[nettime-lat] FW: <nettime> The US-Mexico Border

["luis humberto clinton" <cybercholito@hotmail.com>]

------ Mensaje reenviado
De: TONGOLELE@aol.com
Responder a: TONGOLELE@aol.com
Fecha: Sun, 2 Sep 2001 13:26:27 EDT
Para: nettime-l@bbs.thing.net
Asunto: <nettime> The US-Mexico Border

     [also To: <faces-l@yahoogroups.de>]

In the wake of borderhack2 (which I did not attend) and the heated debates
about its legitimacy and validity on nettime-latino (in which I did
participate), I have received several emails from Europeans, Americans and
Mexicans full of questions and comments that make painfully clear that there
are several overdetermined structured absences in the net.art/activist
dealings with the US-Mexico border. Cybertheory's overemphasis on spatial
conceptualization of the virtual and its tendency to unquestioningly 
conflate
abstract concepts with physical realities is encouraging a superficial
"flanneur" approach to the border that equates "knowledge" with a quick tour
of the border landscape, yet another version of leftist culture tourism. The
fetishistic reduction of technology to computers occludes the possibility of
understanding how metaphorical " hacking", recycling, detournement of
American machines has been part of the Mexican and Chicano strategy of real
survival and culture jamming for decades -- the culture of low rider cars
being only one example.  The history of border art that has addressed the
power relations that structure intercultural exchange appears to be unknown
or willfully forgotten.  Worst of all, to my mind is the absence of
comprehension about the psycho-dynamics of intercultural relations that
border exchanges make so apparent. One particularly painful exchange with a
Mexican cyberfeminist who wanted to discuss Sandy Stone and Helen Cixous 
with
me while she dismissively equated her compatriots who make art about the
border with those who make bad art about indigenous Mexicans in order to get
grants revealed what I already suspected - that Euro-American cybertheory
may, however inadvertently, be a form of escapism when reconfigured in a
neo-colonial context. The Europeans and Americans involved with borderhack
appear to have very little understanding of how their techno-formalism and
postructuralist extrapolations of borders and hybrids easily serves the
interests of the neoliberal technocratic elite now managing cultural affairs
in Mexico that wants to do everything possible to obfuscate the relationship
between new technologies, militarism,  privatization and the immiseration of
the indigenous and mestizo Mexican majority, and to promote art works devoid
of direct references to social, economic and political crises in Mexico
brought on or exacerbated by free trade policies.

In light of these problems, I am posting a chapter from my forthcoming book 
(
The Bodies That Were Not Ours and Other Writings, Routledge/iNIVA, 2001) 
that
reflects upon the work of several artists who have responded to the impact 
of
free trade on Mexican people and social life.

Coco Fusco

The Unbearable Weightiness of Beings: Art in Mexico after NAFTA
© 2001, Coco Fusco

"Death is a mirror which reflects the vain gesticulations of the living."
        Octavio Paz
The Labyrinth of Solitude

    When I arrived in Mexico City in the summer of 1994, just six months
after the Free Trade Agreement went into effect and the Zapatistas launched
the first indigenously based, electronically savvy revolution, there were 
two
conversations I remember hearing at every gathering. One was about the
eloquent letters appearing in the press by Subcomandante Marcos that were
making the damas in the wealthy neighborhoods of the capital swoon. Many
people I spoke to were impressed that news of the rebels?ccupation of San
Cristobal had reverberated around the world, and this had given them hope
that real political changes were imminent. Intellectuals and artists were
preparing to journey to Chiapas for the first Encuentro that El Sub had
convened to strengthen support for the rebels?emands and to elaborate a
critique of neoliberal policies?ffect on Mexico?poor.
The other conversation was about an exhibition that was taking place at the
Museo Carrillo Gil that featured dead animals.  Ensconced in the affluent 
San
Angel neighborhood in the south of the city, the museum was dedicated to
showcasing contemporary art, but it did not have a reputation for taking
risks or embracing the macabre. I joined a group of friends who were
attending a gathering there one afternoon, and can remember being 
overwhelmed
by the smells that greeted me as I entered the main gallery area and made my
way up the ramps. Wafts of formaldehyde and a faint scent of putrescent 
flesh
floated through the air.
   The exhibit by the Mexican artists?ollective SEMEFO, entitled Lavatio
Corporis, began with a reproduction of a Jos? Clemente Orozco painting that
lay in a box parallel to the floor. In the center of the image was the head
of a fallen horse pointed vertically upward, framed by the slain 
rider?pierced palm and head. Beyond the reproduction was a rusted carousel 
with
three preserved colts chained and suspended above a bed of spikes. Next to
the carousel were three metal rings set above eye level, each containing a
preserved horse fetus that was visibly desiccating. Further into the gallery
were six Lucite blocks arranged in a descending row, each holding a sliced
section of a horse?head. Finally, at the rear of the gallery were two older
dead horses, each shackled to metal constructions reminiscent of torture
paraphernalia. One horse was splayed out on all fours, while the other was
held up with his head thrown backward and his rear legs chained wide apart.
When I have spoken of this exhibition to American and European friends, they
invariably think of Damien Hirst and his lifeless shark, lambs, and split
pigs. But Hirst?animals are exhibited under glass, like specimens in a
science display. SEMEFO?horses on the other hand were exposed to the
elements in the museum, their poses suggest scenarios of pleasure and pain,
and their oxidizing frames recalled the instruments of the Inquisition.
Whereas Hirst?composition evokes the hyper-rationalist world of the
laboratory, SEMEFO?theatre of death invokes Catholicism?embrace of
suffering as the performative imitation of Christ.
One could argue that Hirst?choices of animals carry specific symbolic
meanings in the context of Britain, but SEMEFO?horses definitely demand a
reading in relation to Mexican national allegory. The Orozco reference at 
the
onset of the exhibition sets the wheels of such an interpretation in motion.
The title of the painting, Los Teules, was the epithet the Aztecs used to
denigrate the Spanish conquistadors, and the horse is a well-known icon of
colonialism. Here the symbols of mastery are rendered abject, as corpses
whose subjugation has not ended with their death. I have sifted through
memories of this exhibition for years, and with each effort to reckon with
the complicated sentiments it aroused, I see more clearly how SEMEFO offered
a prescient commentary on Mexico?condition at the onset of the country?entry 
into the global economic order.
SEMEFO?name is an acronym for Servicio M?dico Forense, or Forensic Medical
Service, a term they borrow from the actual state agency that manages the
transfer of unclaimed bodies to the country?many morgues. Over the past
decade, the art group has elaborated a series of installations, performances
and videos involving the corpses of human beings and other animals. Their
works delve into the mushrooming culture of violence that has transformed
urban life in the capital and in the northern cities that host the 
country?drug trade. Recasting creativity as an analysis of human remains, 
they
present themselves as pathologists and morticians who tend to the ruins of a
dysfunctional social organism. To grasp the significance of their creative
endeavors, one must take into account how neoliberalism (i.e. globalization)
affects both their country and their practice as artists.
Globalization is usually defined as an economic system in which the
international circulation of information supplants nation-based industry as
the primary source of wealth. It is characterized by the free flow of goods
across borders; the dispersal of manufacture to export processing zones in
different parts of the third world; the drastic reduction of government
involvement in industries and services; and the rise of the multinational
corporations?hose assets surpass those of several nation-states.  Parallel
to these developments, the artworld has reorganized itself around a string 
of
global exhibitions managed by a network of itinerant curators from different
parts of the planet. A series of moves by these arbiters and their artists
have shifted the thematic focus on work from the periphery from the politics
to the marketing of location. Several historical exhibitions mounted during
this period have rewritten various chapters of modernism to posit that
movement as a global rather than strictly European or American phenomenon, 
as
if to cry out to the world that modernity was always already everywhere.
These changes have contributed to the growth of high-art tourism, as 
artworld
professionals globe trot in search of the avant-garde?every permutation.
And at the same time as pure information becomes the stock market?most
prized commodity, ephemeral art and new media have become the hottest genres
on the global art circuit.
Mexico?transition to a neoliberal economic order has been particularly
tumultuous. Its proximity to the US has turned Mexicans into the shock 
troops
of free trade. But the changes are also difficult because the country was
managed for seven decades by a one-party state in which the PRI or
Institutional Revolutionary Party exercised almost total control over the
economic, social and cultural life of its citizenry.  While privatization 
may
signify increasing efficiency in management of the country?resources to
many, it also entails the dismantling state operated social services and
agrarian reform, which has greatly imperiled Mexico?vast underclass, which
cannot afford the alternatives offered by the private sector.
Mexican society is regularly described as tied to the past, to family, 
memory
and tradition. Translated into economics, this actually means that most
Mexicans are less voracious consumers, are more likely to engage in
non-commercial social activity and to rely on kin or minimally remunerated
and unregulated live-in servants for domestic labor. Current neoliberal
policies promote increased dependence on consumer goods and service 
industries
, which Mexico?overwhelmingly poor population can access only minimally if
at all. Mexico?capital and border cities are bloated by a continuous flow
of poor people who abandon rural areas to go to the urban centers in search
of ways to insert themselves into an increasingly money-driven social order.
Mexico City, the most populous urban center in the world with more than 20
million inhabitants, is doubly invaded, by American chain stores and a
floating army of chronically under and unemployed countrymen. The more the
poor occupy public space, the more the rich barricade themselves behind
gates, elaborate alarms systems and private security forces.
What further exacerbated the difficulties of the transition was the wild
financial speculation that preceded NAFTA.  From 1989 until 1994 under
President Salinas, Mexico attracted $70 billion dollars in foreign
investments. Only 10% of this actually made its way into the economy, while
the rest went into stocks and bonds.  Twenty-four billionaires emerged in Me
xico during this period, and around them a new technocratic elite with
high-end consumerist habits.  At the end of the Salinas presidency, after 
the
assassination of favored candidate Luis Donaldo Colossio and revelations of
corruption that linked the president to the drug trade, the Mexican stock
market collapsed, the peso suffered its third devaluation since 1982, and 
the
country?middle class and poor were decimated. Though the Clinton
administration did organize a bail out that tied Mexico to yet another round
of austerity measures, a steady flow of Mexicans have ventured northward
across the border in search of any means of survival.
While other crises, from earthquakes to the 1968 massacre at Tlatelolco
generated swift and direct responses from artists in the past, the recent 
art
from Mexico City that has received the most support, media coverage and
international attention has evinced the most attenuated forms of social
commentary, or avoided it altogether. (I am here thinking of such artists as
Gabriel Orozco, Francis Alys, Miguel Calderon, Melanie Smith and Yishai
Judisman.) As part of a break with a long history of promoting indigenist
populism, art promotion in the wake of NAFTA has been directed toward
inserting younger more experimental artists into the international art
market, forging collaborations with American foundations and the private
sector, and promoting a more modern image of Mexican culture.  The brash
contradictions that mark everyday life are only intermittently visible as
decorative detail in most art of the post-NAFTA era, despite the heated
debates in the Mexican press about globalization, maquiladoras, political
corruption, the drug trade, and the Zapatistas.
Curators acting as brokers during this period have helped to redefine these
priorities. That post-NAFTA spirit is evident, for example, in the 
apolitical
character of featured art projects selected for San Diego-Tijuana?In Site,
the "border biennial." The more confrontational, locally based political art
that put that region on the artworld map in the 1980s combined human rights
activism, radical pedagogy and experimental and public art strategies and 
was
resolutely anti-institutional. In Site, on the other hand, has domesticated
border art by suppressing proposals that touch on controversial subjects and
separating work into low profile community projects on the one hand and
international artists?howcases that are readily consumed by the arts media
on the other.
While it is undeniable that many artists are entirely complicit with these
reworked mandates, the increasingly powerful artworld arbiters do play a
pivotal role in the shift. One Mexican critic and curator who spoke on a
panel with me in Madrid in 1997 suggested that Mexican artists were better
off leaving politics to the comic talents of the artisans who each day
devised new modes of caricaturing corrupt leaders. Another curator averred 
to
me in an interview during this period that he was tired of artists who 
became
famous as "vampires of misery," referring to avant-gardes of the 60s and 
70s.
What was consistently clear to me from conversations I had with the new
protagonists of Mexico City?art scene in the wake of NAFTA was that
neo-formalism was the strategy of choice. It made them more attractive
candidates for the global art market, and it made them look and feel
anti-statist, and therefore modern. The children of the new technocratic
elite are attending art schools in the US and Europe, and are absorbing the
lessons of the backlash against identity politics, which they interpret in
relation to the seventy year PRI project of state supported populism that so
many have learned to vilify.
In the midst of an arts milieu such as the one I have described in Mexico
City, SEMEFO and Santiago Sierra stand out as countervailing forces. These
artists offer key critical visions of the social and political situation of
the country.  Santiago Sierra has focused on the degradation of human labor
as a symptom of social malaise, while SEMEFO concentrates of the culture of
violence in the overblown metropolis. Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT),
though not based in Mexico City, could be considered as a parallel force to
the aforementioned artists, operating within the virtual sphere. Pointing to
President Zedillo?hypocritical dealings with the EZLN and the peoples of
Chiapas, EDT directs its internet actions against the Mexican government
website as a virtual embodiment of the state.  I would like to consider some
of these artists?rojects in detail here, as I believe they comprise a
crucial link between older forms of avant-garde interventions and new
aesthetic and political strategies for the global era.
Santiago Sierra is a Spanish artist who has lived in Mexico City for the 
past
five years.  Though several of his more recent projects have been carried 
out
abroad, Mexico City?urban landscape is the laboratory in which Sierra
concocts his experiments. Like many Americans and other Europeans who arrive
in Mexico City with fresh eyes, Sierra was taken by just how visible the
social contradictions were in the city center where he settled.  Walking out
of his apartment onto the streets of the Centro Hist?rico, he is confronted
by Precolombian, colonial, and modern architecture, extreme wealth and
wrenching poverty, the most ancient cultural expressions existing side by
side with pirated versions of the latest Disney characters. Most daunting of
all is the sheer number of people, the presence of masses of humanity that
bears down on the city with an astounding intensity. No urban experience in 
a
European or American city is comparable. "Es que somos muchos! " (it?just
that there are many of us!) Mexican friends often say to me when they lack
concrete explanations for failures in social engineering.
    Sierra calls upon the services of others and makes a public display of
their work. His pieces have taken place in alternative spaces, galleries and
museums. He purposely selects or offers employment to individuals from the
most marginalized sectors of the cities in which he works; among the
participants in his projects there have been petty criminals, prostitutes,
drug addicts, unemployed day laborers and undocumented foreigners. The
actions Sierra requests that others perform are repetitive, often 
nonsensical
and even humiliating. People have been asked to sit under huge boxes, to 
hold
up walls, to stand still in a hall for hours, or to allow their bodies to be
permanently marked. The artist makes a point of paying his participants and
sets their fees slightly above the day rate that comparable workers in
non-art situations would receive. The amount of payment is noted in the
documentation of the works, as are other details about the tasks performed.
All information is presented in the cool, matter of fact tone associated 
with
minimalism. Consider, for example, some of Sierra?titles: 30cm Line
Tattooed on a Remunerated Person, A Person Remunerated for Remaining in the
Trunk of a Car, or A Removed Gallery, Inclined at 60 degrees from the Floor
and Held by Five People.
    Sierra is not the first or only artist to involve others as bodies, 
props
or laborers in the creation of an artwork. In 1968, Oscar Bony of Argentina
put a worker family on a podium in a gallery and paid them double their
regular wages for posing as works of art.  American artist Ann Hamilton
incorporates people, usually a single person who engages in repetitive acts
in her installations as a live element.  Earlier this year, the Nordic duo
Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset contracted two unemployed house painters
in Leipzig to execute an extended version of their performance 12 Hours of
White Paint, renamed Between Other Events. Other more trendy artists
currently employing people as ready-mades, such as Vanessa Beecroft with her
fashion models and burly seamen, or Mauricio Cattelan with his buried fakir,
capitalize on the spectacle of their physical presence without any attempt 
to
critique the intercultural or inter-class dynamics those spectacles imply.
    Of the artists cited, perhaps Elmgreen and Dragset?relation to the
workers in Leipzig most closely resembles Sierra?situation in Mexico. As
the house painters painted the gallery walls white seven hours per day for
seven weeks, the transfer of the task from the artists to the workers
converted the performance into a commentary on the depressed labor 
conditions
in Eastern Germany and the role of "western" investment in that context.  
But
Sierra?is a Spaniard and white in mostly mestizo Mexico, a point that some
have made to suggest that this racial difference automatically marks him as
an oppressor. He irritates the art elite with the obvious absurdity of the
tasks he calls for and the mixing of members of different social classes
inside the normally segregated spaces of the Mexico City?art world.
Admittedly, Sierra seeks to shock, not as a flip gesture but as a form of
institutional critique that is detonated by the breaking of social taboos.
Tellingly, many of Sierra?most vocal critics in Mexico, who accuse him of
further exploiting the exploited, hail from the city?wealthiest families,
whose fortunes were built on the backs of the same people in whose name they
now complain.
    It seems to me however, that there is another element of Sierra?work
that is key to understanding its disruptive quality. The artist?stress on
the pathetic condition of the underclass and the meaninglessness of their
actions flies in the face of a venerable Mexican tradition of celebrating 
the
creativity of the oppressed in the face of adversity. For seven decades, the
PRI?romanticizing of indigenous tradition and popular culture functioned
ideologically to legitimate the party as the true representative of "the
Mexican people".  From the onset of the Mexican Revolution, progressive
artists have made el pueblo central to their work. The muralists created
heroic depictions of them; the Popular Graphics Workshop produced multiples
designed for their use and education. Artists such as Felipe Ehrenberg have
copied their vernacular cultural practices such as altar making and custom
car decoration while others such as Guillermo G?mez-Pe?a, who contracts
Tijuana velvet painters, have employed artisans as executors of their
concepts. Ruben Ortiz and Francis Alys have exhibited popular art by others
as a conceptual gesture. With different degrees of paternalism, irony or
identification, all these artists champion the resilience and ingenuity of
the underdog, forging an imagined union between representatives of the elite
and the "masses".
    Sierra?work, on the other hand, foregrounds desperation and futility,
the gap between rich and poor, the constant humiliation to which the needy
are subjected and the discretionary power of those with even a modicum of
wealth.  His performances suggest a view of contemporary  Mexican society
clinging to the hierarchies established under Spanish rule. Transferring the
interplay among contemporary castes to the gallery space and deflecting
attention from issues of creativity or originality through the stress on
repetitive tasks, Sierra brings this power dynamic into focus. He recasts a
minimalist inquiry into the relation between the viewer and mass as an
investigation in the relation between viewers and "the masses."  By
concentrating on economic exploitation, in which many educated Mexicans
participate through their employment of servants and day laborers, rather
than political corruption from which most Mexicans can distinguish
themselves, Sierra challenges the basic privileges that even the most 
liberal
members of the middle class take for granted. It is unlikely that they would
relinquish them, for it is the availability of cheap labor that enables even
the middle class to inflate its standard of living and to imagine itself as
the protector of poor people (i.e. el pueblo) who would otherwise be
destitute.
    One of Sierra?ost large-scale projects to date was 465 Remunerated
Persons which took place at the Museo Rufino Tamayo in October, 1999. Sierra
solicited assistance from a casting agency, and called for 465 adult mestizo
males between the ages of 30 and 40. Though the agency did not follow his
instructions to the letter, Sierra was able to fill an exhibition hall with
men who fit the "working class type" and who stood still in grid formation
for three hours during an opening.  The group?size and mien could have been
comparable to all the custodial workers of Chapultepec Park, where the 
museum
is located. Under normal conditions, those men would be compelled to seem
invisible. It is not as if they cannot actually be seen, but they are 
trained
and expected to operate in the presence of visitors as if their existence
were insignificant. Their symbolic erasure parallels the elision of labor
concerns that is multinational management?favorite cost-cutting strategy.
Sierra?piece functioned like a human version of Richard Serra?Tilted Arc.
The museum visitors were physically constrained by the presence of this
collective mass, and their well-being disturbed by the impropriety of 
sharing
a gallery space with men of a lower social class who were not cleaning,
serving or guarding the premises.
    In other pieces by Sierra that he has carried out both in Mexico and in
Cuba, another Latin American country in the midst of a rocky transition from
centralized control by a "revolutionary" state to a privatize economy and
social order, solicited labor takes the form of performed abjection.
Reformulating the signs of Catholic martyrdom, Sierra posits that the price
of survival extends beyond self-abnegation to include the commodification of
the body. Person Remunerated for Cleaning Shoes of Attendees to an Opening
Without Their Consent, which took place in March, 2000, at Ace Gallery in
Mexico City, featured an eleven year old boy who usually cleaned shoes in a
subway station, hoping to occasionally secure some payment.  Sierra?two
actions to date in Cuba have underscored how, in an burgeoning dollar-driven
economy organized around tourism, the island?inhabitants can make more
selling themselves than working in any trade for which they may have been
trained.  For 250 cm Line Tattooed on Remunerated Persons, (El Espacio
Aglutinador, January, 1999), Sierra paid $30 each to six unemployed mulatto
men from Old Havana to stand shoulder to shoulder and have a line tattooed
across their backs. In November, 2000, Sierra returned to Havana during the
biennial to present Santiago Sierra Invites You for A Drink. He called on 
the
international art tourists to join him on the roof garden of a local 
artist?home. The foreign guests were invited to sit on three long wooden 
cubes that
served as benches, each of which contained and concealed a Cuban sex worker
who was being paid $30.
    Sierra?work throws into relief the harsh realities that many art world
globe-trotters prefer to elide on their junkets and in their exhibitions.
While I find the local controversies surrounding his work to be quite
telling, I hardly find them hard hitting. Having witnessed some of 
Sierra?actions and having had the opportunity to speak to the participants, 
I do not
come away with the impression that they see themselves as exploited.  That
notwithstanding, Sierra?current popularity in Europe may be leading him
into situations that could jeopardize his work and even dilute its force as
institutional critique. In the past year, Sierra has received invitations to
present his work in Berlin, Madrid, Pusan, Paris and New York, and some of
these events have even been partially subsidized by the Mexican government.
In accepting these invitations abroad, Sierra must rely more heavily on
institutional support and relinquish some control over the selection of
participants in his projects. The institutional structures he negotiates 
with
often diminish the element of surprise he could use when he was operating
independently. In some cases, advance notice produces a split audience in
which some arrive to watch the others?eactions, to act as anthropologists
or to parody the behavior of a bourgeois ?pat?.  These dangers are ones that
any artist working on the international circuit face as s/he moves quickly
from context to context. That nomadism makes it terribly difficult to engage
in a protracted analysis or engagement with any social situation.  In
addition, mega-exhibition audiences are frequently dominated by equally
nomadic professionals without a stake in the political context of event
locales. As artists like Sierra attempt to transfer a set of issues from
their own working environment in a developing country to a first world 
arena,
they face thrill-seeking audiences that consume the political drama of the
periphery as spectacle.
        During 1998 and 1999, Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT) offered a
strategy for managing contemporary nomadism without relinquishing political
intervention. Their virtual performance promoted  "global citizenship" via
the internet. The group?project was rooted politically in the Zapatista
struggle in Chiapas, but EDT?actual members are dispersed throughout the U
.S.; Ricardo Dominguez and Stefan Wray are in New York, Carmin Karasic in
Boston, and Brett Stalbaum in San Jose.  Through creative d?tournement of
HTML software, EDT devised means of bringing civic dialogue to a domain that
is increasingly dominated by consumerism. Giving the issues raised by the
Zapatistas a global platform, in which people all over the world contribute
to a debate about the civil and economic rights of an indigenous group, EDT
established links across borders based on political solidarity rather than
escapist identification with the indian as romantic "other."   This
discussion helped to transform the privileged signifier of official Mexican
discourse, el indio, from silent symbol to political agent.
    The activities of EDT derive from the theory of Electronic Civil
Disobedience which was elaborated by Critical Art Ensemble (CAE), a
collective that Ricardo Dominguez was a member of prior to founding EDT.  In
their 1995 essay on Electronic Civil Disobedience, CAE argued that blockage
and information dispersal were the key means of intervening politically in
the virtual domain.  This idea was predicated on the notion that information
is currency in the global economic order and that those who own it seek to
block others?ccess to it. Therefore, CAE argued that subversion of the
system lay in controlling institutions by blocking their information
circuits, and democratizing the internet by rerouting information free of
cost to the public.  These strategies, according to CAE, blend the political
radicalism of the old left with the technical expertise of new and
transgressive, albeit apolitical hackers. What EDT did was to develop the
means for thousands of internet users to "block" the Mexican government?we
bsite as a gesture in support of the EZLN?demands that President 
Zedillo?government recognize indigenous rights. They created their actions 
in direct
response to the December, 1997 massacre of Zapatista supporters in Acteal,
when 45 women and children were killed by paramilitary forces.
    EDT?virtual actions structurally altered the electronic embodiment of
the Mexican state. They did so via an operation that they developed called
FloodNet, a command that retools the usual "refresh" or "reload" button on a
web server.  Whereas under normal conditions a user would hit the "refresh"
button to obtain updated information, FloodNet activates this command each
time a user enters a site. In this sense, the server being acted upon 
"feels"
the presence of the users. If several hundred or several thousand users
activate this procedure simultaneously, it is unlikely that a server will be
able to manage the entries and will thus be forced to shut down. In the
course of a year, some 80,000 people participated in EDT?FloodnNet actions.
The virtual sit-ins did in fact shut down the Mexican government?official
website several times. That these mass occupations of the Mexican
government?website disabled its capacity to represent the country is an
uncannily accurate metaphor for the PRI?dysfunctional relationship to the
citizenry ?e more people applied pressure the state to recognize their
presence, the less able it was to maintain itself in operation.
    FloodNet also makes structured absences on a website intelligible.  In
addition to alerting the server to user presence, FloodNet offers a second
upload function, enabling users to send information into the site. EDT
programmed FloodNet to continuously upload the names of the Acteal victims
into the Mexican government website, cognizant of the implications of the
server?failure to recognize the dead. Users also have the option of
manually uploading other information of their choice. For example, if users
uploaded questions about human rights on the Mexican government site, the
server?response would be a 404 file, which signifies that the server cannot
locate any information on this subject. This also suggested that there was 
no
space accorded to human rights on the server, which could be read as
government resistance to the issue. Those uploaded requests, though
unanswered, left a trace ? precisely what was left unanswered. Virtual
sit-ins activated scores of requests for this kind of absent information,
thus creating a record for the server of that information which it could not
recognize. In this sense, FloodNet not only blocked and deterred; it also
cast negative space.
    That EDT would call its actions "theater" might seem odd, particularly
because of what is actually visible on-screen. A virtual sit-in participant
will have received a call to action via internet and may have imagined
hundreds of collaborators, but sharing a physical space was not part of the
experience; instead it was shared time and a consensual collective
hallucination that constituted a group. These factors notwithstanding, 
EDT?Floodnet actions did follow a script, and they had a beginning, middle 
and an
end.  What appeared at the bottom of the screen was a row of vertical black
lines moving up and down ?barometer of FloodNet activity, but it hardly a
mimetic representation of actions. EDT?theater is resolutely non-mimetic;
instead, it operates in a manner similar to that of early conceptual art by
such artists as Douglas Huebler, in that the effects of a textual 
description
of something imagined resonated in the minds of its audience-participants
without a realist representation serving as an intermediary. The difference
was that what was "imagined" did actually happen, even though what happened
was not visible to the agents of the action.  Judging by EDT"s impressive
audience-participant numbers and the high-rate of repeat-participants, it
seems fair to argue that audience-participants?onsciousness was indeed
altered by their experience of virtual theater.
    EDT?FloodNet actions also engendered a whirlwind of controversy among
hackers. In tampering with software, EDT?activities resembled those of
hackers; but unlike hackers who operate surreptitiously, EDT acted in the
open, announced its projects, introduced its members and invited
collaboration. As a result, several hackers attacked EDT as "digitally
incorrect" for their non-conformity to the unwritten principle of electronic
subversion: secrecy above all. The reactions to EDT from the US Department 
of
Defense and the Mexican government betray their difficulty in distinguishing
between criminal activity and political action. EDT?transparency appears to
have baffled the US military, which interpreted the theory and practice of 
"e
lectronic civil disobedience" as a euphemism for cyberterrorism.
During EDT?Swarm action against the Mexican government, the Pentagon and
the Frankfurt Stock Exchange at the 1998 Ars Electronica New Media Festival
in Linz, Austria, the Defense Information Systems Agency, a division of the
US Department of Defense, launched a counter-offensive.  Requests from EDT
were redirected to a hostile applet that crashed the browsers and froze
FloodNet. This constituted the first time the US had unleashed its 
electronic
arsenal against a civilian organization, which, in the eyes of EDT members,
violated the Posse Comitatus Law that forbids the US military from attacking
American civilians. That attack came on the heels of telephoned threats to
Dominguez from a Mexican who he identified as a government representative.
One year later, in the wake of dozens of articles about this skirmish in the
mainstream media, the Domiguez and Wray were invited to Washington by a
security consultant for the US military to exchange information about
electronic warfare with the National Security Agency.  The two EDT members
gave a presentation on their activities and were subjected to hours of
interrogation by military about the future of electronic civil disobedience.
In the aftermath of the controversy over EDT?methods, other similar means
of virtual intervention emerged that have led to moves by several 
governments
to criminalize such activity. In the two years since EDT distributed its
Disturbance Developer Kits, Floodnet political actions have taken place
around the world in support of such causes as termination of the death
penalty in the US, and dismantling of nuclear bombs in India. The tactics of
Floodnet, however, continued to mutate. In 2000, major commercial servers
such as Yahoo and America On Line were brought down by means of "distributed
denial of service (DDoS)," a mechanism that enables one computer to perform
even
more potent flooding actions than EDT?Floodnet. These shutdowns, for
which as yet no one has claimed responsibility, prompted the European
Community to legislation banning "distributed denial of service, " based on
Britain's the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act that passed last year.
Though EDT?Floodnet systems demands mass participation to achieve its
goals, the fact that the DDK?circulate worldwide is being construed by some
governments as tantamount to "distributed denial of service." Current 
virtual
skirmishes between Israeli and Palestinians have come under the scrutiny of
the Israeli government, which is now seeking to make their activities 
illegal.

    Though most of the metaphors Dominguez uses to describe EDT actions are
drawn from the language of theatre, he also borrows frequently from the
vocabulary of sculpture to describe the structures his group build, jam and
alter. For example, Dominguez describes the FloodNet as an electronic
tombstone that repeatedly inscribed the names of the Acteal dead. To him,
servers are social sculpture, with endless potential for creating new
communications networks and cooperative relationships with street level
political action. Like Sierra, EDT?fundamental task is to make the presence
of the forgotten sectors of Mexican society felt. The group?notoriety in
the cyberart world has enabled them to spread their tactics to other
"hactivists" by generating a multiple interactive artwork. Last year, EDT
culminated its FloodNet action by issuing Disturbance Developer Kits (DDK)
via internet for other organizations and individuals who sought to create
FloodNet operations for other causes.
    Why the Zedillo government might not have chosen of its own accord to
recognize the names of victims killed by its own military hardly needs
explanation. Organizing an examination of social ills around the exploration
of the status and history of corpses links the efforts of EDT with the work
of SEMEFO. SEMEFO?focus, however, highlights another effect of
globalization ?e social disintegration in the metropolis. During the
1990s, Mexico?cities experienced soaring crime rates; the urban
infrastructures have been heavily taxed by exploding population growth and
diminished resources; and kinship structures have been ruptured by
accelerated migration and extended work hours. As the number of displaced 
and
disappeared persons increases, so does the number of unclaimed bodies, which
end up in the country?morgues as property of the state. Though the majority
of the bodies that find their way to the morgues are victims of crimes, some
are simply casualties of poverty. Even for those who retain family contacts,
the cost of even the most basic funeral services offered by the state -- 
$250
US ?r exceeds the purchase power of good portion of the citizenry, many of
whom mete out an existence on less that $5 per day.
    Those cadavers and their personal effects are the stuff with which 
SEMEFO
weaves its unseemly tales. Some works seem to have sprung from the covers of
Mexico?many scandal sheets, such as the laminated cards for cutting cocaine
lines that feature photos of murdered drug dealers. In their other projects
appear clothing marked by the bloodstains of fatal wounds and pounds of hair
shorn from heads in preparation for dissection. SEMEFO has taken government
issued sheets impregnated with body fluids, attached them to stretchers and
exhibited them as painting. They have imbedded objects found on murder
victims in blocks of cement resembling sidewalks. They have filled glass
cases with the carbonized bones of unknown people that they extracted from
crematory ovens.
    The artist who is perhaps best known for exhibiting objects as charged
traces of actions is Joseph Beuys; but the actions recalled by his objects
were his own. Beuys, Chris Burden and many others have exhibited props and
instruments from performances, while numerous other artists from Adrian 
Piper
to Andres Serrano and Bob Flanagan have made their own flesh, fluids and
waste the stuff of their work. That focus on the artist?body and actions
was part of an attempt to reframe aesthetic value as the performative 
residue
recalled by a used substance rather than the intrinsic qualities of matter.
Still, all these practices draw on a history of the Catholic relic, the
exhibit of human remains and personal effects as curiosity and mystical
object par excellence. In the Middle Ages, relics, particularly those that
showed no evidence of decay, were relished and revered as evidence of the
triumph of spirit over matter, of the saintliness of those martyrs who were
metonymically represented in the displays. In the centuries that have
followed, numerous candidacies for sainthood have been proposed based on the
belief that the flesh of the Christian in question withstood torture,
destruction and even death. The specter of those traditions lingers behind
these contemporary artworks that thrust the unclaimed bodies into spotlight
in an effort to thwart the efforts to efface them, and with them the
unspeakable violence that brought an end to each one?life.
    SEMEFO does not champion the sanctity of the body with its focus on
corpses, but rather underscores the desacralizing of life that is the
suppressed underside of Mexico?ongoing economic crisis. The work is not
simplistically denunciatory; instead it evinces a strange ambivalence about
if not fascination with decomposition, The group?most eloquent
spokesperson, Teresa Margolles, readily avers her attraction to the 
processes
that cadavers undergo; physical decay, hair growth and nail growth after
death. Margolles, a photographer and installation artist, has established an
ongoing relationship with the staff of the real SEMEFO morgue. This has
enabled her to participate in dissections, to obtain discarded body parts,
and to learn about taxidermy and techniques for preserving flesh. Whereas
Michelangelo studied cadavers to improve his ability to represent live human
form; Margolles remains fixed on the corpse qua corpse.
To my mind, SEMEFO?project has more in common with a Gothic sensibility
that begins with Mary Shelley?Frankenstein than it does with the anatomical
obsessions of Renaissance artists. Shelley?story is organized around the
revival of a corpse as an allegory about repressed desires; the monster
embodies a split and projected part of the self.  That composite corpse is a
man-made entity, a scientific product that functions as a metaphor for
socially constructed aspects of the self, whose genesis and very being
threaten life as we know it. As many critics have noted, Shelley?monster
was a symbol that explained a philosophical dilemma for which no rational
language had been codified. Similarly, SEMEFO?projects draw us into a space
beyond life as we usually see it by bringing us in contact with the dead.
SEMEFO thus inhabits a metaphor that theatricalizes the irrational dimension
of Mexico?present.
Much in the same way that Sierra?work flies in the face of a longstanding
tradition of romanticizing Mexico?poor, SEMEFO?endeavors call into
question the widely held assumptions about the culture?embrace of death. Ar
tists, anthropologists and tourists are routinely enamoured with altars to
the dead, Jos? Guadalupe Posada?skeleton? the popular cultural
personification of death as "La Pelona," and many other symbolic means by
which Mexican society supposedly confronts mortality. It has almost become a
clich? to suggest Mexicans are more culturally adjusted to death than
Americans, and that that sensibility is rooted in a purportedly Aztec view 
of
death as a regenerative force. This view veers dangerously close to an
essentialist characterization of contemporary Mexicans as people destined by
ancestry to respond to endless fatal violence with humor and resignation, an
argument that can easily be used to legitimate their further exploitation.
SEMEFO does invoke the Aztecs in their citation of Orozco?painting, but the
group also regularly cites George Bataille?theories about how cultures
ritualize violence as a form of social control.  Whereas Shelley was
preoccupied with science?encroachment on morality in the age of
Enlightenment, SEMEFO enables us to grasp global economics as a form of
instrumental reason levied against a people in the name of "modernization."
Through their focus on violent death they chronicle the social 
disintegration
that is a by -product of an imploding economic order.
    SEMEFO, Sierra and EDT are caught in the interstices between the
post-human and the antihuman aspects of our current moment. The term
"post-human" usually refers to the possibilities of sentience outside the
body, the advent of artificial reproduction and the dissolution of
recognizable boundaries between life and death engendered by organ
transplants. Instead of rehashing cyberculture?glorification of these
developments as intrinsically liberating, the artists in question examine 
the
human cost of "progress." They all describe a world in which some human
beings can exist impervious to the demands of the social while others are
viewed as cumbersome weight. They make work about societies in which power 
is
best expressed as the ability to commodify all elements of life, and whose
impoverished majorities are subject to modes of objectification that the
privileged hide from view. Commodification of the human body nonetheless 
runs
rampant in the age of globalization in the form of illegal organ traffic, 
the
international traffic of sex workers from the third world, and the sale of
children from poor countries to adoptive parents in the first world.
    The artwork that makes this point most poignantly is a piece that Teresa
Margolles presented at Ace Gallery in New York in the spring of 2000 called
Tongue. It consisted of a taxidermied human tongue, perforated by an 
earring,
that protruded from a white wall in a small room. Directly across from it 
was
a tiny sign that explained how to tongue was obtained by the artist from the
mother of the deceased in exchange for a coffin in which to bury the rest of
his remains. Margolles explained in an interview that she had approached the
mother upon learning of the situation. The woman?teenage son had died of a
drug overdose and the mother could not afford the cost of a funeral.
According Margolles, the mother was shocked by the artist?offer at first,
but after a lengthy conversation they reached an agreement to exchange the
tongue for the coffin. Margolles herself surgically removed and preserved 
the
tongue.
    For the first exhibition of the tongue in Mexico City, Margolles invited
the deceased?relatives. Out of discretion, the artist had not mentioned the
name of the deceased in the gallery flyers or in the description of the work
on the gallery wall. The boy?relatives complained to Margolles about this.
At one point, one of them said that if he were to die and if she were to
exhibit any of his body parts, he would want to have his name to be 
mentioned
in the artwork.
    In a world in which the subject of organ donation still stirs up 
profound
questions about the integrity of the human organism, this tale is
particularly resonant. That a subaltern would accept the transformation of a
part of his body into an artwork that would be credited to another person
runs counter to one might expect. I cannot help but recall for moment the
tragic colonial history of exhibiting remains of indigenous peoples and the
later efforts to repatriate and bury those remains. So many postcolonial
critiques of anthropology and of Primitivism have been centered on the
failure of both to attribute agency to the subjects who produce the
artifacts. Yet here is someone in the present that matter-of-factly imagines
himself bartering his own flesh with an artist to pay his coffin. One could
read this as an assertion of agency or a symptom of profound social decay. I
prefer to see it as a combination of the two. The artists I have discussed
here call upon us to contemplate the implications of these ethical and
aesthetic dilemmas, which are proliferating at the onset of a new 
millennium.
Note: Much of the information in this piece came from interviews that I
conducted with Ricardo Dominguez (Nov. 1999), Santiago Sierra (May, 2000) 
and
Teresa Margolles (May, 2000). I thank them for their help in the development
of this essay.

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