Teresa Margolles

This dissertation examines the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Doris Salcedo, Teresa Margolles, and Santiago Sierra, artists that redeploy the aesthetics of 1960s minimalism in relation to contemporary political crises. I argue that these artists make an important case for the political and ethical relevance of aesthetic abstraction, insofar as their work imagines forms of coexistence that resist the sovereign organization of human bodies.

In each chapter, I discuss a selection of major works by an individual artist, emphasizing theoretical analyses that privilege deconstruction, bio- and necropolitical theory, and continental philosophy. I situate artistic practices in relation to their social and political contexts to consider how Gonzalez-Torres, Salcedo, Margolles, and Sierra respond to issues such as the AIDS crisis, state violence, and socio-economic subjugation. Specifically, I consider how they use minimalist formal strategies to convey the socio-political abstraction of human life and, further, to address the conditions in which certain bodies fail to appear. These artists demonstrate how the body’s disappearance produces an abstraction: not the sign of a body but the index of its withdrawal from appearance (to invoke the etymological meaning of abstrahere). By portraying the material traces of the figure’s negation, they account for the aesthetic and political challenge of presenting anonymous bodies and beings. Their work thereby inverts minimalism’s concern with the relation of objective forms to embodied viewers, in that it reveals art’s contradictory relation to inaccessible bodies. This approach carries important aesthetico-ethical ramifications: it exposes viewers to unknowable and imperceptible beings, challenging dominant ethical models based on the inter-subjective relation of autonomous individuals; hence, it illustrates an ethics of coexistence that is irreducible to subject-object binaries and to the subjectivization of embodied life.

From a woman’s perspective in Mexico: provocative works of Latin American Conceptualism

Women artists in Mexico present their lifeworld from a decidedly female point of view and respond to international artistic movements with very different approaches: works by Teresa Serrano (*1936), Ximena Cuevas (*1963), Betsabeé Romero (*1963), Teresa Margolles (*1963), Claudia Fernández (*1965), Melanie Smith (*1965), and Maruch Sántiz Gómez (*1975) constitute the core of this publication. The photographs, videos, objects, and installations from the holdings of the Daros Latinamerica Collection in Zurich take a subversive look at Mexico’s national identity. The works call prevailing hierarchies of power into question, including their associated traditional functions as well as the social spaces of women within Mexican society. The apparent banality of everyday things and actions—both in the domestic-private as well as the urban-public sphere—experiences new, deeper meaning and is in part ironically broken.

Exhibition: Kunstmuseum Bern 3.6.–23.10.2016

Catalog
Edited by Valentina Locatelli
Publishing house: Hatje Cantz
With texts by Matthias Frehner, Valentina Locatelli, Alma Ruiz, and interviews with Hans-Michael Herzog, Maruch Sántiz Gómez, Teresa Serrano and Betsabeé Romero
Edition in German and English; 176 pages, 64 images.

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Aus der Perspektive der Frau in Mexiko: provokative Arbeiten des lateinamerikanischen Konzeptualismus

Künstlerinnen in Mexiko präsentieren ihre Lebenswelt in dezidiert weiblicher Sicht und antworten auf internationale künstlerische Strömungen mit ganz eigenen Ansätzen: Arbeiten von Teresa Serrano (*1936), Ximena Cuevas (*1963), Betsabeé Romero (*1963), Teresa Margolles (*1963), Claudia Fernández (*1965), Melanie Smith (*1965) und Maruch Sántiz Gómez (*1975) bilden den Kern dieser Publikation. Die Fotografien, Videos, Objekte und Installationen aus dem Bestand der Daros Latinamerica Collection in Zürich werfen einen subversiven Blick auf die nationale Identität Mexikos. Die Arbeiten stellen herrschende Machthierarchien und die ihnen zugeordneten traditionellen Funktionen sowie die sozialen Räume von Frauen innerhalb der mexikanischen Gesellschaft in Frage. Dabei erfährt die scheinbare Banalität alltäglicher Dinge und Aktionen – sowohl im häuslichen-privaten als auch im urban-öffentlichen Bereich – eine neue, tiefere Bedeutung und teils ironische Brechung.

Ausstellung: Kunstmuseum Bern 3.6.–23.10.2016

In this article, we mobilize a theoretical and political critique to the aesthetic and affect that informs ‘white innocence’ and its attempts at witnessing the pain of the Other. Engaging with the work of critical race theorists we put the artistic interventions of Hannah Black and Parker Bright critique of Dana Shutz’s Open Casket in conversation with Teresa Margolles’ Vaporization. In doing so, we explore the epistemological, affective, and aesthetic dimensions involved in the desire of whiteness
to transcend its own matrix of race-power and aestheticization of black suffering. That is, instead of anti-racist and transformative, Schutz’s piece, in our view, remains caught within a Manichean subject/object relationship constituted by a curative relation of mastery and servitude that is inextricably contained with and by the ontology of whiteness. We argue that this dynamic of ‘pornotroping’ mobilizes an aesthetics of hailing and identification that reaffirms white innocence. Margolles’
Vaporization, on the other hand, compels us to engage the space, corporality, and epistemology of flesh outside of the subject/object divide, while confronting us with multiplicities of embodiment as experienced through art and social productions.

Ce texte propose une relecture de l’œuvre Sterberaum (2011) de Gregor Schneider, pour laquelle l’artiste envisageait d’exposer dans une galerie une personne décédée ou sur le point de mourir, à l’aune de l’histoire de l’art des années 1960-1970. Au cours de ces deux décennies, plusieurs artistes cherchèrent non plus à représenter la mort mais bien à la présenter par l’intermédiaire de leur corps, dans un contexte inquiet, parfois religieux et souvent sacrificiel, élevant l’artiste au rang d’épigone du Christ.

This paper aims at considering Gregor Schneider’s work, Sterberaum (2011), through the prism of art history in the 1960’s/1970’s. Many artists at the time sought not to represent death but to incarnate it quite literally by using their own body in an attempt to present the artist as a sacrificial victim. With Sterberaum, Schneider planned to exhibit a deceased person or someone about to die in an art gallery.