2013

2013 MexiCali Biennial
Los Angeles and Mexicali

The MexiCali Biennial is a dynamic platform for creating new channels of communication between artists and audiences in the US and Mexico.

VPAM is proud to host the third MexiCali Biennial from January 19 to April 13, 2013, and this project will include the work of 26 artists and collectives working in a variety of media, from sculpture and performance to video and painting.

The first MexiCali Biennial took place in 2006 at La Casa de Tia Tina in Mexicali, Mexico and Chavez Studios in East Los Angeles. The second MexiCali Biennial took place three years after the first, and was held in four different locations spanning two years and two countries.

The third Biennial is scheduled for early 2013 and will engage with the subject of cannibalism.

The cannibal is a creature that threatens the collapse of identity and ethics, and instills anarchy in the social order. Cannibalism in the New World was one of the central rationales for colonialism, but MexiCali also proposes it as a path forward towards a new model for avant garde practice. Cannibalism can open up radical new spaces in art for bodies and their environmental interactions, and push against the oppressive pressure of hegemonic Western cultural systems.

These transformative possibilities can change our relationship with art, and perhaps the world itself.

Curated by Ed Gomez, Luis G. Hernandez and Amy Pederson Converse

Participating Artists:
Fred Alvarado, Natalia Anciso, Marycarmen Arroyo Macias, Ana Baranda, Juan Bastardo, Sergio Bromberg, Helen Cahng, Matthew Carter, Carolyn Castaño, Enrique Castrejon, Tony de los Reyes,
Map Conception: Deborah Diehl & Arzu Arda Kosar, Dino Dinco and Rafa Esparza, Veronica Duarte, Roni Feldman, Kio Griffith & Carmina Escobar, Zoè Gruni, HELL- (0) featuring: Michael Dee,
Martin Durazo and Ichiro Irie, Daniel Lara, Candice Lin, Juan Luna-Avin, Matt MacFarland, Dominic Paul Miller, Flavia Monteiro, Nancy Popp, Peter Bo Rappmund, Christopher Reynolds, Cindy Santos Bravo, and Fidelius X

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Catalog essay by Dr. Amy Pederson Converse.

According to Romanian philosopher Catalin Avramescu, the cannibal is a scholarly creature, a thought experiment that interrogates identity on the verge of collapse, posits ethics without morals, and instills anarchy into the social order. In the West, “the cannibal is the messenger of disorder, the proof that moral chaos has descended upon us, human nature at its worst, the unusable atom of an impossible social order.” Cannibalism in the New World, whether real or imagined, was one of the central moral rationales for colonialism, and it is no accident that the etymological and sociological origins of the cannibal coincide with the discovery of the Americas.

Historically, utopic tendencies in Western modernism have had a forward thrust, projecting into an imaginary space of the future and driven by the forces of technology. By contrast, the Latin American avant-garde project of the last century frequently looked to the past, with the seeds of utopia located not in the technological future, but in the purity of the pre- Colombian and autochthonous past. However, these locations are equally phantasmic. The dependence on either trajectory for a post-colonial artistic practice fails because of this historical myopia, a short-sightedness that can only superficially resolve the conflicts inherent within the production of international contemporary art in any location other than the West. This MexiCali Biennial proposes cannibalism as a strategy for the production of a Latin and North American avant-garde in the present.

There is no need to draw a line between actual and symbolic anthropophagy; they are part of the same system of meaning. Through ingestion, digestion, and subsumation, the cannibal bridges the gap between political science and moral philosophy, nature and civilization, north and south, east and west, the self and the other. Beyond the boundaries of civilization is an inverted world where all laws are challenged, “…the limit beyond which evil nature becomes visible, whence it came and whither it was summoned to return.”

We take as our inspiration the Brazilian Tropicàlia movement and its anthropophagous tendencies, particularly the work of Hélio Oiticica. Developed in the effervescent cultural climate of the late 1950s, and checked by the military regime of 1968 and the “black years” of institutional violence that followed, Oiticica’s practice opened up radical new spaces in art for bodies and their environmental interactions. These methods of individual and collective production pushed against an aesthetic experience produced by hegemonic cultural and artistic systems and moved towards a transformation of the world itself. This urgency in regards to transforming the system of
art was part of a cultural and political strategy of opposition to forms of oppression within Brazilian life. It was more than just a move towards a plural, open subjectivity, and encompassed ideas of violence, appropriation, and a post-colonial Latin American artistic production burdened by the vocabularies of international contemporary art. The transformative possibilities of the experimental in art were predicated on changing our relationship with art and the world itself. These goals are shared by the MexiCali Biennial. Against the reversible world and objectified ideas. Made into cadavers.

Dr. Amy Pederson

Curators: Ed Gomez, Amy Pederson & Luis G. Hernandez

1. Catalin Avramescu, An Intellectual History of Cannibalism (Princeton, NY: Princeton UP) 2009.
2. Justin E.H. Smith and Catalin Avramescu, “The Raw and the Cooked: Interview with Catalin
Avramescu,” Cabinet 39 (Fall 2010).
3. Avramescu: 8.
4. Catherine David, “Hélio Oiticica: Brazil Experiment” in The Experimental Exercise of Freedom: Lygia Clark, Gego, Mathias Goeritz, Helio Oiticica, and Mira Schendel (Los Angeles, CA: MOCA)
2000.
5. Oswaldo de Andrade, Manifesto Antropofago (1928).