Losing Ground: Public Art at the Border - inSITE program

Art in America, May, 2001 by Leah Ollman

Over inSITE's closing weekend, Krzysztof Wodiczko provided a grand finale, projecting live video onto the exterior of the spherical Omnimax theater at the Centro Cultural Tijuana. A dozen years ago, he staged a stirring projection at the same site (commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego), of a man's head with hands clasped behind it in the classic posture of police arrest, a reference to the fate of many an undocumented border crosser. For Wodiczko's inSITE2000 project, the 60-foot-diameter sphere again doubled as a human head, but the images conforming to it were not symbolic but highly specific: the faces of individual women recounting traumas of incest, rape and abuse by the police. Disempowered by their experiences, these women testified through a forum that granted them enormous scale and visibility. Their huge talking heads (looking much like a gargantuan Tony Oursler piece) attracted hundreds of onlookers who stood spellbound on a rainy night, as stories generally suppressed became audibly and visibly public.

Wodiczko's project was characteristic of inSITE2000 overall in its preference for the politics of private experience over political machinations on the regional or global level. Some artists burrowed deeply into particular communities to realize their projects. Monica Nador of Brazil spent two months in the impoverished Tijuana neighborhood of Maclovio Rojas, gleaning ideas for stencils that the residents then used to paint decorative borders and patterns on the walls of their homes. Art as a tool for bettering daily life was also the impulse behind Ugo Palavicino's community theater workshops and Alberto Caro Limon's workshop-derived design for a neighborhood park in Tijuana.

A handful of other artists staged theatrical public spectacles, performances grounded in the sociologies of place and personality. Gustavo Artigas, from Mexico City, kicked off inSITE's opening weekend with Rules of the Game, a riveting event at a high school gym in Tijuana. A marvel of simultaneity, the performance took to a literal extreme the platitudinous description of the border region as shared space. Artigas arranged for two American basketball teams to play against each other on the same court and at the same time as two Mexican soccer teams. Both games adhered to the same clock, but each had its own referees and its own announcer, who called the soccer match in Spanish and the basketball game in English. With two different modes of play and two distinct sets of rules in force, how would the players--who were privy to Artigas's experiment but not given the opportunity to rehearse--accommodate each other? Would new, unspoken rules emerge? Would cooperation prevail, or could friction lead to hostility, even violence?

The meaning and function of the shared space were to be negotiated in the moment, as an experiment in coexistence. In actuality, there was surprisingly little friction among the players because there was surprisingly little interaction. Players flinched and ducked their way around the congested court, staying entirely focused on their own tasks, their own scoring opportunities. For them, the rest--the dense layers of sound reverberating off the gymnasium walls, the soccer ball careening off the slick wooden floor into the crowded stands--was strictly peripheral and largely ignored. Cooperation happened more by default than by strategy. When players collided, they simply separated and moved on, folding back into the turbulent maelstrom of sweat and speed. It was the absence of tension between the teams that was startling, and that threw the action back to the inSITE audience, who were left to muse on whether the performance was an apt metaphor for existing border conditions or a model of mutual tolerance for the future.