Losing Ground: Public Art at the Border - inSITE program

Art in America, May, 2001 by Leah Ollman

Few other inSITE projects matched that degree of physical and psychic immersion. With close to half of inSITE's projects done in video--projected onto storefront windows, displayed on handheld screens or in viewing rooms at the event's information centers--passive spectatorship became the prevailing mode of experience. Investigating the nature and function of public space has been an implicit theme of inSITE through the years, but what emerged among this latest crop of artists as the primary site for engaging in public discourse was the placeless space of the screen. With so many projects framed in a viewfinder, and so many fewer than usual insinuated into the physical environment, inSITE's overall presence in the region--as well as the community dialogue surrounding it--felt far more diffused than in years past.

Gruner, from Mexico City, showed a video documentation of herself undergoing psychoanalysis in the backseat of a car as she crossed the border. In spite of its coy concept--crossing the geographic border while examining the borders with in the self--and its tantalizing promise of voyeurism, the resulting two-channel video is merely tedious, pocked with psychobabble and self-indulgently raw in form. Jonathan Hernandez, also based in Mexico City, shot a video of under age Americans heading south to drink and dance in Tijuana nightclubs. With roots in prohibition-era drinking and gambling excursions across the border, this current manifestation of pleasure-seeking on the "wild side" offers meaty potential for deeper study, but Hernandez's project is superficial, driven more by the beat of its soundtrack (by the Tijuana band, FUSSIBLE) than by thoughtful vision.

Several other artists shooting in film and video exhibited works of comparably little consequence. Lorna Simpson's Duet and Glen Wilson's Interstice 2001: The Nomad Project were both vacant, self-important efforts, strands of loosely knit scenes that satisfied neither as conventional narrative nor as visual spectacle. Jordan Crandall adopted heat-seeking and stealth cameras used for surveillance by the U.S. Border Patrol to make a series of short films shown on handheld cellular devices. Those imaging systems were devised specifically to reveal what the human eye normally cannot see, but Crandall's fragmentary clips of a woman on an operating table, golfers at night and the engine machinery inside a ship felt drab and familiar. Wholly indifferent, the images were outclassed in sophistication by the high-tech equipment used to record and screen them.

More revelatory in content was a two-part video installation by Dias and Riedweg, sited provocatively on the border, alongside a walkway for pedestrians crossing into Mexico. The videos, projected inside two stark, boxy structures resembling shipping containers, exposed oppositional aspects of border crossing: the groups of men who routinely leap the fence at night and head north, and the training of "Customs Canines" assigned to sniff out northbound contraband, from drugs to humans. Both the cool efficiency of the customs agents and the grittier desperation of the border crossers received relatively dispassionate treatment from the artists. Political underpinnings were left unstated, and the power of the piece rested on its privileged access to activities heard about but not commonly seen.