Losing Ground: Public Art at the Border - inSITE program

Art in America, May, 2001 by Leah Ollman

In the latest edition of inSITE, a program of public art commissioned for the San Diego/Tijuana area, the work tended to be heavy on concept, light on material presence.

Scar. Wire. Dam. Wound. The border between the United States and Mexico suffers from metaphor exhaustion. In both art and the mass media, it's always being likened to something else. Such distillation can yield pithy truths, but it's equally likely to deliver something facile, a single note assigned to stand in for the cacophonous whole. The recently completed run of inSITE2000, a program of public projects commissioned for the San Diego/Tijuana region, exposed both realities--art's power to concentrate and intensify the existing charge of the border region, and art's impotence to make an impression that transcends its own loaded context. If public art exists "to thicken the plot," as Vito Acconci puts it, what is left for it to do when the plot is already as dense as it is here, on the most heavily trafficked international border in the world, where two radically different cultures and economies meet with such abrupt intimacy? How much thicker can it get?

InSITE has tested that proposition through more than 200 temporary, publicly sited art works over its 10-year history. The event's scale, budget, ambitions and presumptions have burgeoned since its inception in 1992, but the art itself has not kept pace, in part because of the daunting challenge of the border setting, but also as a consequence of curatorial and artistic choices.

InSITE originated when Installation Gallery, a once-vital alternative space in San Diego, lost both its director and its lease. As a means of retaining a presence in the area, the organization's advisory board launched inSITE, coordinating 21 different venues--college galleries, museums, cultural centers and vacant office spaces north and south of the border--to exhibit, concurrently, installations by 50 artists from the San Diego/Tijuana region. From the first, the event had variety and vigor, as well as substance.

By the time of its second staging in 1994, the stakes had risen precipitously, and inSITE's humble, homegrown feel had begun to metastasize into a big-budget art-world production. A hundred artists took part, most coming from afar and conceiving their work during sponsored residencies in the region. By 1997 (with higher numbers all around, organizers shifted from a biennial to a triennial schedule), the budget had risen to $2 million, the catalogue had gained heft and the event appeared to nestle into a slot on the international art festival circuit. Regional artists continued to be included in both 1994 and '97 but were increasingly outnumbered by headliners from elsewhere, such as Pepon Osorio, Dennis Oppenheim, Andy Goldsworthy, Chris Burden, Terry Allen, Yukinori Yanagi, Jose Bedia, Robert Therrien, Miguel Rio Branco and Andrea Fraser.

The latest incarnation of inSITE, which ran from late 2000 through early 2001, was comparable in size to that held in 1997 but substantially different in feel. As inSITE has grown and changed, its organizers--Carmen Cuenca directing on the Mexican side, Michael Krichman on the American, with Susan Buck-Morss, Ivo Mesquita, Osvaldo Sanchez and Sally Yard curating--have adopted ever looser, more open-ended language to describe it. "Site-specific installations" have given way to "projects," and what was once an exhibition in multiple parts is now something far more process-oriented and event-driven, spread out over a longer period of time and less grounded in physical space. Projects for inSITE2000--by Alfredo Jaar, Inigo Manglano-Ovalle, Allan McCollum, Komar and Melamid, Mark Dion, Silvia Gruner, Jeffrey Vallance, Valeska Soares, Judith Barry, Mauricio Dias and Walter Riedweg, along with two dozen others--tended to be heavy on conceptual strategy and light on physical presence. Much of the work was transitory, mediated or deferred, viewed passively on-screen or through after-the-fact documentation.

As in previous years, inSITE2000 engaged its audience in the manner of a scavenger hunt, requiring a spirit of adventure and discovery. Many projects were tucked into the urban landscapes of San Diego and Tijuana, off the beaten track of the conventional art audience. That expansion of the familiar circuit, that stretching of the audience's comfort zone has, in itself, been one of inSITE's most welcome gifts, but this time around it was its only consistent one. With so many conceptually driven works in the mix, perhaps it was fitting that the path and not the destination was what ultimately lodged in the memory. In any case, all but the most modest expectations were thwarted, and what had to suffice were newly framed views of the region as a dynamic, ever-shifting stage."

Most of the artists who made site-dependent work for inSITE2000 gravitated to the border itself or to Tijuana, where opportunity and deprivation consort with startling abandon, making for an uncannily ripe visual landscape. Vallance added three new figures to the fairly funky displays at Tijuana's wax museum--Richard Nixon (tapes in hand), Dante and the Virgin of Guadalupe. Roman de Salvo created a faux vendor's stall in a shopping arcade off Avenida Revolucion, the touristic epicenter of the city. Incongruously slick, the stall housed what looked like a video-game setup, complete with electronic screens and joysticks. The joysticks were actually wooden handles from a simple children's toy. When jiggled, they activated a set of chimes overhead. Vallance's additions integrated well, if uneventfully, with their surroundings, but within the richly textured commercial ecology of the arcade, de Salvo's project seemed a bit like a tourist itself--conspicuous, awkward and slightly embarrassing.