Galleries: Mexico City, alive with art in the bad-news '90s

The last decade of the 20th century was rough on Mexico City. Everything that was already spinning out of control got worse: political corruption, the economy, social inequity, poverty, violence.

But, as often happens in periods of crisis, art thrived on the bad news. Artists who might otherwise have been drawn to traditional modes of art-making turned to installation, performance, actions, video, and other more socially engaged art practices that could exert a physical intervention with, or offer a sharp rebuke to, the status quo.

"Strange Currencies: Art & Action in Mexico City, 1990-2000," at the Galleries at Moore College of Art & Design, is the first exhibition to thoroughly examine that change in Mexico City's cultural landscape through the works of artists who lived and worked there in the 1990s. Conceived and organized by Kaytie Johnson, the director and chief curator of the Galleries at Moore, the show has the added advantage of Johnson's expertise on her subject. In 1997, while a graduate student at Arizona State University, she went to Mexico City to research its contemporary art scene for her master's thesis. On subsequent trips, she met many of the 28 artists in her show.

From the initial information and images I received before the exhibition's opening, I assumed much of the work I'd see would be documentation of performances and actions. An overload of black-and-white monotone conceptual or blatantly political art loomed in my mind. I couldn't have been more wrong.

For one thing, Johnson's roundup bursts with vivid color, from Claudia Fernández's sprawling 2000 grid arrangement of small ink-jet prints of color snapshots of houses, La Belleza oculta en la propriedad ajena (The Hidden Beauty in Someone Else's Property), to another large, grid-based assemblage of tiny cartoon-inspired paintings by Marco Arce, Mis aventuras en el espacio (My Adventures in Space) from 1996, to Melanie Smith's installation of mass-produced orange-plastic objects found in stores and street stalls, Orange Lush (1994-97), to Vicente Razo's psychedelic-style poster ridiculing Carlos Salinas de Gortari, president of Mexico from 1988 to 1994 (Mexicans do cynicism with the best of them, you'll see).

For another, even when the work is of the most conceptual sort, it's mitigated by humor or pure weirdness, or both, as in Daniel Guzmán and Luis Felipe Ortega's Remake (1994), their color (albeit pretty colorless) video re-creations of performances by Bruce Nauman, Vito Acconci, and Paul McCarthy. They had never seen the videos of said performances and based their iterations on published accounts of them.

To me, the works that best sum up the strangeness of 1990s Mexico City are Daniela Rossell's color photographs of well-off young Mexican women flaunting their over-the-top clothes and domestic interiors from her 1999 series "Ricas y Famosas" (Rich and Famous) and Francis Alÿs' Re-enactments (2000), a two-channel video that shows Alÿs buying a 9mm Beretta handgun on the black market, loading it, then walking through the streets of downtown Mexico City with it clearly visible in his hand.

He's arrested by the police about 12 minutes into his stroll, terrifyingly, suddenly, and forcefully. His action was recorded on video by cameraman Raphael Ortega, following at a distance; he then reenacts the scene for Ortega's camera with the aid of the same police officer who arrested him (you wonder how that could have happened), in order to create a comparison between the initial action and its conceptual reenactment for documentation purposes. The two footages shown side by side question the concept of authenticity and demonstrate, according to Alÿs, "how media can distort and dramatize the immediate reality of a moment." You realize, if you didn't already, that it's a work that could never be made today.

"Strange Currencies: Art & Action in Mexico City, 1990-2000" is accompanied by a series of public programs and events, a symposium, and a curated film series at International House. Information is available at www.thegalleriesatmoore.org.

The Galleries at Moore College of Art & Design, 1916 Race St., 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mondays through Thursdays and Saturdays; 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Fridays. 215-965-4027 or www.thegalleriesatmoore.org.

Through Dec. 12.

One thing's certain - no one is likely to leave Marcus Harvey's first solo show at Locks Gallery without a strong opinion of this British artist's paintings and sculptures.

Looking at his painting of two enormous bare feet on an ink-jet photograph of a landscape, and a large cast jesmonite sculpture of a male head assembled from little hands, a tiny perfect bust of Winston Churchill, and other recognizable three-dimensional forms, I found myself thinking of Julian Schnabel's early paintings, Philip Guston's late ones, and Giuseppe Arcimboldo, the Renaissance painter whose portraits of human faces were fashioned from assortments of fruits and other edibles.

And so it goes throughout the show of this YBA, a founder of both an art magazine and an art school. There is a painting of a solitary iceberg, a painting of an isolated man o'war ship, and a painting of a nude male tromping through a field (on photographic backgrounds); and cast sculptures, most notably one featuring a young reclining Margaret Thatcher with enormous fake breasts and a pig's head protruding from her hip. I'm guessing he is not on board with Britain's colonial past.

What I found most interesting about Harvey's show was that it seemed to be a bold philosophical stance negating the importance of individual artworks. You might compare it to a performance writ in lasting objects.

Locks Gallery, 600 Washington Square S. 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays. 215-629-1000 or www.locksgallery.com. Through Oct. 24.