Teresa Margolles
RAID
Under the title Operativo/Raid, Teresa Margolles presented her first solo show in New York, structured as two consecutive exhibitions at Y Gallery, and curated by Cecilia Jurado. Born in Culiacán, Mexico, in 1963, after earning a degree in Forensic Medicine and Communication Science at the National University of Mexico, Teresa Margolles founded, in 1990, the Collective SEMEFO (Forensic Medical Service), together with Arturo Ángulo Gallardo, Juan Luis García Zavaleta and Carlos López Orozco. From that moment on, she adopted the morgue as her workshop, considering it almost a sociological laboratory of Mexico City. The group began its activities as a Death Metal Rock band, and later its members made themselves known through their interventions in public spaces, which took the form of performances, videos, and all sorts of installations. In Margolles ́s case, she always remained behind the scenes and avoided making direct appearances, allowing other people and objects to hold a dialogue with her work. Later, she continued her career as an independent artist, taking human remains, death, violence, organ transplants and burials as the point of departure for her work, which is never, however, addressed in a macabre way. In Margolles ́s oeuvre, the aesthetic approach and the treatment of the body are never devoid of socio-cultural implications.
The fact that her first solo show should take place in a venue as representative as Y Gallery contributes an additional dose of consistency to the artist ́s work, if we bear in mind that the gallery is located in the area of Jackson Heights, in the New York district of Queens, where there is a strong Latin American presence, and the idea was to create a link between this community and the United States and infuse a breath of socio- political consciousness into American society.
In the artist ́s first exhibition a series of vinyl plates on the window feature, in the manner of an omen, newspaper excerpts reporting murders committed by drug dealers in the artist ́s home town, a reality whose frequency is growing at an alarming rate throughout the country. One of them reads: There are four days to go before May ends and the number of intentional murders is the highest in decades. There have been 106 murders in Sinaloa. (...) Most of the cases have occurred in the State capital and have been the result of shootings. “El Debate” newspaper (Culiacán, Sinaloa – Mexico), 28 May, 2008.
As soon as we started walking on the pale gray carpet with which the gallery floor had been covered, an inscription stood out on the wall: FOR THOSE WHO DO NOT BELIEVE IT SONS OF BITCHES. The poster at the side informed us that this was a message found beside a corpse which appeared in Culiacán, and it seems that this way of marking the bodies of the victims has become a common practice among drug dealers in the area. Through this work, Margolles made reference to the impunity and the lack of sensibility to which a crude reality has led in large metropolis such as Mexico City, where violence and crime are currently so much a part of ordinary daily life that the victims lose their human character and become distorted; they become just another figure, a number in a file, or a paragraph in a local newspaper. Margolles works only with these victims of violent deaths whose identities are unknown, and she ennobles them, rescuing them from anonymity.
The second part of this mise en scène appeared, a priori, more relaxed and contained. In this case, on entering the gallery space we were faced with a canvas which, at first sight, could be associated to the purest European informalism, hyper-textured painting, or Post-War abstract expressionism. Once again, as is customary when Margolles ́s work is concerned, the spectator ́s impression changed when he or she approached the informative poster. After reading the title, Pintura de Sangre/Blood Paint, the viewer ́s suspicions were confirmed: the paintings had been created by immersing the canvas directly in a pool of blood resulting from exemplary murders used to settle scores in a street corner in Culiacán. The artist had some good contacts and she submerged the canvas when the blood was still warm, when the crime had just been committed. The work thus acquires a much more dramatic dimension; if it previously had some connection with Alberto Burri ́s informalism, this informalism has been taken to the limit. Burri began to paint after being a doctor in a prisoner-of-war camp during World War II. Hence the references to blood, the torn burlap, which he himself employed to make bandages, the charred paper and his ́cracked ́ paintings. Margolles takes this pain to the limit, substituting the actual blood of the victim for the bloodlike paint, fusing the conceptual and the aesthetic in an amazing way. The pale gray carpet, which during the first part seemed to play an anecdotal role, became in the second exhibition a key element, functioning as a sort of second canvas, receiving part of the coagulated blood that dripped off the paintings as it dried. The canvases were deliberately rolled up when the blood was still liquid, to produce this effect at the time of their installation.
Removed from any kind of traditional ethic conventionalism, Margolles ́s artistic career has gradually purified itself, leaving behind the literal treatment of matter characteristic of her early works, in which she showed the body much more directly, to give way to a progressive formal rigor and a strengthening of the metaphorical content. Her work has sometimes been associated to the performative practices of representatives of Viennese Action Painting such as Herman Nitsch, Otto Muehl, Schwarzkogler and Gunter Brus, who intended to address sexual taboos and attack the conventions of Viennese society. In spite of my permanent fascination for the orgiastic mystery theater of the Viennese collective, the only real parallel I find between them is the plasticity with which both employ blood and the visceral, in a quasi-shamanic conversation. Despite the fact that both utilize the human body as the central element in their works, the way of addressing the subject takes totally divergent paths and is of an egocentric character in the case of the Viennese; romantic dogmatism, apolitical perversity, the exaltation of violence and the sexual content of the Viennese are absent in Margolles ́s work. The latter artist ́s work leaves theatricality and spectacularity aside to take on a much more didactic sense, a social dimension that goes beyond any kind of ethic-aesthetic dichotomy.
Teresa Margolles highlights the fact that not even death has the power to level out social inequalities. Here, once again, the victims are ennobled and transformed through painting, and they are offered the solemn ceremony they never had.
The two exhibitions brought us into contact with another key factor in the work of this artist: the traces, the remains, the relic, the power of what is left. In the first case, enhanced by the fact that the inscription had been cut into the wall; and in the second case, forming the essence of the work itself. In the midst of this contained pathos, the role of silence also acquired fundamental importance. The spectator ́s imagination transported him/her to the experience of the real, and here is where the artist ́s greatness resides. In this respect, we might quote Baudrillard: “Modern unreality has nothing to do with the order of the imaginary. It belongs to the order of too much reference, too much truth, too much exactitude – it consists of making everything manifest in its absolute reality”.1 In the presence of Margolles ́s works, one is faced with the immediateness of the murders, as if one were reading that note standing beside the victim, or had witnessed the moment when the canvases were immersed in the pool of blood. Thus the Mexican artist becomes established as a mistress of suggestion, confronting the public with the terrifying idea of death, fusing in this way a disturbing existentialism and a high dose of social critique. Margolles appears as an agent agitating the collective consciousness, as an alchemist of death. Hers is an oeuvre that screams in silence.
Perfil:
Nació en 1963 en Culiacán, México. Se graduó en Medicina Forense y Ciencias de la Comunicación en la Universidad Nacional de México. En 1990 fundó el Colectivo SEMEFO (Servicio Médico Forense) junto con Arturo Ángulo Gallardo, Juan Luis García Zavaleta y Carlos López Orozco. Ha recibido el premio del Salón de las Plásticas Sinaloenses de la Universidad Autónoma de Sinaloa (UAS) en fotografía (1995); segundo lugar en la VII Bienal Internacional de Pintura de Cuenca, Ecuador, tercer lugar en el Concurso Nacional de Fotografía, convocado por la Universidad de Veracruz.
