Tijuana is the most vibrant site for amazing, innovative, contemporary art. A comprehensive survey of the best is showing at the Museum of Contemporary Art (La Jolla and concurrently with the downtown gallery at the Santa Fe Depot). The exhibition is also the largest ever assembled by the museum and it is awesome, colorful, innovative and gutsy. The diversity of medias proclaims the creativity of 41 contemporary artists, architects, designers, filmmakers, musicians, photographers and essayists trying to make sense of the complexities of life today in Tijuana is explored in this exhibition. Amazing conceptual art, including a GPS installation is stimulating and very up to the minute.
Artist Teddy Cruz argues that the border is the most interesting pressure point for artists from both Tijuana and San Diego while the downtown art argues against a transborder region, implying that when you live in Tijuana you know the fallacy to that premise, because Tijuana is becoming more and more segregated. These artists say the focus is only on the strange city that is Tijuana. Cruz’s triptych of a large photo collage shows a jumble of railroads, cranes, street signs, and a vortex in the middle of each. One panel shows buildings in various stages of framing all tumbled together, which may be interpreted as a reflection of the country in a state of chaos and political guile.
Sergio de la Torre is a National City artist. His conceptual black and white landscape photographs, Landscapes_05, have been manipulated with computer digital images that literally erase all signs of human life, windows, doors fences, cars and trucks, from roads and housing units. His literal acts of erasure mimic the constant erasure of the needs of the people that now live in the vicinity of industrial parks.
Felipe Almada’s “The Altar of Live News” is a testament to the sacred and profane images that make up the rich collection of the visual culture of Tijuana. It is altar and part cabinet of border curiosities of religious and secular objects. Newspaper clippings at the base of the sculpture engage the viewer with daily reality news of the border region.
Eniar and Jamex de la Torre’s amazing conceptual piece, “Butterflies to Bombers,” begins in the main gallery of the museum. Beginning at the center of a wall-size map of the United States, in the Kansas City area, is a nest of pupae; the hatched butterflies on tiny crucifixes fly eastward throughout a glass window into the next gallery where they emerge as steel American bombers welded to larger crucifixes as one unit, with red and yellow flames emitting from the tails of the planes. Their flight continues through the windows over the ocean toward the East. Make up your own mind.
Benjamin Serrano depicts himself as the title character seated on a toilet in the midst of a dramatic imperial battle staged between Aztec warriors sporting Pepsi-Cola logos on their shields and the Western knives and suits of armor. La Malinche is at the heart of an imperialistic battle for cultural domination, and as in all his work he is serious and intent although wry and humorous about his conflicted role as a Tijuanese who is neither First nor Third World.
At the San Diego gallery is the GPS construction by Raul Osana and TOROLAB, “The Region of the Transborder Trousers.” The inspiration began in 2001, with an exhibit about a clothing line, with a pair of trousers becoming the instrument for the cell phone and GPS unit. The purpose was to follow monetary transaction based upon movement, to cross or not to cross the border. Two residents of San Diego, two residents of Tijuana and one from Rosarito were followed for five days. The yellow lines trace what they leave behind, the thick lines indicate traffic and the circles represent the areas according to how much gasoline they have in their vehicle at the moment. When they filled their tanks, the circle widened. Every 24 hours, the colors blend together with their transactions. At the end of the fifth day, the coordinates go away, and the only thing left behind is the drawing of the life of these five persons on the topography of the region.
Find your own GPS coordinate and make way to visit these two extraordinary exhibitions that visualize a common future aspiring to life in a globalizing world. The exhibition is part science fiction, part political commentary, and part cultural critique.
Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, 700 Prospect Street, La Jolla. (858) 454-3541. Hours 11 a.m. “” 5 p.m. Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Friday, and Saturday. Thursday 11 a.m. “” 7 p.m. Closed Wednesdays. Downtown Gallery, Santa Fe Depot, Kettner Blvd., (619) 325-1626. 11 a.m. “” 5 p.m. daily. Ends Sept. 3.