Mister Trippy

Regina José Galindo is a 34 year-old artist from Guatemala City and the major retrospective of her work that opened this weekend at Modern Art Oxford (AKA Oxford MOMA and Madam Mao’s) entitled The Body Of Others is stunning. The large upper gallery contains 3 video works: I’ll Shout It To The Wind (1999), Who Can Erase The Traces (2003) and The Fashionable Cut (2005). In the first, Galindo hangs by a harness from an arch in the centre of Guatemala City and is filmed literally shouting her poems to the wind; as she does so she drops sheets of her poetry and the crowd beneath her scramble after the paper thinking it might be money, since this is an area used for illegal currency exchanges. Who Can Erase The Traces is the piece that broke Galindo internationally, in it she walks from the Constitutional Palace across Guatemala City to the National Palace, stepping every so often into a bowl of human blood so that she leaves a  trail of red footprints behind her. The final video in the first gallery shows Venezuelan plastic surgeon Billi Spence using a marker pen to indicate how a beauty industry professional would ‘improve’ Galindo’s body The Fashionable Cut is one of a number of works in which Galindo presents the viewer with a problematic eroticisation of her nude body. She appears in this piece as an attractive and very young looking 30 year-old, but it is simultaneously a document of what is supposedly physically wrong with her from the perspective of popular contemporary body aesthetics.

Galindo has a background in advertising and it was only a couple of years ago that she was able to give up copy-writing and become a full-time professional artist. What Galindo has taken from advertising is the practice of distilling sets of ideas and experiences into a single image; she uses this process to raise social issues but in a poetic form. The result is neither activism nor advertising because Galindo does not provide solutions to the problems she raises. If Andy Warhol were still alive he’d be both fascinated and mesmerised by her because she combines an insider knowledge of advertising industry practices with YouTube aesthetics. Galindo does not employ a regular cameraman and her work does not have the slick finish we associate with so much of the video art produced in the overdeveloped world. Instead she will hand a camera to anyone who is available to record what she’s doing and much of the resultant footage is extremely rough, with some of her films suffering very badly from camera shake. This is a deliberate choice, one Galindo has made because she does not want the poetic core of her work obscured by an unnecessarily smooth finish.

The upper gallery at Madam Mao’s is spacious and the huge screens onto which Galindo’s works are projected use the space to great effect. The Fashionable Cut is silent, the other two films feature soundtracks of incidental street noises with the volume on both turned up so that they blend into each other. By this means a pleasing tension is created between the clean space and the chaotic camerawork and street sounds. This is a very slick piece of installation that deploys films which have been distributed in part on the internet (including via platforms such as YouTube) fantastically well on a monumental scale in a gallery setting.

The middle gallery is dominated by photo documentation. Angelina (2001) consists of 31 pictures each documenting a consecutive day on which Galindo dressed as a domestic servant. This was done to test public reaction to someone pursuing activities that might be considered unusual for a person of this station. Survival Skills Course For Men & Women Preparing To Travel To The United States (2008) is a video documenting ten people learning skills that will aid illegal entry into the wealthiest economy in the Americas. America’s Family Prison (2008) features Galindo and her family living in the type of cell in which illegal immigrants into the US are detained, and a photograph of this architectural structure. Finally there are two versions of The Conquest- Scalp (2009), a hand-crafted wig and a photograph of a similar item, one made from the hair of indigenous Guatemalan women and the other from hair sourced in southern India. Again the crisp and spare installation shows the work to best advantage.

The Piper Gallery features five further films, four of which are shown on Sony Cube monitors. Confession (2007) records a volunteer Spanish nightclub bouncer repeatedly pushing Galindo’s head into a barrel of water. The volunteer becomes extremely enthusiastic about the role he is playing, to the extent of ignoring an agreed stop signal and as an improvised addition to the scripted performance shoving Galindo across the room into a pile of wood. Amir Shakouri of La Caja Blanca, where this performance was staged, told me the audience directed their anger about the violence of the action towards Galindo rather than at the bouncer who’d overstepped the limits set down for this piece. I don’t find this particularly surprising, since art lovers often credit cultural practitioners with a level of agency they do not in fact possess, and when someone like Galindo exposes the fact that artists are every bit as constrained by capitalist social relations as anyone else, culture vultures tend to become enraged about having their illusions shattered.

Why Are They Still Free? (2006) depicts Galindo in the eighth month of pregnancy positioned on a bed in the way the Guatemalan army prepared pregnant indigenous women for gang rape; in this piece Galindo is restrained by umbilical cords. Social Cleansing (2006) shows Galindo being hosed down with highly pressurised water, something I vividly remember seeing done to rough sleepers in London in the 1970s; it forced them to move on and given the cold climate was likely to compromise the health of this vulnerable group, potentially fatally. XX – II (2007) documents workmen hired by Galindo placing tombstones on unmarked graves in Guatemala City. At the back of the exhibition space is a large screen onto which Identification Of A Body (2008) is projected. In the film Galindo lies heavily anesthetised with a sheet draped over her body, the audience lift the covering as if they were going to identify a corpse. This video is far slicker than anything else in the exhibition, and  some of the shots within it even bear a striking resemblance European Renaissance painting. It is thus shocking proof that Galindo’s trademark slacker aesthetic is a matter of conscious choice.

Not quite a part of the exhibition, and hidden away next to the Madam Mao’s reception desk, is Breaking The Ice (2008). This is a video of a performance in Oslo for which Galindo sat naked in a cold room with clothes laid out next to her, waiting for the audience to dress her. Before the Madam Mao’s opening, Galindo gave an anti-performance called Warm Up (2009). Those attending were made to queue before being admitted into an over-heated room; Galindo was not present and the work consisted of the audience reaction to this. This anti-action was followed by a talk during which Galindo’s frustration with the tendency of European audiences to exoticise her work was greeted with incomprehension by many of those listening; and this was particularly noticeable when Galindo stated that the reason she documented her activities was so that she could live from the sale of her photographs and videos (rather than starving or having to return to her former employment in the advertising industry). Tate curator Gabriela Salgado made a passionate intervention during the Q & A at the end, and this brought forth thanks from Galindo.

Listening to Galindo speak both during the talk and later in the more intimate setting of the Madam Mao’s cafe, I was very much struck by the way her work was shifting away from its initial focus on her own body, to an ever increasing emphasis on the manipulation of her audience. Indeed, as was the case in Oxford, Galindo no longer needs to be physically present for her live actions to be realised. It was also interesting to see just how small Galindo is in person, I’d guess around 4 feet 10 inches, I hadn’t realised she was this tiny from watching her videos. That said, Galindo has a larger than life personality and this is the most exciting exhibition I’ve seen at Madam Mao’s since the Gustav Metzger retrospective a decade ago (back in the days when the venue was still calling itself the Oxford Museum of Modern Art). So if you find yourself anywhere near Oxford, do yourself a favour and go check this one out. Regina José Galindo: The Body Of Others at Modern Art Oxford (MAO) runs from 31 January to 29 March 2009. Galindo’s Oxford performance and talk took place on 30 January 2009.

And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!