Rigo 23

GALLERY AT REDCAT
631 West 2nd Street
April 22–June 17

View of “Autonomous InterGalactic Space Program,” 2012.

Floating in a room painted the color of outer space is a wooden rocket ship, part bird, part ear of corn, part co-op, piloted by carved snails from a balaclava cockpit. The sculpture is the centerpiece of a complex, expressive, and spiraling collaboration between Rigo 23 and over a hundred Zapatista artisans in Chiapas, Mexico. Vivid paintings, embroideries, sculptures, and a mural incorporate the iconography and slogans of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN). Like the Zapatistas—armed alter-globalization revolutionaries as invested in intergalactic travel and the Internet as in agrarian reform—the exhibition grounds a relentless creativity and cosmic outlook in handcraftsmanship. “Space Program” forms an imaginative machine, far-reaching in its poetic and deathly serious politics; it outstrips the didacticism that often weighs down “political” art, presenting work not just about but of the movement.

The figures depicted throughout the installation wear the black mask and red bandana characteristic of the EZLN, their eyes visible through oval openings. Slits in the inner wall allow peeks of a boldly painted alleyway made from salvaged materials. Spaces open onto further spaces, both figurative and literal. The balaclava symbolizes little more than terrorism in the US, though it takes on richer meaning when worn by mothers, children, crops, stars, and moons. Similarly, these calculated “lines of sight,” like the eyes of the masked satellite dangling above the gallery, lend the playful and at times cute installation a dire militant edge.

Many have dismissed the seventeen-year-old EZLN as another stalled and disintegrated idealism, just as the REDCAT show might seem like so much stargazing. But one should bear in mind the scale of Zapatista time. This is contemporary art with ancient Mayan ancestry, conceived within four walls but limited only by the speed of light, yet “patiently advancing” at the speed of snails. The measure of its progress is embroidered with pink thread on the spacecraft’s red needles of flame: ¡NO ESTAN SOLOS!—THEY ARE NOT ALONE!

— Travis Diehl

Edgardo Aragón

THE HARRIET & CHARLES LUCKMAN FINE ARTS COMPLEX
5151 State University Drive, California State University
April 14–June 2

View of “La Trampa” (The Trap), 2012.

Despite art criticism’s rampant overuse of words such as traffic (or interrogate or investigate) to describe the seemingly nefarious “activities” of works, there is no better term to describe Edgardo Aragón’s recent videos that deal in the practices and fallout of narcotrafficking throughout his native Mexico. The trilogy of video installations in his first solo exhibition in the US, however, presents an oblique form of trafficking animated by the harsh realities of the region’s narcoterrorism and drug-related violence: the drug cartels’ makeshift techniques of torture and interrogation as forms of playful, childlike recreation. This is most evident in Efectos de familia (Family Effects), 2008–10, a series of video vignettes that restage these scenarios with the artist’s friends and relatives cast as both perpetrators and victims.

Bearing some resemblance to the durational performances initiated by Santiago Sierra (without the physical harm), or the rehearsal performances of Francis Alÿs (without the resources), Aragón’s videos offer seemingly banal rituals of everyday experience that are only later revealed to bear some social relationship to the reign of terror that has taken hold of the country in the form of an ongoing “war on drugs.” In Efectos de familia, children aimlessly hold bricks above their shoulders, or push a truck down a dirt road; and one stands in the path of an oncoming SUV with his feet buried in the sand. As opposed to the reality of life on the ground in Mexico, Aragón’s actors are able to walk away from each scene relatively unscathed, which seems to emphasize the fact that the works traffic in meaning rather than giving it to us outright.

— Aram Moshayedi