REMEX: Toward an Art History of the NAFTA Era City

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 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 Mexican-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 on a global market to the period's consolidation of Mexico-US border art on a 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 DF 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 phenomena from California's Proposition 187 to Zapatismo, US immigration policy, 9/11 (1973/2001), femicide in Cuidad Juárez, and Mexico's war on drugs"--Page 4 de la couverture 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 Mexican-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 on a global market to the period's consolidation of Mexico-US border art on a 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 DF 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 phenomena from California's Proposition 187 to Zapatismo, US immigration policy, 9/11 (1973/2001), femicide in Cuidad Juárez, and Mexico's war on drugs--back cover 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.0A 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 Juarez, and Mexico's war on drugs 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 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 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, _________) Postlude. REMEX || re: Mex || Remix: Untoward Art Histories of the Third Millennium Acknowledgments Notes References Index