reviews minerva cuevas
Minerva Cuevas:
On sOCiety
mc, Los angeLes
28 JuLy – 8 septem ber
State, 2007, wall
painting, white acrylic
paint, dimensions
variable, edition 1 + 1
ap. photo: Joshua White.
courtesy mc, Los angeles
At the crux of both propaganda and what has been loosely termed ‘activist counterpart to this recurring insect, the three video monitors of Silent
art’ is any fixed ideology. But unlike the immediate and systematic mind- Spring (2007) loop found footage of pesticide crop-dusting, the time-
control of propaganda, the activist aesthetic materialises as a tool of lapse shrivelling of a plant, and the faces of workers in fields.
ideological communication and empowerment; Mexican artist Minerva Given that Cuevas lives in Southern California and is witness to
Cuevas’s Mejor Vida Corp. (Better Life Corporation) is an outright America’s sick immigration system, it’s easy to read the artist’s central
expression of such. Cuevas’s nonprofit art organisation is best known imagery and use of Meabe as metaphors for US/Mexican border issues.
for its stealth campaigns and interventions like bootlegging subway and An estimated twelve million undocumented immigrants live in the US,
lottery tickets, fabricating stick-on barcodes that lower supermarket prices embodying the enormous tension between human-rights responsibilities
and issuing fake student IDs to swindle institutional discounts. For her and cultural anxiety that plays across geopolitical boundaries. Seemingly
recent solo show at MC, Cuevas held back on these sorts of performative at odds with this pressing theme are Cuevas’s six static photo-documents,
actions in favour of a more conventional (and comparatively tame) take on which recount her Concert for Lavapies (2003), an impromptu public jam
politicised issues. session orchestrated in the streets of Madrid. While the photos speak to a
On Society consists of five works from 2007 – sculpture, video momentary cultural integration, they seem dislocated, begging to resound
projection, a three-channel video installation, a wall piece and a polemic text with the music of the actual event. In proximity to her new work, these
stencilled on the face of the gallery – and the photographic documentation documents make me question whether Cuevas’s action-driven aesthetic
of a public action from 2003. The new body of work is strong, centring on isn’t better suited outside the gallery walls altogether. Literally located on
issues of agriculture, economics and social divides. In the video, El Pobre, el MC’s exterior, the work State (2007) is put to the test. The white-lettered
Rico y el Mosquito/The Poor Man, the Rich Man and the Mosquito (2007), text, written in English, publicly asserts that all government reduces its
a young boy reads a short story of the same title written by the Basque citizens to calculable data and variables in pecuniary exchanges. Interjected
nationalist, Tomás Meabe, around the turn of the last century. The boy between gallery and street, the work proves a more activist function missing
reads in Spanish, unfolding a tale of two men, one rich and one poor, who in the other pieces – to incite thought and challenge the status quo within
eventually die of the same disease carried by a single mosquito. As the the public landscape. Catherine Taft
story progresses, the camera pulls back to reveal a looming image of a
magnified mosquito behind the boy, a figure that reappears in Cuevas’s
magic lantern-like sculpture, In the Darkening Land the Light (2007). As
artreview 160
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