Critical Commentary on Teresa Margolles Work and “Zones of Tolerance” (Unedited)
Art History and Critique
Course: 100 YEARS OF MEXICAN ART - ARTH 398
The present is a critical commentary on the work of Mexican artist Teresa Margolles based on Cuauhtémoc Medina's text "Zones of Tolerance". Beyond the moral controversies that usually constrain the criticism of her work, I propose neither an interpretation nor a review, but a simple presentation of the work and its context. Entering the Zone of Tolerance: a space defined by compliances of many sorts (criminal, governmental, institutional, and the spectator itself); we arrive at notions of "gore economics," "necropolitics," "poetics of brutality," among other aesthetic and political terms of violence's grammar.
Concordia University
December 2020
Teresa Margolles, La Huella, 2019
Margolles and SEMEFO
Teresa Margolles is a Mexican conceptual artist; with 30 years of trajectory, she has become one of the most recognized and discussed artists in the panorama of Mexican contemporary art. Born Culiacan Rosales, the biggest city in the state of Sinaloa, and one of the most important points for drug trafficking and therefore, an area whose population and economic infrastructure have been subject to conditions of extreme violence midst cartel wars and the failed “administration” of these by the State. This geographical space of constant violent contestation has determined her entire artistic practice, which she has focused solely on explicitly denouncing and exploring the aesthetics and sociocultural implications of death, tragedy, and trauma resulting from the failed neoliberal policies of a narco-state–whose gore economics reduces bodies to mere currency and surplus.
Her earliest work, which Cuauhtémoc Medina’s–notorious curator and longtime supporter of Margolles–regard in his text “Zones of Tolerance”, refers to a series of controversial ready-mades consisting of residual forensic matter. The work was made as part of the “SEMEFO” art group (short for “Servicio Médico Forense”: Mexico’s National Institute of Forensic Science). Violence and criminality were not new topics in Mexican art, yet the introduction of forensic matter as a potential art object into institutional circles of exhibitions was, so to speak, a radical motif; highly criticized as acclaimed, it turned the conversation into an ethical controversy between the spectator, the institution, and the artist. It sought to bring into question the corruption of the multiple systems that allow this art to exist.[1]
To my understanding, Margolles’ concept is very clear: to depict necropolitics as an established system of governance in Mexico. Defining Necropolitics, as Achille Mbembe conceptualized it, conveys the exercise of control over mortality as the deployment of power in means of doing polities.[2] Philosopher Sayak Valencia has addressed Mexico’s own ‘Economy of Death,’ in which the extreme violence on the everyday basis oppressing the populations becomes not only ordinary but necessary for the organization and functionality of the colonial and postcolonial capitalism; murder becomes then systematic murder under this model of gore capitalism.[3]
Margolles’ work needs to be conceived within this realm to fully understand her controversial discourse. Margolles and SEMEFO work on what I define as the “poetics of brutality”. The poetics of brutality is what artists create when they frame or recontextualize real violence to present it as an aesthetic object for critical analysis. This object exists to document and denounce. The poetics of brutality convey the crude or explicit depiction of wrongful suffering.
Bringing the politics of mortality to the field of artistic representation naturally conveys a call for awareness that Margolles has been careful to maintain. However, the discursiveness of these artworks is always backed by a poetic approach to the art-object. SEMEFO, and the criticism made around it insists that these practices are based on an investigation of violent death and the aesthetic process that unfolds from it, the ‘life of the corpse’, or the ‘sociocultural implication of the corpse’ SEMEFO claims to study, are mere “intellectual rhetoric” that backs up the representational labour of conceptual art. This is completely identifiable and canonic in the art produced within Mexico’s artistic circle at that time and until today. [4]
It is not my attempt to swamp my critique under the never-ending debate that measures the ethical conflicts in the production and marketability of this kind of art. Rather, I aim to analyze the context (zone) in which Margolles’ art is allowed to exist (tolerance), with the hopes of arriving at new grounds in our understanding of Art and Violence: a twofold business.
Zones of Tolerance
What are these ‘zones’ that Medina proposes? Where are they and what is tolerated within them, I consider it to be just a matter of interpretation by the reader, they are cognitive processes to interpret Margolles’ art.
The first zone that comes to our mind when we encounter a Margolles’ artwork is situated specifically in the place where murder was committed, where the ‘life of the corpse’ begins, the matter is ‘rescued’ by the artist that will keep it safe from oblivion, this forensic matter will undergo a set of procedures so it can become a medium of its own, and ultimately serve as public evidence that this object is a result of systematic murder tolerated and perpetuated in specific areas.
The second act of tolerance also happens in our imaginary: it is our denial to solve the mystery of these procedures, because it is precisely in this grey area in which the magic of art happens. How does Margolles is able to (il)legally retrieve gallons of water from autopsy rooms, chemically treat it so it is safe to interact with it, smuggle it into Venice or New York, and get away with everything? This is a question we all ask to ourselves but have no actual intention of solving, since it entails the use of illegal and unethical operations, to which we as spectators, and the Art Institutions comply. Medina addresses the irony of these transnational operations very well, and it is what I think he ultimately refers to as a Zones of Tolerance. The fact that official art institutions and the Mexican government recognize and promote Margolles’ art implies not only the evidence that the legal, social and forensic system is broken, but that she also corrupts these systems so that her art can exist. In Medina’s words: ‘The space of tolerance Margolles’ art occupies is a gift of inefficiency and institutional complicity.’ (p.48).
I’d like to wrap up this review with a very personal thought, in which I conceive that Margolles’ forensic art gains most of its meaning from being an experience of ethical tension: the Zone of Tolerance is everything between the viewer and the artwork. The Zone of Tolerance in not only a delimited physical area of permissiveness, but a state of mind in which the viewer is allowed to experience violence from the safety of a gallery room. The spectator feels uncomfortable of what they encounter but to some degree tolerates and accepts the violence presented as something out of their reach, unsolvable, unfixable. At the same time, implies that the action of viewing is an individual contribution since it raises individual and collective awareness of the subject in question. This momentum is a zone of tolerance perse. The viewer has no option but to move on to the next piece to be captivated by a different aesthetic narrative, distracting themselves from the tragedy just witnessed.
Medina is clever to address these tensions and contradictions between art, spectator, and institution, but he is not concerned of ethical implications as much as he is with poetic interpretations. For him, the concept of ‘Zone of Tolerance’ is a political statement to validate her art within his textual analysis in the means of producing meaning for the artworks; we shall take into consideration, always, that the majority of contemporary conceptual artworks are composed by both, the material object, and the textual discourse that validates them as manifestations of intellect and sensitivity. Margolles’ “conceptualism” does not really depend much on these textual analyses, but it will remain at the forefront of the conversation that regards aesthetics, ethics and political allowance, which art critics, historians, and curators focus the most.
Bibliography
Emmelhainz, Irmgard. 2019. ‘La crítica y la revolución cultural en México.’ Campo de Relámpago. From http://campoderelampagos.org/critica-y-reviews/19/12/2019
Medina, Cuauhtémoc. 2001. “Zones of Tolerance: Teresa Margolles, SEMEFO and Beyond.” Parachute, no. 104 (October): 31–52. https://search-ebscohost-com.lib-ezproxy.concordia.ca/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aft&AN=504977388&site=ehost-live&scope=site.
Valencia, Sayak, and Olga Arnaiz Zhuravleva. 2019. “Necropolitics, Postmortem/Transmortem Politics, and Transfeminisms in the Sexual Economies of Death.” Tsq: Transgender Studies Quarterly 6 (2): 180–93. https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-7348468.
