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Camouflage Transvestitism Media icons Recycling Refuse Market Panic Identities Digital kitsch Antiheroes Paranoia Invasion Tourism |
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The consumer society’s best-selling product is the comfort of belonging to it. What matters is not the product, but how it is sold. Or, at any rate, that the product and the sale are part of the same narcotic phenomenon of seduction. Internet reverts the relationship of power that results from the unidirectionality of traditional mass media. Though not without setbacks, information is starting to flow independently of advertising rules and market logic. Using different methods, through humor, disorder, mimicry, parody or camouflage, the pieces that make up this section attack advertising stereotypes, seen as social, political, military or marketing propaganda. The process of naturalizing heroes and villains in the sphere of social conflict that this propaganda attempts to impose starts to fracture and distort. The media icons and ideological memes that are shaped by the spectacle, when obstructed by the virus of art, transform into menaces, into Trojan horses, zombies who turn against their creator. A cycle of cultural recycling is triggered, a social, symbolic remix with attitudes of transvestitism, rage, abandon and impertinence. |
Ze dos Bois Transfer is a “company” whose web presence was created by the Portuguese ensemble Zé dos Bois, and which was founded as “an agency for the legal importation of American citizens interested in alternative ways of life”. Its cover shows Martim Moniz Square, where a series of tragic, but common, events involving illegal immigration are simulated, and provides real information about the legal steps an immigrant to Portugal must follow. This page is only one part of the original project that was concluded with an installation titled Situation Zero at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco in 2001. The exhibit called on the public to fill out a form which exposed all the myths and stereotypes of immigration, and where anyone interested in emigrating to Portugal could establish initial contact with that country’s job market. While the content of the page resembled that of a consultancy, the language was reminiscent of a tourism office. With its promotionally-priced packages, it invites us to take part in this new popular practice in which the immigrant, like a chameleon, dresses up as a tourist. Antonio Mendoza Antonio Mendoza’s works, gathered in the Subculture site, present us with a dizzying metacollage of images and sounds that blend, almost obscenely, icons from politics, industry, pornography, religion, fringe groups and terrorists. Mendoza gives us an up to date snapshot with the narcotic effect of the digital and its main active ingredient: speed. And with the same speed that we see the Subculture browser windows pop up and disappear, we are exposed to the extremes: comfort and alienation, control and chaos, databases and overflow. In his piece 7 sabores (7 flavors), keeping with the theme of devalued popular Latin American superheroes, Iván Lozano comes up with some new ones, Combimen, Lucha King’s, Insert Coin and Virtual Vedette, based on local stereotypes. The name of the piece, 7 sabores, comes from a dish that is served casually and which features a colorful mix of various criollo chowders from Lima that form a rainbow of colors, smells and flavors. Looking like a cross between a videogame and digital kitsch, Lozano uses these popular icons to introduce us surreptitiously to a marginalized world, using seduction to transform rejection into curiosity. This “rich combination” of antiheroes proposed by Lozano is presented to us packaged like a videogame, one which might well be offered for sale in the street by one of Lozano’s characters, playfully recycling elements from everyday life, colors and flavors, hardships, dreams and anxieties. Eduardo Navas The Diary of a Star is based on the words in Andy Warhol’s diaries. Navas points out that Warhol wrote his diaries in much the same way as blogs are written today, with the knowledge that his personal writings would become public sooner or later. The way to classify and organize the objects we see in flea markets is as enigmatic to us visitors as it is for anyone, even for the seller, to trace its provenance, the log of each rejected article. Multiverses alludes in a certain way to the immeasurability of these possible worlds, parallel worlds in which the objects have been silent witnesses to happenings, horrors, fantasies and celebrations, and which now share a common space and evoke memories all at once real, invented or implanted. Repetition ingrains memories and also generates rituals. Like market days. In his work 3AM, Arcángel Constantini offers us scenes recorded in infrared video hours before sunrise, while the El Salado market in Iztapalapa, Mexico City, is set up. The images are shown in a loop, like the loop that is the repetitive work and travel ritual of the vans to the market and the setting up of the stalls. |
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