I have a piece in last week’s Current discussing the work of Regina José Galindo (currently at Artpace). It’s not so much a review as a discussion of the history of Galindo’s work, and the way that it brings protest strategies into a visual art context. There’s a lot I couldn’t get to in that article, though, and thought I might dig into that a little bit here.

One thing that struck me about the work at Artpace is the contrasting uses of performance and documentation by Kate Gilmore, Regina José Galindo, and Margarita Cabrera. (Although Rodney McMillian incorporated performance and documentation into his work, for various reasons I won’t be discussing him in this post.) Galindo’s performance draws from a protest tradition — at Artpace, she locked herself along with her husband and daughter in a mobile prison cell in the gallery. Also, like a protester, she views her performances as her artwork, while the videos and photographs that are generated from them are purely documentation of the performance — not individual works of art, but necessary to spread “word of the performance and the message.” However, when she discusses her intentions and expectations, Galindo never mentions social change:

I suppose that—like everything I do—this was done for me…. I never have any expectations after completing something. What I do have is a certain amount of nervousness and anxiety before every performance. But after that I have no expectations. It’s done.

So in this way at least, it is distinct from protest which aims to catalyze social change.

Like Galindo, Kate Gilmore puts herself into dangerous or difficult situations in order to comment from a personal perspective on the systemic problems that prevent human progress. But the similarities end there. Gilmore’s work consists of performances on video (the videos being, in this case, the artworks, while the performances become simply part of the process of creating the work). The situations Gilmore puts herself in don’t target material injustices, but are created by the artist. She sets her foot in a bucket of cement, lets the cement dry, and then sets about the task of breaking her foot out of the cement with a hammer. This kind self-imposed task suggests an allegorical confrontation with psychological barriers more than a way to address specific injustices (although these barriers are connected to societal inequities).

Margarita Cabrera takes a different tack. She turns the gallery space into a makeshift copper butterfly factory, and recruits community volunteers to make 2,500 butterflies by hand. This strategy recalls the work of Harrell Fletcher, who often addresses divisions within communities by organizing collaborative events. However, Cabrera does, like Galindo, deal with concrete issues of ongoing social injustice. The workshop Cabrera builds is meant to signify the maquiladoras (low-wage manual labor factories, often with lax labor law enforcement) in Mexico. By “exporting” the butterflies to the home of a wealthy San Antonio collector, Cabrera targets economic systems that hide the human costs of a product from its owners by separating the craft from the craftsman. The documentation plays a minor role in this work: a photograph of the butterfly installation is affixed to the wall of the workshop. In another parallel to Galindo’s work, Cabrera leaves the workshop for gallery visitors to explore, so that a trip to the gallery gets you an experience of the residue of her artwork.

The interplay between these exhibits helps flesh out the contours of performance in contemporary art. Each artist works with performance strategies that articulate a distinct relationship between artist and community. By placing these shows side-by-side, Artpace encourages the visitor to contemplate approaches to social critique: The direct, literal commentary of Galindo, or the allegory of Gilmore. The interpersonal relations of Cabrera or the personal goals of Galindo. The roles of document and sediment in the artistic process.

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