Felipe Ehrenberg

His own definition of the meaning of this neologism is tantamount to a volcanic declaration of identity: “catalytic agent”, “stimulus of the imagination”, “antidote against stupidity, conformism and lack of imagination.”
The fact is that Ehrenberg has turned verbs not accepted in Spanish, such as "performar" (to perform) or "fluxear" (to “flux”), and of course, "artear" (to “art”), and even accepted verbs like "mapear" (to chart), into a conjunction between life and art which no suitcase, portable or not, is able to accommodate. This performer who, in 1967, seated atop a ladder, paved the way for that genre in Mexico City using posters during a talk about his first show, “ kinekaligrafías”, for the viewers to participate in the performance following the indications of the written words ; promoter of mail art, pioneer of the urban sculpture urban, and of what Nicolás Bourriau would later term relational aesthetics, he has contributed since then to broaden the territory of art through a body of work which, besides prints, paintings, videos and installations, also encompasses performance (“performa”, he calls it) and “some unexplainable hybrids”, according to Peña. Among these, César Martínez highlights − in the catalogue of Manchuria − his ability as a “redACTOR” (play on the Spanish word “redactor”, meaning editor, which can be broken down into net and actor): “…his texts converge with empirical demonstrations, often associating conceptual horizons with historical facts.” And there is also his theoretical creation, with a large number of letters which are documents that anticipated, and nourish the meta-artistic relationship between the work and institutional criticism. They function as a permanent alteration of the “archive”, which according to Focault, is an omnipresent system which cannot be encompassed and which displays its possibilities on the basis of the established discourses.
Ehrenberg has "arted" – or lived, an inseparable conjunction, to his view − generating a continuous documentation of culture (always in the context that surrounds him) that subverts those established discourses. The mobility of rebelliousness in his work forms part of his constant state of alert. This implies stopping at that edge where the experimental and the risk of all creation not subjected to the powers-that-be conforms to the demands of the market and becomes an accredited style, or even worse, the kinds of practices packaged and labeled as iconoclastic and ready to conform to those global consecrations that voracious capitalism administers so skillfully.
It is impossible to explore in an article Ehrenberg’s rebellious and irreverent trajectory. It may be said that the heretical and politically disobedient humor (and eroticism) in his collages, or in the interventions in the series Información incompleta (Incomplete Information) harbingered the work of such artists as Dr Lakra, Jonathan Hernández, or Daniel Guzmán. But this anticipation is only an indication that one is in the presence of the exceptional type of artist − capable of inspiring as much adhesion as rejection − who seriously makes his own person and his life the same work of art. It was in this way, announcing himself as an artwork, that in 1970 he pretended to enter Tate Gallery with his head covered by a hood, as part of the performance “ A date with fate at the Tate”, which included the recording of his argument with the museum guard, a recording later acquired to be incorporated in the same collection. I follow, therefore, his own nomadic methodology to capture decisive moments that mark the horizon of his trajectory.

First. The Conjunction of the Senses: an olfactory hint in the origin. The scent of mahogany and pinewood in the carpenter’s shop in the backyard of the house of his childhood, where he learned that craft/trade watching don Gonzálo Hernández, who taught him “precision, and to ponder the order of things.” In his adolescence, Mathías Goeritz would affectionately guide, rather than his hand, his eyes, and he would teach him to see forms in letters. And from childhood there was also the sonorousness of the words in náhuatl and the wish to carry out transactions in that language: he heard it from the servants, the storekeepers, the neighbors, and he learned it because he was interested in communicating with the people next doors. To this was added his work, as an adolescent, at a printers’ work, which was decisive for the connection between the tactile and the conceptual, and even the political. At the age of 25 − during the months which preceded the massacre of students in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, in Mexico City, he mimeographed the movement’s communiqués. And when he sought asylum in London, he bought a mimeograph which would be the matrix of the Beau Geste Press, the legendary independent and artisanal publishing house through which he contributed to forge one of the most insolent and peripheral movements in contemporary art: Fluxus.

Second. The verb to flux: Ehrenberg carried the spirit of Fluxus to new territories in London with his periscope-like gaze − that instrument that allows, “by means of mirrors or prisms, the observation of an area that is inaccessible to direct vision” −, heedful to the periphery. He tracked, in the midst of a strike of garbage collectors, the growths of the trash. David Mayor contacted him, after he had exhibited together with Richard Kriesche and Rodolfo Alcaraz at Sigi Krauss’s gallery, and had caused a scandal with his documentary and aesthetic recording which included the stinking “Chicken of the Seventh Day”, as the exhibition was titled; a situationist show, in a way, and capable of tracing that which was socially foul-smelling in 1970’s England. Then, together with Martha Hellion, his partner at that time, he mounted the traveling exhibition FLUXshoe from Devon, in the spirit of Geoge Maciunas. Beau Geste Press opened the way for the first books by Ulises Carrión and Carolee Schneemann, or by Takako Saito.

Third. The re-mexicanization. Ehrenberg does not trust globalized art and he has decoded its strategies. He wants to make art that his neighbor can understand. When he discovered that his children thought in English, he left England and he put away in what he called Box 9, the documentation of that which had been an international network of creative affinities, composed of Fluxus’s “conspirers”. The title of his subsequent exhibition at the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, Chicles, chocolates y cacahuates (Chewing-gum, chocolates, and peanuts) signals his re-Mexicanization.

Fourth. The conjugation of Performar. Long before Santiago Sierra in “ What are you doing?”, he stood against the wall, his back to the viewer, while a ribbon crossed his back and rendered him a part of the painting. He remained motionless until someone said: “What is that man doing there?” A distinctive sign is that Ehrenberg does not “perform” simulacra, he is “there”, he “is” there, that is why he can give his blood or extend the notion of “performa” to social “imaginaction”, as was the case with the H2O project, an association of instructor-artists who toured Mexico teaching people to create editorial notes, posters and murals, and in the wake of the 1985 earthquake, provoked the collective “performa” of a march of the Route 100 bus drivers from Tepito to the presidential residence.
I evoke two “performas” as a conducting thread leading to this body of work that is the artist himself, his way of being in the world. In the first of these he tied himself up with strings, every possible part of his body − every finger, the knees, the penis, the waist, the torso − until he became the center of a spider’s web, while the spectators held the extremes of the strings in their hands.
The other “performa”, which he presented at the Pinta art fair, is part of that “being here” in which he cuts the skin on his chest without any spectacularity, in a state of concentration, to assume the role of a stencil. On this occasion, the incisions had the shape of a bird’s footprint, and he imprinted the blood on a roll of paper, while the radio broadcasted information on the current affairs taking place in the in the city of London in the summer of 2010, where he transplanted a gesture associated with the offerings of the Aztecs, who pricked their bodies with maguey thorns to earn merit by repeating the gesture of a god. Men, the “macehuales”, were the ones who had earned the right to “be”.

Fifth. The Re-location of the neologist His offerings for the Day of the Dead, subjected to the traditional commemorative date, constitute a challenge to the mandate to eliminate any trace of the local unless it is masked by allusions, appropriations, and other accepted procedures. His art is not in the object − a print of Death in an erotic pose, for instance − but in the social network that it unleashes. It is, in a defying way, a permanent ontological search. It is a stratum of his being as a neologist artist based on the roots of his own environment, digging into imagination to the bone, and therefore capable of being annoying or moving in any context. Someone who makes performances for his family and neighbors following his mother’s idea, and who assumes, like he did in Beto Brant’s film Crime Delicado, the idea of playing the part of a character based on Jusep Torres Campalans − the artist invented by Max Aub with such skill that he inserted him in real life, for he was also represented by works that mocked the established art of his time − can afford the luxury of being obnoxiously local and at the same time, situate his work in Manchuria, a place “we have all heard about, although nobody knows where it actually is”. His trace can be found at the center of the being, and it can be easily followed from the artery of something that is intimately alive and touching.