Featuring dozens of compelling images, this transformative reading of borderland and Mexican cultural production—from body art to theater, photography, and architecture—draws on extensive primary research to trace more than two decades of social and political response in the aftermath of NAFTA.
Honorable Mention, Humanities Book Prize, Mexico Section of the Latin American Studies Association, 2018
Honorable Mention, Arvey Foundation Book Award, Association for Latin American Art, 2019
REMEX presents the first comprehensive examination of artistic responses and contributions to an era defined by the North American Free Trade Agreement (1994–2008). Marshaling over a decade’s worth of archival research, interviews, and participant observation in Mexico City and the Mexico–US borderlands, Amy Sara Carroll considers individual and collective art practices, recasting NAFTA as the most fantastical inter-American allegory of the turn of the millennium. Carroll organizes her interpretations of performance, installation, documentary film, built environment, and body, conceptual, and Internet art around three key coordinates—City, Woman, and Border. She links the rise of 1990s Mexico City art in the global market to the period’s consolidation of Mexico–US border art as a genre. She then interrupts this transnational art history with a sustained analysis of chilanga and Chicana artists’ remapping of the figure of Mexico as Woman.
A tour de force that depicts a feedback loop of art and public policy—what Carroll terms the “allegorical performative”—REMEX adds context to the long-term effects of the post-1968 intersection of D.F. performance and conceptualism, centralizes women artists’ embodied critiques of national and global master narratives, and tracks post-1984 border art’s “undocumentation” of racialized and sexualized reconfigurations of North American labor pools. The book’s featured artwork becomes the lens through which Carroll rereads a range of events and phenomenon from California’s Proposition 187 to Zapatismo, US immigration policy, 9/11 (1973/2001), femicide in Ciudad Juárez, and Mexico’s war on drugs.
REMEX can be read as another form of the atlas, with the fundamental difference that it is a cartography that maps and interprets the archive it produces…Carroll's book offers the clearest vision of the path that Mexican art took during the consolidation of the neoliberal paradigm...its research on sources and problems is exhaustive.
Carroll’s superb research makes a seismic contribution to understanding Mexican and US Mexico border art in the post-NAFTA age. Aside from being an essential book in US-Mexico art, borderlands, history, interdisciplinary studies, political science, and women’s studies courses, REMEX needs to be on everyone’s reading list so we can all make sense of how we got to the haze permeating our countries.
[REMEX] presents a welcome challenge to existing histories of Mexican art since 1984 and is a significant contribution to the growing field of border art studies...By critically examining canonical and lesser-known artists alike, REMEX reveals a nuanced and complex new understanding of the impact of neoliberal economic policy and the Mexican culture industry...Indeed, the consistent and well-researched political and economic parallels that are brought into dialog with interdependent movements in the art world constitute a great strength of this book. Carroll’s expanded borders, made possible by the parsing of performative allegory, open avenues for examining other (non)sites shaped by NAFTA and will undoubtedly influence future studies of the period.
Carroll’s [REMEX] is an attempt to write a history of Mexican art of [the NAFTA era] and, in so doing, to propose an alternative lineage for Latin American Conceptualism.
Incredibly smart, well-articulated, and very much needed. REMEX is not only an important contribution to the fields of Mexican and border visual cultural and performance studies, but it is the book that will move the conversations in the fields in new and provocative ways. It is the book many of us have been waiting for.
Ambitious and engaging . . . arguing, rather boldly, for a comprehension of NAFTA as an aesthetic project as much as an economic one.
AMY SARA CARROLL
Ithaca, New York
Carroll, a 2017–2018 Society Fellow in Cornell University’s Society for the Humanities, is the author of two poetry collections SECESSION and FANNIE + FREDDIE/The Sentimentality of Post-9/11 Pornography, chosen by Claudia Rankine for Fordham University’s Poets Out Loud Prize. Since 2008, Carroll also has been a member of Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0/b.a.n.g. lab, coproducing the Transborder Immigrant Tool.
- Prelude. The Allegorical Performative
- Introduction. Remix || re: Mex || REMEX: Toward an Art History of the NAFTA Era
- City
- Nafta-Era Performance and Conceptualism’s Prehistory
- Mexico City, Readymade: The “PIAS Forms,” Mexico's 1968, and Los Grupos
- "Naco" as the Taco: No-Grupo, Maris Bustamante’s La patente del taco, and Melquiades Herrera’s Object Lifeworlds
- Post-1994 GDPS and Labor Wars; Institutional Critique and Incorporation
- The Almost Ex-Teresa Generation
- Vicente Razo’s Anthropological Materialism
- Yoshua Okón’s Art and Administration
- Minerva Cuevas’s Logocentrism
- Francis Alÿs, Santiago Sierra, and the Age of Cuauhtémoc
- Teresa Margolles, Remaindered
- Nafta-Era Performance and Conceptualism’s Prehistory
- Woman
- ¿Desmodernidad? Literalists to the Core!
- Polvo de Gallina Negra’s Maternal Prosthesis
- Reallegorizing the Female Form
- Lorena Wolffer’s “El Derecho de Réplica”
- Katia Tirado’s Pub(l)ic Niches
- Silvia Gruner’s Fucked-Up Ethnographies
- Nao Bustamante’s Inter-American Pageantry
- ¿Desmodernidad? Literalists to the Core!
- Border
- NAFTA-Era Performance and Conceptualism’s Prehistory
- Art and Design: The Mexico-US Border after 1965
- The Border Art Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo’s Open Door and Laboratory
- Post-1994 GDPS and Labor Wars; Institutional Critique and Incorporation
- Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s North American Free Art Agreement
- inSITE Specificity/Tijuana, Capital of the Twenty-First Century
- From Undocumentation to the Undocumentary (Alex Rivera, Sergio Arau and Yareli Arizmendi, Lourdes Portillo, Ursula Biemann, Sergio De La Torre and Vicky Funari, Chantal Akerman, Natalia Almada, _________)
- NAFTA-Era Performance and Conceptualism’s Prehistory
- Postlude. REMEX || re: Mex || Remix: Untoward Art Histories of the Third Millennium
- Acknowledgments
- Notes
- References
- Index
The New Public Art
Collectivity and Activism in Mexico since the 1980s
Edited by Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra
