User:Kul/Art In the Age of Asymmetrical Warfare
Jose Antonio Vega Macotela, Murmurs, 2011
Jose Antonio Vega Macotela uses ad spaces of the daily Mexican newspaper –El Sol de Mexico, as a platform to communicate with his audience. The artist has purchased and filled out advertising aeries with distorted, seemingly abstract graphic. By approaching the ad content from an extreme angle the reader can decode the actual text. In the exhibition Art In the Age of Asymmetrical Warfare at the Witt de With Center, the newspaper’s pages are attached to the wall so the viewer in order to decode the massage is forced to knee in front of the wall pressing his or her body uncomfortably against it. The artist provides us with the cushions below every page to suggest the right “penitent” position to read distorted letters. The messages are all versions of the same sentence in Spanish, translated: “Here I murmur.”
The El Sol de Mexico is one of the few newspapers which daily traces the number of the Mexican drug war victims and announces it on a front page. It is no news, that Mexico is one of the most dangerous places for reporters today. The on-going power struggle between the official, often corrupted, authorities and international drug cartels resulted in death of many civilians and lays terror upon entire country. Mocatela places the prisoners code in the El Sol in order to disrupt the realm of daily mass media information flow and let us know that another level of communication exists beneath public news reports. The artist brings to presence these traumatic aspects of Mexican everyday that, for sake of illusive social harmony, shouldn’t be addressed out load. They can only be murmured about. Yet, murmuring about “the invisible” lets it resound brutally and accurate. Therefore, as an audience we murmur on our knees faced with the cold number of deaths, as if we were prisoners ourselves: isolated and mute.
Mocatela uses the strategy of discrete yet critical interventions into already established system of socio-political relations. By adding his seemingly harmless comment to the newspapers content he manages to transform the meaning of the official news. This kind of conceptual disruptive gestures can also be seen in a practice of many other artists like: Félix González-Torres bringing the intimate images of empty bed sheets into public sphere; Francis Alÿs walking through the streets of San Paulo with a fake gun or pushing a block of ice around Mexico City for several hours until it malts; Yes Men, releasing the fake “special edition” of the New York Times in cities across the U.S. informing citizens that the war in Iraq is over; or finally, Julian Oliver’s and Daniel designing Newstweek, a device for manipulating news read by other people on wireless hotspots.
Macotela work can be understood as a form of activism, where art becomes a tool for shifting the meaning of everyday life. The fact that the white cube isn’t the true destination for Macotela’s piece makes me particular drawn to its content. His work comes to have a real impact on people’s lives, both metaphorically and politically. As a gallery viewer, I didn’t feel redundant to his work. The particular aspect of performativity, kneeing in front of the wall, engages me directly and puts me in the both, physical and moral, awkward position. His work does not just smartly illustrate or fetishize the war traumas and atrocity. The gallery exhibition is rather an aftermath of its actual socio-political operation beyond the art world.