"Strange New World," the ambitious exhibit on the Tijuana art scene, has landed in Los Angeles. Here is my LA Weekly review of the show, as seen as the Santa Monica Museum of Art. My family on both sides is from Tijuana going back several generations. Growing up, the border was more of a toll-booth in our daily lives than any kind of national boundary. So I naturally approached the show with my somewhat Proustian, Hickey-influenced art-viewing antennae especially alert. A key graf:
The show's hefty bilingual catalog is crammed with verbose essays on how interesting and postmodern Tijuana is. Which is fine, but if Tijuana’s cultural cheerleaders were really confident in its tag as “cultural hot spot,” you wonder why they feel the need to repeat it as much as they do. And they repeat it a lot. The problem is that the compulsion to constantly defend Tijuana’s cultural pedigree is clearly meant to counterweigh the overwhelming worldwide impression that the city is a crass and “culture”-less urban disaster zone with no face and no history. That’s almost like staging an exhibition about Los Angeles and saying, “L.A. is more than Hollywood.” Tijuana is similar to most thriving world cities of today; it supports both high culture and abject poverty, and is beginning to feel a lot like every other major urban center.
Interesting sidebar: Last week my brother Surge was in Echo Park. I showed him the "Strange New World" catalog and he saw that they printed a huge two-page photo of a tag of his that says "Tijuana." It is reproduced without any credit. That's street art for you.
But the snub says something broader, I think, about the weirdness of the Tijuana art hype: Much of the excitement focuses on the concept of the city's "emergency aesthetic." The thing is, I get the sense few of the officially sanctioned Tijuana artists actually operate within this aesthetic, at least not in the same way the city's street and guerilla artists -- like the guy behind the "casa mona" -- have. (See Acamonchi.) There was a time, though, when it sounds like everyone was mashing together "art" from whatever they could find, as captured by Josh Kun in this 2004 L.A. Times magazine cover story. Whatever my opinion, or anyone else's, art-lovers in L.A. are encouraged to go check out a slice of current TJ cultural productivity in action.
* Here is a sample of pieces Surge did in Tijuana during a period when he was pretty much all-city on both sides of the border. Above, my new favorite borderlands artist Daniel Ruanova. Below, some TJ schoolkids in front of pieces by Surge and Lenox:
A few engaging Tijuana alt-blogs are found here, here, here, and here.