In the 1970s, German artist Joseph Beuys, famous for his public performances and theories on art, politics, and society, developed the term Social Sculpture. The term, which became monumentally influential and continues to simmer in both the high and low art worlds alike, investigates “how we mold and shape the world in which we live” and led to the equally famous saying, “Everyone an Artist.”
For a week in 1974, Beuys performed I Like America and America Likes Me by staying in a New York City gallery with a live coyote — it was his symbolic effort to repair the damage done to Native Americans. Close to thirty years later, Mexican artist Yoshua Okón reproduced the performance in his Mexico City studio.
Beuys’ original materials — a felt blanket, staff, and Wall Street Journal — were modernized with a cheap blanket, police baton, TV Guides, and, most comically, a hired Mexican middle man (used to navigate the Mexican government’s bureaucracy) referred to in Mexico as a “coyote”. The update is simple but effective.
Okón is part of a middle-aged group of artists from Mexico City represented in the exhibition Escultura Social, thoughtfully curated by Julie Rodrigues Widholm and exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the museum’s first ever Mexican art group show. Chicago has the second largest Mexican population in the US (after Los Angeles), making this exhibition especially overdue.
Widholm gives the explanation (or is it an excuse?) that Mexican artists have only recently begun making work that creates a dialogue in the international avant-garde forum. She summarizes previous Mexican art as mainly “Mexican muralism, folk arts, and neo-Mexicanism.” This point aside, Widholm presents a clear and digestible introduction and framework to the artwork documented in this bilingual book.
The essays and interviews lack the obtuse and concocted scholarly discourse that commonly suffocates contemporary art. They are, instead, enjoyable and informative, and compliment the artwork’s sincere craft and community. Escultura Social succeeds in bringing us a relevant, worthwhile glimpse of contemporary artwork from Mexico City, where community, not geography, smartly define the boundaries of the city.
– Chris Force
Escultura Social: A New Generation of Art from Mexico City
Julie Rodriguez Widholm
Paperback, 224 pages
$39.95, Yale University Press / Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
Yale University Press: yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks
Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago: www.mcachicago.org