Walls and Border Art: The Politics of Art Display

Abstract

This detour through art aims at demonstrating the performative function of contemporary walls and barriers, designed to impose a geopolitical vision through landscape changes. The text assesses the link between art and borders by formulating the hypothesis that a “border art” (art on the border, art born from the border, art against the border, etc.) is emerging. It tries to understand how the closing up of a border not only reactivates cultural production on an international border, but also transforms the latter's meaning. On the US–Mexico border, for instance, the building of the security fence since 2006 seems to have been accompanied by a strong artistic upsurge. This can be nuanced by analyzing the changes in the nature of artistic production, with more mobile works, marked by a strong presence of videos and performances, as if the fixity imposed by the line requires a fluid creative answer.

Notes

The “Jardin des Deux Rives/Garten der Zwei Ufer” opened in 2004. The park is designed by the German Rüdiger Brosk, the footbridge by the French Marc Mimram.

“La tentation du mur n'est pas nouvelle … Chaque fois qu'une culture ou qu'une civilisation n'a pas réussi à penser l'autre, à se penser avec l'autre, à penser l'autre en soi, ces raides préservations de pierres, de fer, de barbelés, ou d'idéologies closes, se sont élevées, effondrées, et nous reviennent encore dans de nouvelles stridences.”

See their website (http://www.borderartworkshop.com/index.html) as well as two beautiful catalogs:

• The Border Art Workshop (BAW/TAF) 1984–1989: A documentation of five years of interdisciplinary art projects dealing with US–Mexico border issues (a binational perspective). [Taller de Arte Fronterizo (BAW/TAF) 1984–1989: Documentación de 5 años de proyectos de arte interdisciplinario sobre asuntos de la frontera de Estados Unidos con México (una perspectiva binacional).] San Diego, CA: Border Art Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo, 1988/catalogue de l'exposition Vidas Perdidas/Lost Lives of 1989.

• La Frontera/The Border: Art about the Mexico/United States border experience. San Diego: Centro Cultural de la Raza, Museum of Contemporary Art, 1993, Chávez, Patricio and Madeleine Grynsztejn, curators, catalog of an exposition of 1993, project Dos Ciudades/Two Cities produced by a collaboration between the Centro Cultural de la Raza and the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego.

“Border culture is a project of ‘redefinition’ that conceives of the border not only as the limits of two countries, but also as a cardinal intersection of many realities. In this sense, the border is not an abyss that will have to save us from threatening otherness, but a place where the so-called otherness yields, becomes us, and therefore comprehensible.” (Gomez-Peña 1986)

cf. the border art section of their website: http://talleryonke.com/, and their works: Border Dynamics, winter 2003, Paseo de Humanidad, winter 2004, Mural “Taniperla”, spring 2005, Muro Invisible, winter 2009.

“Su propuesta es la de experimentar con el arte visual en los espacios de uso cotidiano del ser humano, arte para las masas, donde los elementos principales del proceso de creación es la relación del espacio o sitio, y las personas que cotidianamente lo usan. Su relación en el proceso de elaboración, y después cuando se convierte en un punto de referencia.” http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7247763445818543313

“The Secure Fence Act Builds On Progress Securing The Border”, Fact Sheet: The Secure Fence Act of 2006, http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2006/10/20061026-1.html

L'utilité politique du paysage commence à être étudiée au niveau local, les politiques paysagères pouvant être mises en œuvre pour ‘empaysager’ un projet, cf. Debarbieux (2007).

“les frontières cessent d'être des réalités purement extérieures, elles deviennent aussi et peut-être avant tout ce que Fichte dans ses Reden an die deutsche Nation avait superbement appelé les ‘frontières intérieures’: innere Grenzen, c'est-à-dire, il le dit lui-même, invisibles, situées ‘partout et nulle part’.” (Balibar 1996b, quoting Fichte: Speech to the German Nation, 1807)

“les frontières ne sont plus le bord du politique mais … des objets, disons plus exactement des choses dans l'espace même du politique.”

Mundane art seems to follow the same paths: we found trace, on the “No More Deaths” website (No More Deaths—No Mas Muertes—Tempe Student Auctions Art to Benefit NMD.mht), of a student art auction organized in Tempe to benefit NMD. The winner's drawing, a painting by Gabe Kaplan, a seventh-grade student at Dobson Montessori School in Mesa, figures barbed wire crossing the Statue of Liberty, thus evoking the contractions he feels his country is going through. Kaplan's narrative that accompanies the piece reads: “Deporting illegal immigrants solves nothing. We're a nation of immigrants. Most of our ancestors emigrated here from other countries, yet many of us have little tolerance for Mexican immigrants. Not all immigrants are bad. Countless have jobs and have been contributing to society for quite awhile. Sometimes they were brought over when they were children and have grown up here as Americans. They might not even speak Spanish. We've come to depend on the work of migrants in agriculture and construction. By deporting illegal immigrants we are making the people who are a vital part of our economy leave. Some of the workers came across a huge expanse of desert to get into America. The number of border deaths is going up every year. We need to change the process of becoming an American citizen to help prevent so many people from dying. Unless we change some of our laws people will keep being sent back to Mexico or dying in the desert.”

They significantly appear in the “Elles@centrepompidou” exhibition organized by the French Pompidou Museum between May 2000 and May 2010 dedicated to women artists in the collections of the modern art museum.