Masked allegories
.
There was something in the air during the free wrestling show that took place
in the Municipal Auditorium of Tijuana City on January 19th 2001. For starters,
during the preliminary "atomic rounds" match, "Assasin doctor"
and "The Son of the Nurse" mercilessly kicked "Alcatraz"
at the very moment he was being carried out by the paramedics in a stretcher,
after he had almost broken his neck in a bad fall out of the cords of the ring.
It was impossible to know if the gross spectacle had been part of the pantomime,
or if in fact the "rude" fighters had broken the dividing line between
fiction and reality and really tried to terminate their enemy while he was being
helped by the emergency services. A few minutes later, two identical cute looking
fighters appeared on the arena and under an arch of stroboscopic lights. The
culture of the copy, the doppelgänger and the simulacra seemed to be on
the verge of colonizing this temple of Mexican popular culture. But this was
also an artistic event of sorts: the presentation of the "Amorales"
wrestlers in the Auditorium was part of In Site 2000, the binational contemporary
art event that takes place every three years in the San Diego/Tijuana region
located on the Mexican-U.S. border.
Carlos Amorales, the Mexican artist based in Amsterdam, has for some years been
engaged in developing a multi-layered transcontinental, transcultural, interurban
and trans-class artistic game that reactivates one of the most important icons
of urban popular culture in Mexico, the masked wrestler, so as to address the
issue of contemporary identities. The choice of the wrestler is in itself loaded.
Free wrestling, as writer Carlos Monsiváis has written, is an urban "rite
of poverty": a low class spectacle that mixes elements of "classsic
tragedy, circus, olympic sports, comedy, variety theater and working class catharsis"
providing a form of respite from the poverty of everyday life. From the 1940s
onwards Mexican wrestlers, above all "El Santo," were merchandized
as audacious movie and comic strip superheroes who kept at bay female gothic
monsters, precolumbian dark forces, and cold war global conspiracies—all
presumably disruptive of the perfect order of modern urban life. They acquired
a supernatural status similar to that of Superman or Fantomas, with the added
value of their physical presence in the ring. Because of this, they became the
icon of choice of a whole history of attempts to bring together radical art
and political radicalism. During the 1970s and 1980s, among artists like filmaker
Alejandro Jodorowsky, photographers Lourdes Grobet and Yolanda Andrade, and
the populist conceptual gang of Felipe Ehrenberg, Adolfo Patiño all the
way to Guillermo Gomez Peña, the masked wrestler seduced aeshtetic experiments
which were trying to overturn the cosmopolitan high art aesthetics of the local
mainstream by appropriating the spaces of fantasy of the lower urban classes.
By the end of the century such superhero value became a matter of actual politics.
After the 1985 earthquake, wrestler Superbarrio appeared in a number of political
demonstrations as a symbolic defender of Mexico City downtown tenants who were
about to be evicted from the ruined houses they had occupied for decades. Superbarrio
became representative of the wide network of movements of social resistance
in the inner cities which on a daily basis were battling against the pressures
of neoliberal modernization. By 1994, with the appearance of the Zapatista army,
whose guerilla men and women covered their faces behind black backlavas, the
image of the masked hero became even more explosive. The auratic hopes that
el Santo and Blue Demon had embodied for local audiences consuming B-movies,
turned into an agent of social insurrection that questioned the very fabric
of the project of western global modernization. The identity of the Zapatistas
was built around the concealment of the individual´s face, which defined
a new form of activism that would depart from the old imagery of the messianic
leader or a tradition of "realist" social representation, on ocassion
playing ironically upon the adventures of comic strip characters.
As a consequence of such processes of effective politicization, it would have
been impossible for Carlos Amorales, by the late 1990s, to simply engage in
a methodology of appropriating the kitsch character of the icon. The cultural
and political situation made it ridiculous to create artworks that would suggest
only an imaginary solidarity with popular taste by introducing iconograpy into
mere pop/hybrid artworks. Therefore it became necessary that 1990s Mexico city
artists like Amorales, Francis Alys, Ruben Ortiz-Torres, Yoshua Okon, Vicente
Razo, Miguel Calderon, Daniel Guzman or Fernando Palma, to name a few, or the
Ordo Amoris Group in Cuba and Cabelo in Brasil, rethink the strategies of aesthetical
populism in terms of the development of complex circuits of distorted mirroring,
mischevious exportation and intellectual vulgarism. An increase of performative
and intellectual sophistication is needed to retain populist taste in the invention
of adventures of conceptual complexity and even productive misunderstanding.
First, Amorales developed a somehow purist wrestler character, in the guise
of a self-portrait: a young, white, slightly bald, middle class male artist.
The "Amorales" mask became then an empty signifier, devoid of any
of the elements of denotation characteristic of the actual wrestlers attire.
In that sense, the symbolic void of Amorales contradicts the semiotic transparency
and "perfect intelligibility" Roland Barthes saw as constitutive of
the "human comedy" of wrestling, thus breaking with the "moral
mechanics" on which the whole theatricality of the spectacle is based .
The artist would use the matrix of identity of Mexican popular wrestling, but
at the same time mimicking a conceptual purification of its form. But this neo/icon
was not merely used as a global/conceptual token. With it, Amorales started
developing a performance history based on the interlocking, on many levels,
of many different worlds.
Using the Amorales character he staged dialogues with Superbarrio and Joan Jonas—comparing
two entirely different ways in which theatrical action became means of political
action—techno-devilish dances with european museum goers that aimed to
bring out an enjoyment of their wicked side, as well as self-reflective battles
against himself before a mirror and even experiments into the identity games
ocurring during staged wrestling matches by bringing famous wrestlers, like
Mexican "Satánico", to fight against Amorales in rings erected
in Museums around the world. Carlos researched the production of a mask character
by engaging in a dialogue/performance with a veteran wrestler and mask maker
Ray Rosas, while also trying to understand the fascination of European and Mexican
kids for any number of identity fantasies. The remarkable element in these operations
is that he turned his research into the development of an alternative cultural
network centered around the wrestler’s fetish. Going against the idea that
globalism has anything to do with the internationalization of homogeneity, he
showed the feasibility of occupying the institutional and critical arena of
contemporary art to create a field of exploration of cultural and social multilinguism.
The last recoil of this amazing process of transcultural networking occurred
in the January 19th 2001 show at the Municipal Sports Auditorium of Tijuana.
There for the first time, Carlos brought Amorales into his original context:
an actual wrestler professional match arena, with real popular audiences and
professional wrestlers. But in doing so, he turned the work into a cathartic
reflection of economic integration. Introducing them as Dutch wrestlers coming
to Mexico after a successful tour of various european citities, two Amorales's
were brought into the arena to fight against two legendary fighters, "Último
Guerrero" and "Satánico". There was an obvious reason
in the choice of these two Mexican wrestlers. On the one hand, they are two
“rudos”, i.e. wrestlers that personify tricky, treacherous and evil
characters, against cute “technical” practictioners like the Amorales's
who always battle according to the book and on the good guys' side. "Último
Guerrero" (“Last Warrior”) with his ocelote tiger mask, obviously
alludes to the tiger warriors of Aztec times. "Satánico", who
represents the forces of hell, of course implies the heroization of the villain.
And how could he have done otherwise given that the real Mexican popular heroes
of today—bandits, drug traffickers, gangsters, criminals—are the only
people in the lower classes that have found ways to turn the new economic system
to their advantage.
So when the fight was introduced to the audience it was already a postmodern
drama: a social representation of the spectacle of global strife between Mexican
low class rogues and just arrived modern foreigers. And when the Amorales's
came into the Sports Hall they were accompanied by a third Amorales, their creator,
manager and “second”, who on top of that was a perfect look alike
of the Mexican villain par excelence: the 1990s promoter of global integration,
president Carlos Salinas. This was a total provocation: the audience kept on
yelling demanding that the Mexican wrestlers teach a lesson to the cute Dutch
duplet, in order to show them that Mexican wrestling was "the best in the
world", but above all to come down the ring to kick the ass of the nicely
dressed short, bald and unbearable guy that was coaching them. In the end, the
Amorales’s defeated Satánico and Último Guerrero in great
part because stupid Último Guerrero jumped from the top of the Pyramid…sorry,
the cords, and fell flat on his face. As always, good prevailed over evil. I
mean: the ugly Mexicans lost.
I remember that evening as one of the most exciting moments of my life. Not
only was Amorales showing that his floating masked signifier could provoke a
whole symbolic situation and put it to work poetically, but that he was also
seriously transforming the internal logic of the wrestling drama before our
very eyes. The wrestling audiences could get a taste of the complexity of the
postmodern notion of identity as erotic, unfixed, opaque, volatile and simple,
but could also bring to mind the anxieties of global times. And on the other
hand, the international art audiences were drawn into the same fascination with
popular fantasy that had been a source of obsession for the provincial Mexican
art circuit during all those years the center systematically refused to deal
with anything that could look slightly concerned with south of the border psychodramas.
I mean, they were totally Mexmerized. You had to rub your eyes upon seeing local
girls standing up to send kisses to Amorales, while Susan Buck Morris yelled
as loud as she could: “Kill him, Amorales, kill him, kill him.”
And then I experienced a critical hallucination that I refuse to fully explain:
Minister Jose Vasconcelos was sitting behind me and whispered into my ear his
catchphrase from his speech for the opening of the Mexican Education Ministry
in 1922: “The unity of the popular and the classical without the intermediary
of the mediocre. ” I listened silently, moved my head from one to the other
side and in turn whispered back. “Not really, Pepe. Rather the interlocking
of the vulgar and the overintellectualized, with the aid of commodified fantasies.”
Cuauhtémoc Medina