When the name Artpace San Antonio comes up, a certain caliber of artist springs to mind — Sir Isaac Julian, Mona Hatoum, Félix González-Torres, for example.
Same goes for the quality associated with its exhibition curators, who have included Hans Ulrich Obrist, Jérôme Sans and Helen Molesworth.
And while many great works have graced the halls and walls of this venerated institution, over the past 30 years, Rigoberto Luna is only the second San Antonian to be selected as guest curator for Artpace’s International Artist-In-Residence Program.
It’s both an honor and a burden — one he took seriously and approached with his usual DIY determination, experimentalism and whimsy.
In his role at Artpace, Luna chose Irene Antonia Diane Reece (Houston), Roksana Pirouzmand (Los Angeles) and Chavis Mármol (Mexico City) for the current exhibition, which opened Sept. 17 and runs through Jan. 17.
“Time. I’d say time is the only underlying factor between these works,” Luna said of the thread tying the work together. “I wasn’t trying to find an overarching theme and force fit artists into it. I was looking for artists whose work speaks to who they are, and where they are in their individual practice.”
To his point, the works on view do share a weird sort of temporal distortion. They vibrate, creating a frequency that resonates and ripples through space and generations.
Take Reece’s works. A Houstonian by birth, her mother’s side of the family hails from San Antonio. Her grandmother, a migrant worker and a garment factory worker, was politically active from the early ’70s through the ’90s.
Her grandmothers — one Black, one Latina — were, in their own way, at the forefront of the struggle for workers’ rights and the unionization of the textile industry. However, their histories, which parallel the battle for farm workers’ rights, remain largely undocumented.
Black and Brown women were literally the lifeblood of this movement. Reece’s piece, hand-me-downs, started as a project centered on familial roots but ultimately became a collaboration with the community and documentarians thereof. It asks truly legitimate questions such as who decides what is worth recording for posterity? Who determines — or, rather, predetermines — our history?
Anything less than proactivity in this context equates to erasure.
“People were genuinely afraid to talk about this,” Reece said. “My intent was to give voice to women who worked in the industry, be it from factories or prisons, who might have recollections of that period.”
The artist reached out to many local institutions. It seems that generational discrimination, fear of retribution, frustration, the looming threat of mass deportation and what equates to a lack of understanding of one’s own power all contribute to a culture of silence.
It’s a triple fuck. You want your goods well-made, low-priced and made in the U.S. Sorry, kids: the U.S. is actually an island in the South Pacific, where 10-year-olds’ fingers bleed to satisfy America’s need for planned obsolescence.
Iranian-born Pirouzmand’s installation is nothing short of stunning.
Two massive pieces adorn the left and right walls. What looks at first glance like massive painted images on steel are actually the result of a complex oxidation process — a successful first-time gamble on the part of the artist.
Both works are slightly abstracted human forms that rise and fall from the sea like the poetic backsplash of waves crashing against impenetrable rocks and cliffsides. In the center of the room sits a massive rectangular tank of water, also oxidized. In it are two metal flaps, each attached to the back of a rocking chair on opposite sides of the tank.
The work is activated when two people — originally intended to be the artist and her mother on opening night — sit down in the chairs. Unable to see one another or otherwise coordinate their movements, the water becomes the primary vector for communication, observed or otherwise. (Guests aren’t allowed to sit in the chairs, however.)
The use of water as a means of communication gives it the potential to shift from utterly placid to terrifying C-waves, like those caused by earthquakes. These putative peaks, valleys and crescendos echo the forms on the walls — illustrating, in real time, the difficulty of basic interaction between sentient entities regardless of previous interconnection.
It speaks to fracture, to the reality and the complexity of personal relationships, let alone those between strangers, politicians and nation-states.
Talking about the lack of opacity in the inactivated, still water has an effect on Pirouzmand. But she’s genuinely happy with the outcome, despite the lack of movement and especially the monumental scale — although both pose some internal challenges.
“Talking about it really flattens the work,” Pirouzmand said. “It’s not miraculous. It’s just image-making, but scale is what makes a difference.”
Finally, in Strange Love, Chavis Mármol parodies the mechanisms of power as they exist in both reality and satire.
His installation reimagines the final scene of Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, in which Slim Pickens rides an atom bomb into oblivion.
Mármol approaches site-specific work with an acumen almost unheard of in a not-quite-mid-career artist. Shortly before the opening, the artist ditched bull riding trusses for a handcrafted wooden replica of Little Boy, the bomb the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima in 1945, perched atop the mechanisms of a Gilly’s Friday night hay-bale-and-beer-soaked hoedown.
Much like with his most iconic piece to date — a public sculpture in which he ceremoniously dropped a replica of an Olmec head atop a brand-new Tesla — Mármol doesn’t rely on subtleties.
So why, then, dress a missile up like a bull? That costuming, that subversion of the plot would have been a cop-out. Hence the pivot. Instead, at the opening, the artist approached his creation like a predator, circling around it as if to tantalize, to seduce. He then mounted and slow-rode it, cowboy hat in hand.
Dominance is a recurring motif in Mármol’s work, but not in a purely masculine way. It is more about destabilization — of the image, of the spectacle, of history — and about using the mechanisms of power against themselves to wonderfully theatrical effect. His work is always deeply embedded in the culture of the space that it occupies, and he’s savvy about that.
“Texas is a seat of major power, not just in the area but internationally, and its iconography is potent, deadly,” he said, shaking his head. “You cannot come here and make work and not address that.”
It’s clear Mármol understands both the iconography and the toxicity embedded in that simple statement.
“He’s different,” Luna said with a laugh about Mármol.
By “different,” I originally thought the curator meant resolved and just plain weird, except for the implacable fact that Mármol pivoted the entire project less than a week before launch.
After years co-helming Presa House, which just celebrated its 10th anniversary, Luna is no stranger to cat herding (aka curating). It’s second nature to him by now. Presa House features emerging artists from the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Much of this work tends to be visceral and non-academic, edging into the genre of craft.
Luna has been a very busy boy, both here and beyond. He was a Cohort 06 Curatorial Fellow at NXTHVN and opened the exhibition “All At Once: Reflected Through Glass” in New Haven, Connecticut, quickly followed by “The Things Left Unsaid” at James Cohan Gallery’s location in New York’s Chinatown, both as part of that project.
Shortly thereafter came “Ya Hecho: Readymade in the Borderlands” at the Tucson Museum of Art and “Soy de Tejas: A Statewide Survey of Latinx Art,” which debuted at Centro de Artes in San Antonio followed by time in the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture in Los Angeles.
If Luna treats every residency and opportunity like the one currently at Artpace, he’ll go far. To date, I have never seen an Artpace guest curator jump in and get their hands as dirty as he did.
While Luna blows it off as mere proximity, it’s more than that. It’s admirable. It’s unnecessary even by the institution’s own standards. Frankly it’s absolutely unheard of.
Most curators select names off a short list they were handed or already have in mind, watch the dregs of labor from their fully tenured ivory condos and ask a mirror as they pack for the opening, “Do you think I really need to dress up for this opening?”
Yeah, you kinda really do.
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