Teresa Margolles’ work is
characterized by a decontextualization of the material vestiges of everyday
violence so that by various means, the viewer may experience in the first
person and in flesh and blood, the traces of contemporary violence done to others.
Two questions that Margolles’s work asks are, How can an artwork transmit
horror and pain? How can private pain and horror be made collective? As she stated in an interview in
2004: “My misery is your misery. We don’t level ourselves through purifying ourselves
but rather through sharing our misery.”
Margolles’ earlier work (late
1990s-2006) also sought to investigate the socio-cultural implications brought
about by the presence of corpses in a society marked by violence and
socio-economic disparity, rising questions about memory, social strata and the
experiences lived by anonymous bodies. Margolles holds a degree in autopsy and
initially, her studio was the morgue of one of Mexico City’s most violent
neighborhoods. She transformed body parts from the dead bodies into
‘partial-objects’ and thus artwork-relics
incarnating the real of pure violence. The materials for her work from this
period include clothes and objects of dead children, body parts (tattoos, a
tongue) of youth, all of whom had suffered violent deaths. In an early sound
piece, one heard a trepanation being performed at the morgue. Other works from
this period include self-portraits with bodies at the morgue, a steam room or
soap bubbles made of water that had been used to wash corpses, the latter
inviting either disgust from the viewer or his or her rapturous communion with
the murdered. In that sense, some of her pieces give leeway to communal
mourning, specifically, Andén. Escultura colectiva por la paz (1999). For this “relational” or
“participative” piece, Margolles invited the relatives of drug crime-related
victims to dig a 36-meter long path in the Parque Panamericano in Cali,
Colombia, and to place souvenirs in the ‘wound,’ which was then covered and
paved. Along similar lines, in a piece created In Situ for her 2004 Frankfurt
retrospective, Margolles made cement benches with the water that had been used
to wash murdered bodies at her morgue-studio. This piece had the purpose of
inviting the viewer to mourn both the victims of violence from Mexico
and the victims of the Holocaust (“Germany and Mexico can mourn their dead
together” she stated) Misleadingly, the victims were put on equal footing as
well as collective and private mourning. Similarly obtuse, conceived for
“reflecting upon death” and with the same logic of the Frankfurt benches, there
are her more recent chaise-longues/graves at LACMA in Los Angeles and in the
Botanical Garden in Culiacán, Mexico (2011). These works reveal, furthermore,
an unconscious Catholicism operating in her work, as it invites the creation of
communities gathered around a perpetually absent body. Other traces of this
unconscious Catholicism are Margolles’ transformation of objects related to
violence and its victims into relics, or the sacralization –by way of
museification– of objects such as blankets, clothes, plaster that have been in
contact with murdered bodies, operating under the logic of the Shroud of Turin.
Maybe Margolles’ work has a double purpose: to impose the
duty of morality on the viewer and as witness, to exercise catharsis on behalf
of the victim(s). In Margolles’ work, it is neither the cadaver nor its traces
that testify to violent death, but the artist herself: autopsy comes from the Greek autoptes, which means “witness” from auto (self) and optes (seen). Thus, the artist is a
witness trying to speak out on behalf of the victim, making debatably isolated
moral claims whose incommensurability remains opaque and nonnegotiable. In her
work, a split emerges between the speaking subject (artist) and the subject of
the speech (the truth of violence that is asserted), that is, what “she” says,
exceeds the “said” witnessed by her artistic practice. This excess is due to
the fact that moral testimony evacuates the public it summons because, ultimately,
it is not I (the
witness or victim) who can redeem myself, but God. Margolles’ view of the pain of
others, moreover is inextricable to the religious logic that links pain to
sacrifice and sacrifice to exaltation: the artist sacrifices herself at the
morgue, endlessly washing and dissecting the corpses (“mis muertitos”, as she
referred to them), in order to mourn them. According to Susan Sontag in her key
work Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), however, this view of death as sacrifice is
completely alien to modern sensibility, which regards suffering as a mistake,
an accident a or crime, as something that makes one feel powerless. This
contradiction between a religious conception of death as suffering and the
modern sensibility which posits violence as a question of the violation of
human rights, is never teased out in Margolles’ work, for whom working at the
morgue was a kind of moral duty that she took upon herself. The question one
can ask to her work is, does it transcend morbidity in order to turn the
violence brought about by Neoliberal policies in Mexico into an ethic-political
question?
More recent work by Margolles has been sanitized of bodily
fluids and decaying matter, for example, she has transformed into jewelry
things such as broken glass (Ajuste de Cuentas 15, 2009), or into art-relics bullets
and the wall they’re embedded in, both stemming from traces of violent
settlings of accounts. Last year, she began to collaborate with a witness for
her piece Las llaves de la ciudad: Mr. Antonio Hernández Camacho, a key maker and souvenir vendor
from Ciuad Juárez whose business was negatively affected by the violence
reigning in the city. Margolles’ performative piece consists of him telling his
and his city’s stories in conversation with the viewers while he engraves keys
with words told to him by the visitors. Debatably, Las llaves de la ciudad attests to the lack of cohesiveness
in Margolles’ work, as there is no apparent link neither ethically nor formally
to earlier or more recent work (except for the sensationalist signifiers:
“Ciudad Juárez”, “violence” and a subject of enunciation bearing witness –this
time delegated; other works that stand at odds with the logic of her oeuvre are her walls painted with fat
extracted from cosmetic liposuction operations, the trepanation sound piece and
the cocaine-cutting cards). For this piece, Margolles places testimonial
documentary inside the white cube, by way of an easy appropriation of two
aesthetic genres that have predominated in the past decade in politicized and
socially aware art: relational or participatory and the “talking head” bearing
witness. What is even more problematic, is the role held by the keys that
Hernández Camacho makes and are hung on a wall in the exhibition space; perhaps
it caters to the recent commercial success of Margolles’ work?
In the 1990s and up to around 2006, Margolles’ work took up
as subject matter the violence prevailing in Ciudad Juárez and other border
towns as well as in some areas of Mexico City which included feminicides,
settling of accounts between drug lords and hired hit men aligned with the
cartels, crime in general, kidnappings, gang fights, etc. Since 2006, this
violence increased exponentially and expanded to the rest of the country. This
was due to the militarization of the country by President Felipe Calderon’s war
allegedly waged against drug cartels. The government’s war gave leeway to an
unprecedented violent struggle amongst the cartels disputing territory and
drug-trafficking routes (many claim that the Federal Government fights on
behalf of the interests of El Chapo Guzmán’s Sinaloa Cartel). Since then, there
have been about 60,000 civilian deaths and Mexico is stated to be the most
dangerous country for journalists worldwide.
Within this context, Margolles represented the state and
private-sponsored Mexican Pavillion of the 2009 Venice Biennale, curated by
Cuauhtémoc Medina at the Palazzo Rota Ivancich. This time, the government
turned a blind eye to the breaching of the official mandate to show to the
world an image of a safe and peaceful Mexico – although some heads inside the
Foreign Relations Office were indeed cut because of this project, and even the
Office removed itself from the project at the last minute – and thus Mexico
came across as a “democratic Nation” that allows freedom of speech to critical
artists. Margolles’ intervention was called What else could we talk about? and in the artist’s own words, it
sought to put forth directly and in the most realist sense the current “Mexican
panorama, flooded with blood and tears due to a war against drug trafficking
led by the Federal Government.” In Venice, Margolles showed “pictorial
abstractions” materialized in muddy blankets that had been used to cover
abandoned corpses once they’d been executed; a “floor clean-up,” a performance
in which a janitor mopped with blood the floor at the Palazzo Ivancich; she
also showed “Narco-messages” embroidered in gold thread over blankets
recuperated from execution places at the Mexican northern border. Finally,
during the Biennale’s inauguration, ten thousand credit cards were given away
to cut cocaine; the cards bore images of assassinated persons because of to
their links to organized crime. For the curator, the show materialized: “The
substances of anger, loss and social waste, transferring them (or rather,
smuggling them) to a 16th Century Venetian Palace, cannibalizing the
traces of decadence and history embedded in the building.” Also: “More than a
presentation of objects and images, Margolles shows her public the ghostly and
abject sacrality of fluids and remnants: jewelry made with glass fragments,
murderer’s aphorisms embroidered in gold, sound recordings of the landscape of
death, composing a space for reflection, corporal intimacy and anxiety.”
As many authors have noted, anxiety is one of the illnesses
suffered by the global social fabric along with panic attacks, shock, and
paranoia. Taking this into account, it could be said that Margolles, without
placing any distance between herself, the viewer and the subject of her work,
reiterates and reifies these emotions, giving at the same time, a glamorous
touch to abjection. The “cocaine-cutting-cards” seek to underscore the
spectator’s indirect complicity with organized crime, be it as a drug consumer
or as a passive spectator of the state of affairs (and of art), leading toward
sensorial experiences that simulate feelings coded by Christianity such as
shame, expiation and repentance. At the same time, Margolles imposes a painless
mourning on the viewers (of absent bodies) within a museographic space that has
been transformed into an aestheticized horror house. The problem is that
Margolles’ abstractions tend to be rituals forced upon the viewer that are
neither private nor collective, but rather, fetichistically sacralize the
vestiges of crime scenes.
Moreover, viewers who are foreign to this material culture
and life experiences suffer an excess of sensory-emotional stimulation (at
best), along with paralysis, shock and anxiety, which are typical emotions of
the contemporary world. It could be said that Margolles’ interventions
contribute to the transmission of Narco-violence at an abstract, spectacular
level rendering opaque what really is going in Mexico, including the nature and
causes of State Terrorism (the bourgeois developmental impulse that prevails
since Porfirio Díaz). Moreover, to point to the Federal Government with a
finger soaked in blood (and within the frame of official sponsorship) is much
easier than to lead the viewer to reflect upon the real causes of violence
within a broader panorama in all its complexity which would be: the nature of
the relationships amongst socio-economic classes in Mexico, the Neoliberal
creation of an urban lumpen-proletariat, the de-ruralization of the countryside,
forced migration and repatriation, the systematic destruction of food sovereignty,
the strong state repression of current autonomy struggles and self-management
on behalf of communities seeking to become viable and autonomous (like in
Guerrero, Oaxaca and Chiapas) these indigenous communities have entered the
conservative Mexican government’s war by being systematically repressed, hiding
behind a paternalist, protectionist and developmentalist veil.
Finally, Margolles’ intervention at the Mexican Pavillion
for the Venice Biennale echoes the transparent sensationalism transmitted by
the Mexican mass media, which has ceased to inform, instead it only transmits
violent images and conveys statistics of violence. As I have already mentioned,
Mexico is one of the most dangerous places for journalists in the world, as
more than 80 have been killed in the past 6 years. State and Narco-violence
repress journalists while artists, writers and intellectuals either censor
themselves or retort to conservative strategies to obtusely denounce what is
going on in today’s Mexico, like pointing fingers, fetishizing the remnants of
violence, or more recently, claiming that “we are all victims.” Nowadays,
merely staging the need to politicize violence, dispossession or social
intervention has become the rule – in the name of freedom of expression.
Margolles began to produce her work
in the last decade of the 20th Century, which saw the emergence of a
vein in Contemporary Art taking up the post-structuralist mission to “speak truth
to power” by doing away with mediation in order to express directly and
realistically, the horrors of capitalist vampirism – a genre that Mark Fischer
called, Capitalist Realism. Operating at an affective level, this aesthetic of
demise transmits traumatic shock; the experience of this kind of art either
stuns or incenses the viewer, as he is either invited to become a potential
agent of the denounced events, or his Sado-masochist side is invoked. The
latter is the case of Santiago Sierra, who began to produce in the late 1990s
events in which the viewers experienced fantasies or decadent experiences whose
source of pleasure was the act of looking at the exploitation of others. Using
“remunerated service” as raw material and based on the logic of “confrontation”
Sierra transferred to the white cube the power relations of the Neoliberal
everyday: first, putting the Mexican neocolonial oligarchy in front of “its
sins” and then the international one confronting it with the “real” of the
exploitation of the Other. Along similar lines than Sierra, Margolles also
stages confrontations in her work, in this case between the presence of corpses
who have undergone violent deaths – non-mournable life, as Judith Butler put it
– and the affluent gallery or museum visitor. Following Butler, one could argue
that disparity is based on rhetorical decisions and social practices that frame
the loss of lives as either grievable or not. Lives that are not considered
grievable become a target for annihilation in order to maintain the status quo
of those lives that are worthy of ‘living.’ Butler argues moreover, that every
life is precarious and yet, some can afford protection while others cannot.
Evidently bodies are exposed daily to violence, but some lack national
protection, as economic and social structures have failed them, leaving them
vulnerable at an increased risk of exploitation, disease, poverty, starvation,
displacement and exposure to violence: because they lack social protection,
these bodies are therefore “destructible” and become “ungrievable” lives.
Debatably, work by Sierra and Margolles underscores and thereby normalizes the
distinction between grievable lives and those worth living.
Symptomatically, Margolles’ and Sierra’s work has been
linked to an art historical genealogy tied not to a kind of post-ideological
socialist realism but to the ‘pragmatic’ and ‘non-ideological’ minimal art,
with the argument that their strategy is to format (real) contents within
minimalist frames like seriality, repetition, modularity, etc. Moreover, it has
been said that the basis of their work is the symbolic gesture of replacing the
minimalist ‘epistemological cube’ by signs embodying real processes, as Sierra did
placing human labor inside boxes (Workers Paid to Remain Inside Cardboard
Boxes, 1999), and when
Margolles placed human traces of violence in a cube (an aborted fetus, Burial, 1999), similar to the use of earth
by Walter de Maria, steam by Hans Haacke steam, trash by Arman trash or the
void by Gabriel Orozco.
The de-humanizing aspect of Sierra’s and Margolles’
“minimalist” aesthetic has caused (calculated) scandals, as their stylized
confrontational mirrors have been perceived as transgressions that have
offended or made the public uncomfortable. In the case of Sierra’s work,
however, it is not very far from previous ‘politically incorrect’
representations of the Mexican “Indian” or slaves in European art history. And
as we have seen, Margolles’ work is imbued with an unconscious Christian syntax
that is problematically not dealt with neither by her work nor by the reception
of its work. Under this lens, the ‘transgressive’ aspect of their work appears
as a conservative gesture oscillating between the propagation of shock,
cynicism and sensationalism, closer to the Bretonian rhythm of ‘épater la bourgeoisie
–with the difference that the bourgeoisie addressed by their work is neither
conservative nor repressed but as Slavoj Zizek put it, the class in power today
is vulgar and sadist. At the same time, their work evidences (on purpose?) the
political and historical immaturity of their viewers who are uncomfortable,
surprised or shocked when they are facing the exploitation or the nature of
‘non-mournable life’ of the other. Their work furthermore, opposes utopia and
recalls the prevailing mood of impending doom and approaching catastrophes
delivering an opaque mirror of systemic corruption; their superficial
injunctions to fight greed, consumerism and violence and harmless, moralistic
gestures become an ideological operation that is the opposite of an ethical and
political discourse, conveyed through the use of disembodied ideas and a poorly
conceived aesthetic language.
Works Referenced
- Judith
Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009)
- Irmgard
Emmelhainz, “Brownie and Brownie” (Preface to dissertation Before our
Eyes; les mots, non les choses; Jean-Luc Godard’s Ici et ailleurs (1974) and Notre musique (2004).
- Mark
Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is there No Alternative? (London: Zero Books, 2009)
- Teresa
Margolles, “Interview with Santiago Sierra,” BOMB 86 (Winter 2004).
- Teresa
Margolles, Exhibition Catalogue Muerte sin fin MMK Frankfurt, (New York: DAP
and Frankfurt am Main: Museum für Moderne Kunst and Hatje Cantz Verlag,
2004)
- Cuauhtémoc
Medina, “Materialist Spectrality,” in Teresa Margolles, What Else Could
we Talk About?
Exhibition Catalogue, Mexican Pavillion, Venice Biennale 2009.
- Susan
Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Strauss and Giroux, 2003)
- Slavoj
Zizek, On Violence (London: Verso, 2009)
