Garage Talk: Mexico City in the 1990s: The Paint’s Not Dry

On May 12, 2005 the haudenschildGarage and the UCSD Visual Arts Department hosted a Garage Talk in conjunction with the conference Mexico City in the 1990s: The Paint’s Not Dry (5/13/05).
Is the image of Mexico City circa 1995 no longer one of experimentation and anarchy-or of putting whatever together? Without us noticing, has it now been refigured as a minor capital of arriviste entitlement? To what degree are “we” willing to settle for only this Mexico City, a dot on the map of the moveable feast that is the art world’s list of usual suspects: “If it’s Tuesday, it must be____________. (Fill in the blank with GATT member wannabe of your choice.)” With “Before the Paint’s Dry,” we wish to revisit 1990s Mexico City: bars, cantinas, the pre-”Fondesa” cafes, alternate spaces, “bad music,” and strong opinions. What stories and histories and political interventions were being imagined-and are still to be written now? We wish to convene a día de los muertos to see if this corpse called Distrito Federal can still sing a calavera to us from the mid-1990s in a charmed and off-tune timbre: tuba as melody; tambor militar as rhythm.

Mexico City, circa 1990s: The art scene was blooming and bleeding-edge - and as complex and messy as those adjectives imply. Before the story is sanitized and boiled down to a simple chapter in an art-history tome, the Visual Arts Department of the University of California, San Diego is convening some of the scene’s leading participants to argue alternative accounts.

The conference, “Mexico City in the 1990s: The Paint’s Not Dry,” begins at 9:30 a.m. on May 13, in the Seuss Room of Geisel Library, UCSD. Discussions are slated to run through 6 p.m.

The featured participants, all of whom played a part in the ’90s Mexico City art scene and who continue to have a major role in the unfolding history, include:

… Gerardo Estrada, coordinator of cultural diffusion at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and former minister of fine arts

… Mexico’s leading art critic Cuauhtémoc Medina, current (and, in 2002, the first) associate curator of Latin American art at London’s Tate

… Artist Rubén Ortiz-Torres, who was born in Mexico City, now lives in Los Angeles and teaches at UC San Diego

… Yoshua Okon, artist and founding co-director of La Panadería, which was a key arts cross-roads space in Mexico City

… Monica Manzutto, co-director of the internationally influential Kurimanzutto Gallery

… Carmen Cuenca, co-director of inSite, a network of contemporary art programs and commissioned site-specific projects throughout the San Diego-Tijuana region, which helped redefine the relationship between Mexico City and its periphery.

Among the proposed topics are analyzing patterns of artistic interaction in the urban landscape of “D.F.”; examining art collectives and informal gathering places; and chronicling Mexico City’s fruitful links to the border region of Tijuana-San Diego and to L.A., New York and beyond.

“The 1990s in Mexico City were a period of tremendous political upheaval and incredible cultural energy. The art that grew out of that was socially interactive,” said Steve Fagin, chair of the Visual Arts Department at UCSD and conference co-organizer. “Today, that art is internationally recognized. But does that mean it might lose its living spirit?

“The goal of this conference,” Fagin said, “is to take a breath before the art has become ‘official, important art.’ We want to recapture its undergroundedness, its funkiness - and its politics.”
The conference was organized by Steve Fagin, Yoshua Okon, Roberto Tejada and Rubén Ortiz-Torres of the UCSD Visual Arts Department

image: “Untitled” by: Daniela Rossell

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