The Berlin Wall.” Parkett (2015) Pp
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
McDonough, Tom. “The Berlin Wall.” Parkett (2015) pp. 62 – 69 [ill.] A braham Cruzvillegas A braham Cruzvillegas ABRAHAM CRUZVILLEGAS, AUTODESTRUCCIÓN 8: SINBYEONG, (Self-Destruction 8: Sinbyeong), 2015, found objects from redevelopment areas in Seoul, variable dimensions, installation view Art Sonje Center / SELBSTZERSTÖRUNG 8: SINBYEONG, gefundene GegenständePARKETT aus Sanierungsgebieten 97 2015 in Seoul, Masse variabel, Installationsansicht.62 63 PARKETT 97 2015 (ALL IMAGES COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND KURIMANZUTTO, MEXICO; THOMAS DANE GALLERY, LONDON, AND GALERIE CHANTAL CROUSEL, PARIS / PHOTO: KIM TAEDONG) A braham Cruzvillegas A braham Cruzvillegas ABRAHAM CRUZVILLEGAS, AUTODESTRUCCIÓN 8: SINBYEONG, (Self-Destruction 8: Sinbyeong), 2015, found objects from redevelopment areas in Seoul, variable dimensions, installation view Art Sonje Center / SELBSTZERSTÖRUNG 8: SINBYEONG, gefundene GegenständePARKETT aus Sanierungsgebieten 97 2015 in Seoul, Masse variabel, Installationsansicht.62 63 PARKETT 97 2015 (ALL IMAGES COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND KURIMANZUTTO, MEXICO; THOMAS DANE GALLERY, LONDON, AND GALERIE CHANTAL CROUSEL, PARIS / PHOTO: KIM TAEDONG) A braham Cruzvillegas A braham Cruzvillegas TOM Mc DONOUGH The Berlin Wall In 2008, while on a residency in Scotland, Abraham rity, insufficiency, and solidarity. Each song, we could Cruzvillegas began writing song lyrics. He has de- say, holds a lesson, but some in particular seem to scribed their style as “a hybrid combination of inspir- provide a broader reflection on the structural param- ing sources, such as romantic popular music from eters not only of the colonia of Cruzvillegas’s youth Mexico, folk music, boleros, dub, rock’n’roll, salsa, but also of his current artistic practice. reggae, Brazilian music, corridos, punk, ska, cumbia, That’s the case with “El muro de Berlín” (The trova Yucateca, funk, protest music from Latin Amer- Berlin Wall, 2010), a song about a fence erected to ica during the seventies, commercial pop from every- separate two adjacent neighborhoods, the “hoity- he Self-Construction Suites), 2013, installation view Walker Art Center / DIE EIGENBAU-FOLGEN, Installationsansicht. where, norteñas, hip-hop, etc.”1) The songs are remi- toity and cocky” Colonia Romero de Terreros and niscences of his childhood during the 1970s and ’80s the “proletarian” Pedregal de Santo Domingo, “full in an informal settlement in Ajusco, at what was then of argumentative plebs.”2) The wall, a product of in- the southern edge of Mexico City; as such, they are tolerance, is also a monument to hypocrisy: If the in- coextensive with the origin of his AUTOCONSTRUC- habitants of these quarters “mutually despised one CIÓN (Self-Construction, 2007– ) works and reflect another,” they also “needed each other desperately”: many of the same concerns of this ongoing series of mixed-media sculptures, whose point of departure Some were masons, plumbers and domestics, is the improvised methods of construction found in Metalworkers, carpenters, painters, body shop workers, Ajusco and other squatter communities throughout And the others hired them at low rates. THE AUTOCONSTRUCCIÓN SUITES (T Latin America. Alternately humorous and poignant, , militant and intimate, Cruzvillegas’s lyrics speak of If the wall appears physically as a barrier, as an ab- growing up in a peri-urban zone marked by insecu- solute dividing line between these socially divergent settlements, its actual function is revealed to be TOM Mc DONOUGH is a writer and critic based in western more complex. It acts more as a membrane, allowing New York and Toronto. labor and money to pass through while filtering out PARKETT 97 2015 64 65 PARKETT 97 2015 ABRAHAM CRUZVILLEGAS A braham Cruzvillegas A braham Cruzvillegas TOM Mc DONOUGH The Berlin Wall In 2008, while on a residency in Scotland, Abraham rity, insufficiency, and solidarity. Each song, we could Cruzvillegas began writing song lyrics. He has de- say, holds a lesson, but some in particular seem to scribed their style as “a hybrid combination of inspir- provide a broader reflection on the structural param- ing sources, such as romantic popular music from eters not only of the colonia of Cruzvillegas’s youth Mexico, folk music, boleros, dub, rock’n’roll, salsa, but also of his current artistic practice. reggae, Brazilian music, corridos, punk, ska, cumbia, That’s the case with “El muro de Berlín” (The trova Yucateca, funk, protest music from Latin Amer- Berlin Wall, 2010), a song about a fence erected to ica during the seventies, commercial pop from every- separate two adjacent neighborhoods, the “hoity- he Self-Construction Suites), 2013, installation view Walker Art Center / DIE EIGENBAU-FOLGEN, Installationsansicht. where, norteñas, hip-hop, etc.”1) The songs are remi- toity and cocky” Colonia Romero de Terreros and niscences of his childhood during the 1970s and ’80s the “proletarian” Pedregal de Santo Domingo, “full in an informal settlement in Ajusco, at what was then of argumentative plebs.”2) The wall, a product of in- the southern edge of Mexico City; as such, they are tolerance, is also a monument to hypocrisy: If the in- coextensive with the origin of his AUTOCONSTRUC- habitants of these quarters “mutually despised one CIÓN (Self-Construction, 2007– ) works and reflect another,” they also “needed each other desperately”: many of the same concerns of this ongoing series of mixed-media sculptures, whose point of departure Some were masons, plumbers and domestics, is the improvised methods of construction found in Metalworkers, carpenters, painters, body shop workers, Ajusco and other squatter communities throughout And the others hired them at low rates. THE AUTOCONSTRUCCIÓN SUITES (T Latin America. Alternately humorous and poignant, , militant and intimate, Cruzvillegas’s lyrics speak of If the wall appears physically as a barrier, as an ab- growing up in a peri-urban zone marked by insecu- solute dividing line between these socially divergent settlements, its actual function is revealed to be TOM Mc DONOUGH is a writer and critic based in western more complex. It acts more as a membrane, allowing New York and Toronto. labor and money to pass through while filtering out PARKETT 97 2015 64 65 PARKETT 97 2015 ABRAHAM CRUZVILLEGAS A braham Cruzvillegas A braham Cruzvillegas his work, against the backdrop of the elegant white driven international art circuit”—a position that al- gallery space and to recognize it as an object that has lows him “to assert the asymmetries of object experi- traveled, so to speak, across the Berlin Wall separat- ence induced by global economic integration.”6) ABRAHAM CRUZVILLEGAS, ILS SONT ZAZOUS ing its proletarian material origins from its current Perhaps we could say that Cruzvillegas’s work (DEMOCRATIST & ENGAGED), 2012, rebar, inhabitation of the decidedly hoity-toity and cocky occupies the espace partagé—the space both shared fabric, feathers, chain, meat, 35 x 135 x 30” / environment of the global art market. Many critics and divided—between those two experiences, those SIE SIND ZAZOUS (DEMOKRAT & BESCHÄFTIGT), only see Cruzvillegas’s art occupying one side of this two economies. It’s a term borrowed from the great Armierungseisen, Stoff, Kette, Fleisch, fence: For them, it is an unproblematic translation Brazilian geographer Milton Santos, who from exile 88,9 x 342,9 x 76,2 cm. into sculptural vocabulary of the informal and com- in Paris wrote a book of the same title in 1975, in munal building methods he encountered as a child which he characterized countries like Mexico as hav- in Ajusco.5) However inspiring such accounts may ing a dual economy, or what he called an economy be, they miss the larger institutional apparatuses of “two circuits.” Both were the outcome of contem- the social costs of this uneven division of land and tions itself between two worlds, one proletarian and within which his sculpture circulates. Only recently porary technological modernization, but that pro- wealth, embodied in the excretions—the piss, shit, the other posh. As the artist has explained in regard have those views been challenged, most notably by cess inevitably affected segments of the population and garbage—that pile up on one side. As Cruzville- to the AUTOCONSTRUCCIÓN project, “Many of these art historian Robin Adèle Greeley, who locates the unequally. There is an upper circuit, composed of gas writes, “It was important to work and to survive / works express my wish to confront two or more radi- work instead precisely “in the systemic interconnec- capital-intensive modern industry, banking, export With the other, without the other, and despite the cally different economic systems, creating hybrid tions between object experience in developing coun- trade, and the like, which yields a higher income for other.” marriages and unexpected combinations of materi- tries . and object experience in the hegemonic those employed but which produces only a limited “The Berlin Wall” is, on one hand, a vivid obser- als and techniques.”3) Of course, these marriages and ‘centers’ of developed countries and the market- number of jobs; and a lower circuit, accounting for a vation of this singular location, of the thin line that combinations are evident within individual works, divides and conjoins these two districts. But on the whether we want to label them assemblage, brico- other, it is a reflection on the dynamic that propels lage, or, as Mark Godfrey has convincingly argued, ABRAHAM CRUZVILLEGAS, THE AUTOCONSTRUCCIÓN SUITES (The Self-Construction Suites),