SCULPTURE
July-August, 2001.
InSITEReturn to:
by JO-ANNE BERELOWITZOn Sunday, February 24, 2001, the fourth incarnation of InSITE came to a close. Initiated in 1992, InSITE is a bi-national visual art project deployed at scattered sites in the neighboring border cities of San Diego and Tijuana. Held initially at two-, then at three-year intervals, the one constant in its developmental unfolding has been the commissioning of site-specific works. In almost every other regard, InSITE has changed significantly each time it has been staged, changes marked by growing collaboration (and now parity) with Mexican institutions, internationalization of the curatorial team, expansion of the concept of "artwork" into the larger cultural field, and a willingness to risk losing established audiences by commissioning and positioning art in sites and for audiences usually quite remote from the art world.
Since its inception, InSITE has commissioned site-specific works under the sponsorship of Installation, a San Diego-based nonprofit arts organization directed by Michael Krichman. In 1992, the program drew together San Diego art institutions that commissioned and exhibited installation and site work. While several of the commissioned works were located in Tijuana, neither the focus nor the character of the project was then bi-national. Moreover, few of the works were then created specifically for InSITE.
In 1994, the scale of the undertaking shifted and expanded significantly: cultural, educational, and political institutions from Baja California and Mexico City now participated. The 38 participating institutions from both sides of the border commissioned at least one new work for the more than 75 sponsored projects. InSITE97 marked a true partnership between Mexican institutions and the San Diego-based Installation. Moreover, an overarching theme, "Public Space in a Private Time," now tied together the 43 projects commissioned specifically for InSITE. The theme emphasized the articulation of urban spaces and examination of the different "publics" that comprise Tijuana and San Diego. Comparison of the two border cities and the two cultures they represent became inevitable—as did a focus on the border. The political implications of a transborder, bi-national art project also became more overt, and many artists made work that was strongly political in character.
InSITE2000/01 also had a theme and a title. Conceptually interrogative and open-ended, it addressed the public as "When Where What." The lack of diacritical markers for words that, in ordinary discourse, require them, rendered the title ambiguous. Simultaneously an interrogative and a declarative, the title elicited discomfort and uncertainty in the viewer—precisely the effects that InSITE set out to produce. In short, InSITE2000/01 was less about producing artworks for selected sites than about deploying art to destabilize and disrupt old cultural articulations, thereby (hopefully) opening spaces for new possibilities. Where previously the subject had been the urbanscape, now it became the geoscape—the geo-politics and cultural dynamics of the San Diego-Tijuana border region.
This most recent InSITE was, without question, the most ambitious—not in terms of numbers of projects (this year only 30) but in terms of its conceptual undergirding. To engage that, it is necessary to briefly discuss the curatorial paradigms on which InSITE2000/01 drew. Two were particularly important. The first was "Conversations at the Castle," curated by Mary Jane Jacobs in 1996 to coincide with the Atlanta Olympic Games. The second was Documenta X, curated by Catherine David in 1997. Both were radical interventions in the discourse of sited art Both asked questions about how contemporary art and the broader, uninitiated, non-art world public might meet, about what possibilities might emerge from their meeting, about the kinds of political interventions that publicly staged contemporary art might effect, and about who—and what—contemporary art is.for Jacobs and David were very real, albeit discreet, presences throughout InSITE2000/ 01, for they served as consultants to the curatorial team and participated in InSITE's "Conversations"—four public forums in which artists, cultural critics, curators, and writers from various fields engaged in dialogue about issues raised by this installment of InSITE.
Very few of the commissioned artists originated from or live in this border region, and I was curious to see how artists from elsewhere would take on and address its issues. One of the most interesting treatments was by the team of Mauricio Dias and Walter Riedweg, who both live and work in Basel, Switzerland, and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Their project, MAMA, was staged at the official border crossing between San Diego and Tijuana. Indeed, to access it, the viewer was required to walk through the crossing. Their installation consisted of two small one-room structures, in each of which a video loop was continuously projected. The northernmost building featured customs officers who employ dogs to detect drugs and people being smuggled into the U.S. It would be easy to demonize such agents of interdiction, but Riedweg and Dias treated them as nuanced human beings working at their jobs and tremendously engaged by their canine companions. The "mama" of the title referred to questions the artists posed to the agents about their mothers. Accordingly, the agents came across as capable of positive and noble affections. The adjacent structure and video loop featured the objects of the agents' interdiction—undocumented migrants warming themselves at a makeshift fire from which they then flee, presumably because agents intercept them. When viewed sequentially, in the order described above, the videos triggered an uneasy dissonance, prompting the viewer to reflect on the unequal dynamics of power that positions some men on the side of the law, while others are without power, fugitives from the law. Given its theme, it was a brilliant siting; 40,000 people a day walked past it. It by-passed arts usual venues and engaged a disparate audience.
Also exceptional was the contribution of Mexico City antist Gustavo Artigas. For his Rules of the Game, two Mexican soccer teams and two U.S. basketball teams played against one another simultaneously in the gymnasium of Tijuana's Lazaro Cardenas High School before an audience of screaming colleagues and InSITE viewers. The event—two different sports cultures governed by different sets of rules battling it out on the same playing field—was a metaphor for U.S.-Mexico relations.
Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle's piece was stunningly beautiful. His installation at the bullring at Playas de Tijuana, suspended a huge expanse of white rip-stop nylon above the bullring arena, obscuring the earth and serving as a receiving dish for signals from space via an antenna and speakers surrounding the bullring. His project referenced the "white cube," the sacred precinct of the gallery space. Manglano-valle transformed the space "inside the white cube" into a white sphere in a space outside the institutional confines of art.
But InSITE's organizers and artists by no means excluded more conventional sites for art. Allan McCollum, for example, chose to exhibit his piece in the Art Gallery of San Diego State University. Titled Signs of the Imperial Valley: Sand Spikes from Mount Signal, it examined the ways in which cultural significance attaches to objects and communities. The objects that McCollum focused on were sand spikes—strange geological formations of sand cemented together with crystalline calcite. A rich bed of these had once lain together at the base of Mount Signal/EI Centinela, a mountain that straddles the border They are now to be found only in museums and private collections. McCollum was also interested in the burgeoning municipalities that developed in this desert region, communities still engaged in establishing their identities. By focusing on the extraordinary phenomena of the region and working collaboratively with its residents, he sought to bring attention to its unique landscape. For the project he worked both as curator and artist, inviting local artists to exhibit drawings, paintings, and photographs about the mountain; he also produced and exhibited over 1,000 replicas of a sand spike from a local museum. The result was a hauntingly beautiful installation that evoked the silence and wonder of the region s geological past.
Attention was focused on the border in a number of complex and interesting ways. While any lasting effect these interventions will have is impossible to predict, it is certain that InSITE continues to be a significant contribution to the cultural life of the San Diego/Tijuana border region. Its future incarnations are to be keenly anticipated.
Exhibition Reception
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