, 25, 77 assemblage-work, 3, 11, 34, 36–7, 44, 64, 78, 99, 115, 168–9; see also Rabinow, Paul collaborative assemblages, 46–50 logic of, 69–70 post-Mexican assemblages, 37–45, 63, 72, 106, 164, 166, 167, 171 Atl, Dr, 13 avant-garde, 3–4, 6, 9, 13, 16n12, 114, 170 aesthetics, 120, 121 anthropology–avant-garde–nationalism assemblage, 121 historical avant-garde, 4, 8, 9, 25, 48, 76–7, 103–4, 105–6, 107, 114, 115–16, 167–8 Mexperimental: 60 Years of Avant-Garde Media Arts from Mexico, 6, 13, 105–10, 109 post-avant-garde ethos, 38 axolotl, 81–2, 84, 85, 97–8 Banquet in Tetlapayac, A, 115 “bare life” notion, 32 Barrios, José Luis, 69, 177

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194

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Bartra, Roger, 3, 4–5, 6, 10, 13, 25, 38, 41, 59, 61, 76–102, 107, 160, 161, 162, 163 axolotl in Bartra’s critique, 81–2, 84, 85, 97–8 curatorial projects, 81 as an escaped intellectual, 97–8 fugue, 96–100 intervention in Mexican anthropological thought, 77, 79–80 melancholia, 82–6, 87, 89–90 myth, history of, 85–6 peep show, 76, 80, 81, 86–93 pleasure, 93–6 style of, 80–1 Batalla, Guillermo Bonfil, 90 Bateson, Gregory, 92 Becker, Lutz, 118 Bergson, Henri-Louis, 179–80, 181 biennales, 38, 70, 130, 134, 150, 151, 156–7n12, 173 Bing, Gertrud, 59–60 bio-art, 180 biopolitics, 64, 179, 180 biosociality, 83–4 Bishop, Claire, 19n28, 100n6 Boas, Franz, 33, 76, 90, 161 Borges, Jorge Luis, 165–6 Boyer, Dominic, 106, 171, 184n2 Brenner, Anita, 94–5 Buñuel, Luis, 108 BwO, 61 Cadena, Marisol de la, 53n15 Cage of Melancholy, The: Identity and Metamorphosis of the Mexican (Bartra), 6, 38, 41, 76, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86–7, 88, 91, 97–8, 99, 161 Caldeira, Teresa, 166 Canal, Maria Inés, 11 Canclini, Néstor Garcia, 83, 171–2 care, 8, 11, 12, 14, 23, 37, 44, 62, 63, 176, 179 of the self, 131, 135 Castel, Robert, 133 chaos, 60, 72–3, 91 Cheah, Pheng, 71 Clastres, Pierre, 92 Clifford, James, 107 clinical, 7, 9, 12, 56, 59, 69–70, 89, 131 clinical concept of curation, 72 clinical-specific pedagogical intervention, 132 examination of Mexican culture, 83–4 relationship with critical, 62–3, 128–9, 169 Colebrook, Claire, 44 collaboration, 14, 28–9 collages, 115 colonialism, 30 concept-work, 10, 12 concepts, 8, 25, 34, 36, 40 zones of turbulence, 26–7

conceptual personae (curator, anthropologist, artist), 8, 9, 11, 19n27, 25, 40, 44, 78–9, 89, 90, 111, 115, 162, 174, 176, 181 Connelly, William, 163–4 Conservatory of Dead Languages, The (Helguera), 47–8 contemporary, the, 3, 4–5, 7, 34, 87, 168 contemporary anthropology see anthropology contemporary art see art contem(pt)orary condition, 3, 4, 38; see also Medina, C. control and curation, 14, 128, 133–6 societies of control, 7–8, 9, 63–4, 128, 131, 132, 133, 134, 143–4, 152, 179 conversation, 78–9 Cordero, Karen, 69 Cortázar, Julio, 81 cosmopolitanism, 3, 14, 30, 33, 96–7, 169–70 cosmopolitan modernism, 48, 115, 117 cosmopolitan nationalism, 67 post-cosmopolitan, 38, 67–8, 80, 83, 129 cosmopolitics, 10, 28 counter-actualization, 4, 19n27 counterpoint, 14, 97–8, 112, 114 Covarrubias, Miguel, 90, 117 Crary, Jonathan, 28, 52n14 crisis, 2, 125 and critique, 126–8 critique, 126–8 Critique and Crisis (Koselleck), 62 “Critique of the Pyramid, A” (Paz), 41 culturalism, 33, 42, 48, 169–70 culture concept, 23, 33 Curare, 12–13, 38, 62–8, 69–71, 129, 179 “Curation and Critique” (Toscano), 14, 125–6, 127–8, 128–9, 130–1, 132 curatorial work adjacency, 34, 36–7, 42 affinity, 27–30, 30–1 collaborative assemblages, 46–50 curation, 22–4, 60: as assemblage-work, 64; beyond exhibition and site specificity, 129–32; concept of, 11; and control, 14, 128, 133–6; and the incurable, 63; and pedagogy, 128–9, 131; post-social state of curation, 8–9, 12; process of, 44–5; states of, 1–20; as a technique, 164 curatorial designs, 111 curatorial malaise, 4, 11–12, 43–4, 62, 128 curatorial turn, 164–5 curatorial untimeliness, 69 damages, 32–4 envy, 30–2, 33 montage and animation, 21–2 post-ethnographic intrusions, 24–7 curators, 8, 9, 23, 114 conceptual personae, 8, 9, 11, 19n27, 25, 40, 44, 78–9, 89, 90, 111, 115, 174, 176, 181

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Index as ethnographer, 24, 36 as public intellectuals, 132

Dada, 43, 115 Darwin, Charles, 96 Day of the Dead, 103, 105 “De Eso que Llaman Antropología Mexicana” (Los Magnificos), 170 Debroise, Olivier, 14, 69, 103, 104, 111, 114, 115, 116–22, 162, 168 debt, 7–8 decolonization, 29, 71 Deleuze, Gilles, 7, 26, 36, 37, 68, 72, 73, 85, 121, 125, 128, 133, 143–4, 144–5, 169, 180 delirium, 143–5 Derrida, Jacques, 66 Designs on the Contemporary: Anthropological Tests (Rabinow and Stavrianakis), 16n14, 17n18 desire, 31, 147–50 Destrucción, 59 deterritorialization, 84, 90, 94, 101n10 diagram, 175 Díaz, Porfirio, 76 Didi-Huberman. George, 11, 59–60 différance, 65 discrimination, 88 dispositif, 22, 25, 41, 42, 64–5, 117, 133, 164, 174, 179 medical dispositif, 6, 12, 56–7 Don’t Fuck with the Past, You Might Get Pregnant, 10, 49 Durkheim, Émile, 135 Echo (Montezemolo), 171–6, 175 Eisenstein, Sergei, 6, 13, 43, 81, 103, 105, 108, 110, 112, 114, 117, 118–20, 121, 166, 168 “El acto antropológico: la intervención como extrañesa” (Mier), 25–6 El Machete, 80 “¿El Malestar en la Curaduriá: Que lo-Cura?” (Schmelz), 62 El Pais, 6 El Zoro de Arriba y el Zoro de Abajo (Arguedas), 161 emergency, 125–7, 127, 156n5 emotions, 28, 31, 83, 87, 145 endurance, 5, 54n20, 63, 159, 166 Enríques, Andrés Molina, 5 envy, 30–2, 33 Enwezor, Okwui, 24, 27, 131 Erre, Marcos Ramirez, 174 escape, 97–8 Escuela de Arte Adolfo Prieto, 14 estridentismo, 9 Estridentistas, 104, 115, 170 ethics, 23, 63, 72, 159 Ethnographer, The (Borges), 165–6 ethnography, 21, 165 emblematic figure of research, 27

195

and envy, 31–2 ethnographic turn in contemporary art, 7, 10, 21, 23, 24, 26–7, 36, 37, 114, 161, 162 experimental ethnography, 1, 2, 27, 29, 162 as a medium harboring cultural translations, 167 sensory ethnography, 23, 28, 29 ethnos, 7, 21, 23, 33, 98, 164, 168 “Etnografia” (Siqueiros), 24–5 Études Taxonomiques du Mexique Colonial et Contemporain (Meyenberg), 176, 177, 178 exchange, 7–8 exhibition, 9, 23, 38, 44–5, 65, 66, 68, 125, 151 curation beyond exhibition and site specificity, 129–32 Exits from the Labyrinth (Lomnitz), 87 exoticism, 33–4 Experimental Ethnography (Russell), 11 experimental moment in the human sciences/ humanities concept, 8, 27 FEMSA Biennale, 134, 150, 151, 156–7n12 fieldwork, 2, 10, 21, 26, 34, 90, 117, 171, 172, 183 Fisher, Michael, 27 Flaherty, Robert, 47 Fluxus, 43 forgetting, 97 “forjando patria” (building motherland), 4 Forjando Patria (Gamio), 120 Forjando Patria (Meyenberg), 13, 176, 180 form, 60 Foster, George, 31 Foster, Hal, 24, 25, 27, 30, 31, 32 Foucault, Michel, 65, 70, 104, 133, 134, 135, 143, 180, 181 Fraser, Andrea, 118 freedom, 147–50 Freud, Sigmund, 45, 84 friendship, 4, 11, 25, 119, 162 Frontera: Sketch for a Society for the Future, 46–8, 129–30 Fuga Mexicana (Debroise), 103 fugue, 96–100 post-Mexican fugue: Mexperimental: 60 Years of Avant-Garde Media Arts from Mexico, 105–10, 109; Soy Mexico, 111–12, 114, 120–1 Fundidora see Parque Fundidora, Monterrey futures, 5, 7–8 untimely futures, 159–82; accentuation, 164–71; calling, 161–4; Echo (Montezemolo), 171–6, 175; installation, 159–61; rings, 176–81 Gallo, Ruben, 38, 69, 108 Gámez, Rubén, 6, 12, 14, 56–60, 57, 58, 67, 110, 112, 118, 168 Gamio, Manuel, 4, 76, 77, 90, 100, 105, 120, 121, 161, 180 Gell, Alfred, 68 geography, 2, 33, 89, 99–100, 125, 130–1, 161

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The Incurable-Image

196 geophilosophy, 2, 15n5 gift, the, 31, 43, 48, 53n16 Ginsburg, Faye, 51n5 Girard, René, 66 globalization, 71, 94 Gonzalez-Mello, Renato, 120, 121 Gonzalez, Rita, 13, 105–10 Good, Carl, 71–2 Grosz, Elizabeth, 169 Groys, Boris, 44–5, 66 Gruner, Silvia, 10, 48, 49, 50, 118, 173 Guattari, Félix, 26 Gurrola, Juan Jose, 116 Helguera, Pablo, 46, 47–8 Hiller, Susan, 161 history, 87–8, 89, 92, 108, 130, 177, 179 holograms, 22, 183–4 homeostasis, 62 Hotel Palenque, 103 humanism, 9, 45 humor, 84–5

Icaza, Xavier, 115, 116 iconophilia, 44–5 images anthropology of images, 7, 72, 168 Contemporary Image theories, 11 image of thought, 10 incurable-image: agents, 68–72; chaos, 72–3; concept of, 4–5, 9, 10, 11–12; Curare, 62–8, 69–71; and curatorial/moving image culture malaise, 128; hyphen, significance of, 10, 12, 44, 45, 59, 65, 73; pathos-formula, 56–60, 73; peep show, 88–9; of the postMexican condition, 45, 171; secrets, 167; symptomatology of, 177, 179; Teratoma, 60–2, 64–5, 67, 69–71; three lessons of, 12; untimely futures, 168–9 Imaginary Networks, The (Bartra), 92 In Situ, 49 incurable, the, 11, 12, 63, 70, 82, 125, 126, 135–6, 170 Parque Fundidora, Monterrey, 141–3 as a pedagogy of intrusion, 149 indigenous media, 1, 22, 43, 47, 48, 81, 110 inorganic, 9, 12–13, 45, 62, 70, 136 inquiry, 2, 8; see also method InSITE, 38, 129, 130, 171–4 installation, 14, 42, 54n20, 159–61, 166 Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), 3, 39–40 institutions, 64–5 “institutional critique,” 68 intermedia, 5, 165 inter-medial connections, 78–9, 167 inter-mediation, 42, 110 intermedial expressions, 42–3

Mexperimental: 60 Years of Avant-Garde Media Arts from Mexico, 105–10, 109 intervention, 25–6, 31, 39, 46, 47, 61, 77, 86, 125, 129 clinical-specific pedagogical intervention, 132 concept of, 135 Intolerable Image, The (Rancière), 11 intrusion, 12, 13, 25, 33–4, 61–2, 71, 78, 92, 98–9, 149, 172 anthrointruder, 94–6 incurable as a pedagogy of intrusion, 149 intrusive adjacency, 88–9, 166–7 post-ethnographic intrusions, 24–7 irony, 84–5 Jameson, Frederic, 23 jealousy, 31, 33 Koselleck, Reinhart, 62 Krauze, Enrique, 79 La Fórmula Secreta: Coca Cola en Las Venas, 6, 12, 56–60, 57, 58, 67, 72, 110, 118, 168 La Imagen desorbitada, 11 La Jaula de la Melancolia (Bartra), 80 La Jetée (Marker), 164 La Muerte del Maguey, 113 “La Pharmacie de Platon” (Derrida), 66 Laboratorio 060, 6, 11, 12–13, 46–8, 126, 129 Laboratorio Arte Alameda, 6, 179 Labyrinth of Solitude, The (Paz), 87 Landa, Manuel de, 3 Latin Americanism, 3, 15–16n7, 80, 82, 104 Le Film à Venir (Ruiz), 164 leak concept, 98 Lerner, Jesse, 13, 14, 41–2, 105–10, 111, 113, 114–16, 116, 118, 162, 168, 170 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 86, 91, 92, 161, 166 L’Image Survivante (Didi-Huberman), 11 “Liquid Cultures” (Bartra), 93–4 Lo Mexicano, 38, 76, 82, 87, 89 Lomnitz, Claudio, 79, 87, 91, 99 Los Magnificos, 42, 76–7, 170 Lozano-Hemmer, Rafael, 22, 170 “Magnavoz/Phonograph” (Icaza), 115 Magnavoz, 14, 113, 115, 116, 116, 118 maguey plant, 13–14, 103, 105, 108, 112 Magueyes, 14, 110, 112 malaise, 9, 38, 62–3, 77, 81, 91, 128, 160, 181 curatorial malaise, 4, 11–12, 43–4, 62, 128 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 48, 95, 98, 163 Man With the Movie Camera, The (Vertov), 21 Marcos, Subcomandante, 183–4 Marcus, George, 21, 27, 162 Marker, Chris, 164 Marks, Laura, 11, 28, 52n14

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Index

materialism, 135, 169 media anthropology, 2, 7, 10, 21–2, 106–7, 164 Medina, Cuauhtémoc, 3, 4, 24–5, 60–1, 67, 108, 116, 118, 131 medium animation, 22 medium specificity, 7 of the pharmakon, 65, 67 theater, 111 melancholia, 64, 77, 81, 82–6, 87, 89–90, 171 mestizaje, 39, 69, 104, 170, 177, 180 Mexicanidad, 107, 112 Mexico, 6–7, 26–7 Ayotzinapan and Ayala massacre, 183 border with United States, 171–4 concept of, 4, 5, 10 experimental arts, 38 as a peep show, 76, 80, 81, 82, 86–93 political culture, 39–40 post-Mexican condition, 3, 4–5, 6, 7–8, 9, 10, 12, 13, 25, 38, 39, 41, 61, 67, 71–2, 76, 77, 82, 89–90, 103, 116, 121, 170: as biosociality, 83–4; incurable-images of, 45 representation of, in the arts/exhibitions, 68–9 Mexico City, 2–3, 5, 6, 24, 37, 39, 166, 167, 183 Curare, 62–8, 69–71, 129 as a symptom of malaise, 63 Teratoma, 60–2, 64–5, 67, 69–71, 129, 168, 179 as tumor city, 6, 61, 67, 79 “Mexico City: An Exhibition about the Exchange Rates of Bodies and Values,” 67 Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries, 68 Mexperimental: 60 Years of Avant-Garde Media Arts from Mexico, 6, 13, 105–10, 109 Meyenberg, Erick, 6, 13, 45, 83, 171, 176–81, 178 Mier, Raymundo, 25–6 Minh-ha, Trinh T., 36 mirrors, 97 “Modernist Sensibility in Recent Ethnographic Writing and the Cinematic Metaphor of Montage, The” (Marcus), 21 modernity, 2, 7, 9, 28, 42–3, 47, 103–4, 136, 143, 145 cosmopolitan modernism, 48, 115, 117, 167 Euro-American Modernity, 2 mestizo modernity, 67 Monsiváis, Carlos, 79, 80, 83, 111 montage, 21–2, 29, 50–1n2, 115, 165 Monterrey see Parque Fundidora, Monterrey Montezemolo, Fiamma, 161, 171–6, 175 Moreiras, Alberto, 15–16n7, 67 mourning, 64, 72, 73, 84, 171 Museo Nacional de Antropologia, 6, 40–1, 64, 67, 68 myth, 85–6, 105 “Nacionales y Extranajeros en la historia de la antropologia Mexicana” (Peña), 117–18

197

Nanook of the North (Flaherty), 47 nation/national culture, 3, 5 nation-building, 25 national identity, 83–4, 88–9, 107 National Museum of Anthropology see Museo Nacional de Antropologia nationalism, 30, 40, 67, 81, 93–4, 169–70 anthropology–avant-garde–nationalism assemblage, 121 neo-Mexicanisms, 5 neurobiology, 96 New Man, 10, 45, 177 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 37, 61 nihilism, 9, 45, 165 non-Western, the, 32, 104 Novo, Salvador, 79 Nuevo León State Arts and Culture Council (CONARTE), 150 ontology, 7, 9, 42, 45, 61, 63, 70, 73, 167, 169, 172 organicism, 13, 60, 135 other, 27, 32 Parque Fundidora, Monterrey, 14, 125–58 control and curation, 133–6 freedom and desire, 147–50 history and development, 136–9, 139 industrial remains, 139–41 as a landlocked territory, 150–2 Monterrey (city), 125–6, 129, 130–2, 147–50, 148 Monterrey’s unconscious, 144–5 as overprotected space, 152–3 as a souvenir, 137 participant-observation, 5, 8, 47, 162 second-order observation, 8 pathos-formula, 56–60, 73 Patino, Adolfo, 113 Paz, Octavio, 13, 41, 68, 79, 81, 87, 97, 130 pedagogy, 9–10, 78, 91, 128–9, 131, 132, 135–6, 149 clinical specific pedagogical intervention, 132 peep show, 76, 80, 81, 82, 86–93 Peña, Guillermo de la, 117–18 pharmakon, 10, 58, 65–7, 73, 179 philosophy, 66, 162 Plato, 66 pleasure, 93–6 Political Illnesses that Affect the Great Capital of this New Spain (Villareal), 71 Polo, Marco, 166 post-Mexican condition, 3, 4–5, 6, 7–8, 9, 10, 12, 13, 25, 38, 39, 41, 61, 67, 71–2, 82, 89–90, 103, 116, 121, 170 incurable-images of, 45 problematization, 70 “provincializing,” 33 psychoanalysis, 63–4, 73, 144–5

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198

The Incurable-Image

“Psychoanalysis of the Mexican” (Ramos), 13 punk, 43 ¡Que Viva Mexico!, 6, 12, 13, 43, 81, 103, 105, 110, 112, 114, 118, 120, 168 Rabinow, Paul, 3, 11, 16n14, 17n18, 17n22, 18n24, 33, 34, 83, 125, 127–8, 160 radical alterity, 1, 25, 27, 28–9, 30, 31, 166 Ramos, Samuel, 13 Rancière, Jacques, 11 Ravetto, Kriss, 37, 133 Raza Cosmica, 179 realism, 21, 72, 110, 169 magical realism, 81–2 real of anthropology, 162, 163 Regreso al Presente (Meyenberg), 176 remediation, 65 repair, 4, 63, 74n17 repetition, 176–7, 179 rings, 176–81, 178 of Saturn, 180–1 Rivera, Diego, 13, 24–5, 116, 118 Roitman, Janet, 15n4, 155n1 Ruiz, Raúl, 164 Russell, Catherine, 11 Salazkina, Masha, 112, 114 San Ildefonso, Filmoteca, 58, 59, 167 Savage in the Looking Glass, The (Bartra), 91–2 Schmeltz, Itala, 62, 63 Schneider, Arnd, 36 Sebald, W. G., 180 second-order observation, 8 self, 27, 32, 131, 135 SEMEFO (Servicio Médico Forense), 38 sensory ethnography, 23, 28, 29 Shock of Modernity, The (exhibition), 115 Sierra, Santiago, 6 signs, 59–60, 73, 144, 145 Silvio, Teri, 22 Siqueiros, David Alfaro, 24–5 site specificity, 125, 130–1, 134 Skin of Film, The (Marks), 11 Smith, Terry, 73n8 Smithson, Robert, 103 social, the, 36, 134, 135–6, 174, 176 social body, 83–4 social life, 64–5 social sciences, 5, 127–8, 135, 161–4 friction with art, 161–4 societies of control, 7–8, 9, 63–4, 128, 133, 134, 143–4, 152, 179 Soy Mexico, 111–12, 114, 120–1, 168

Stavrianakis, Anthony, 16n14, 17n18 Stewart, Kathleen, 133 Stigler, Bernard, 162, 166 Sueños de una Nación (Barrios), 177 symbols, 59, 72 symptomatology, 3, 14, 16n8, 72, 176, 177, 179 symptoms, 4–5, 15, 16n8, 56, 59–60, 72 Taylor, Lucien, 167 Tejada, Roberto, 18n24, 169 Téllez, Javier, 11 Teratoma, 12–13, 60–2, 64–5, 67, 69–71, 129, 168, 179 That Which they Call Mexican Anthropology (Los Magnificos), 42, 76–7 theft, 14, 38, 138, 163, 168, 174 Tijuana, 46, 54n25, 171–2, 174 Time Capsule Art in General, 50 Toscano, Javier, 14, 125, 126–7, 128 Total Destruction of the National Museum of Anthropology, The (Abaroa), 6, 10, 13, 35, 40–4, 40, 44, 45, 85–6, 165 transcultural anthropology of art, 42, 48 Tristes Tropiques (Lévi-Strauss), 161 Trojan horse (Erre), 174 truth, 63, 147, 154, 159 T.S.H., 115 tumor city, 6, 61, 67, 79 Un banquete en Tetlapayac, 14, 118–20, 121 unconscious, the, 144–5 untimely futures, 159–82 calling, 161–4 installations, 159–61 rings, 176–81 Uranga, Emilio, 97 Vanguardia, 9, 43, 106–7, 111, 118, 121, 129 Vasconcelos, José, 179–80 Vertov, Dziga, 21 Villareal, Hector, 71 violence, 40, 66, 126, 136, 145, 166 Virgin of Guadalupe, 103, 105 vitalism, 9, 11, 44, 60, 159, 160, 164, 179, 180, 181n4 Voz Alta, 22 Warburg, Aby, 59, 81 Weber, Max, 3, 41, 143 Weber, Samuel, 18n25, 54n20, 111, 182n18 Wolfe, Cary, 180 Writing Culture, 1–2, 21, 99, 160–1 Zapatista uprising, 81

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