New Acquisitions / Donations to UECLAA, July 2004

Carlos Molina, PhD Student, University of Essex

María Ezcurra sees her textile works as a metaphor for the relationship between her inner self and the way she experiences the city. The pieces recently donated to UECLAA use found objects to document the artist’s reactions to and ideas about issues that concern her in everyday life. Leopard swimsuit and blue swimsuit, to be displayed as two and three dimensional installations respectively, are part of an ongoing series that Ezcurra has been involved in producing for the past few years (entitled Body of Work). The name of the series clearly indicates the meaning and intention of the works. Donning clothes is the realm of experience in which the “I” and the world conspire to evaluate who you are based on what you wear: a type of performance that defines your identity and occupation accordingly.

Her work is about self-definition; it is a political manifesto, and at the same time an artistic and ethical statement. But Ezcurra’s pieces do not merely provide a circumstantial note, inviting us to reflect on issues. The textile works that she has donated to UECLAA embody those different layers of experience that exist when one decomposes the self, observable in-between skin, outerwear, perceived image of oneself and the self that others see. In Ezcurra’s conception, the ‘body of work’ (or the work of art) is at once physical reality, psychic construction, and socially interacting entity.

Between 1992 and 1996 María studied at ENAP (the National Fine Arts School) in Mexico City. For the genre of installation her tutor was Melanie Smith, from whom she both learnt to take liberty with form and to use that form to address gender issues. Working at Diego Toledo’s studio, (a now mythic atelier where painting had been proscribed as a medium) Toledo’s disciples rejected tradition in a quest for experimentation and for alternative media in which to express themselves. Those artists have since been characterized by a debate concerning whether to locate their work as conceptual or to disentangle their strategies within figuration.

As the popular saying goes in Mexico, Maria does not pray to any particular saint. She takes different approaches to her materials and resists making pamphleteerish claims: whether overtly political, gender-derived, or repetitions of a nationalistic trope that is often found amongst Latin-American artists. Born in Argentina, to a family of European descent, Ezcurra holds a Mexican Passport and is married to a Mexican designer. That is to say, labeling her as a Latin-American artist is as problematic and vague as the notion itself: at once true but, for analytic purposes, not very useful.

However a number of nationally-related preoccupations are present within her oeuvre; daughter to exiles, Ezcurra’s family are all leftists, petit-burgeois, rather cultivated, and typical of the Latin-American intelligentsia. Reflection on nationality invites evaluation of the current role of collections in addressing Latin American artistic practice. UECLAA for example has been constructed thanks to donations and has no prescribed or self-definitive character and programme. As part of a graduate school of art history its main concern is to provide a certain academic and aesthetic objectivity with which to consider the art works that make it up. But, at the same time, it is implicitly involved in constructing a notion of the Latin American artist. Its ever-growing donated chaos increasingly gains importance and attention as reference and resource for scholars in both North America and Europe. So, what will make Ezcurra’s work get along well with those artists already included in UECLAA (for example, Guillermo Kuitca, or Damián Flores)? Why and how is she a Latin-American if her work does not facilitate an ethnographic approach when shown or studied? What is the inclusion in UECLAA doing for/to her work, especially in light of other collections within which works by Ezcurra have been included?

In the 7th. Annual Mexican Contemporary Art Salon, sponsored by BBVA (Bilbao Vizcaya Bank Mexico) María Ezcurra presented “Ni una más” (2001) an arrangement of women’s stockings denouncing the wave of crime and murder affecting women of all ages in the northern border of Mexico; a human rights issue the government is systematically oblivious to. Perhaps the swimsuit also directs our attention to the body of women, to social pressures inflicted upon that body, to male opinion on female garments. Ni una más was bought by a private enterprise whose identity remains concealed. A noted psychoanalyst in Mexico City is known to collect her fetishistically charged items.

Other than being a part of Ezcurra’s oeuvre, the groupings of art works I have mentioned so far have something in common; despite being collected, they remain unseen. Such collections, including UECLAA, are not permanently exhibited to the public at large. Diffusion however is one of María Ezcurra’s closest concerns; she was among the founders of La Panadería, probably the liveliest, active and more interesting forum –outside the institutional circuit- for contemporary art in Mexico City, during the 1990s. It is there that and María and her former classmates (among them Yoshua Okon, Daniel Guerra, Eduardo Abaroa, Sebastian Romo) found the possibility to exhibit their works. If UECLAA is to continue welcoming the works of artists such as Ezcurra into its corpus, its only logic can be to allow for public entrance for the extreme and the unknown, its decontextualisation thus serving to activate a new field of metaphors; only until then will what it has accumulated be allowed to make sense.