Teresa Margolles and the Aesthetics of Death

By Julia Banwell

This book is the first and most extensive academic monograph to be published on the work of the Mexican neo-conceptual artist Teresa Margolles. A range of art works produced by Margolles throughout the length of her career, which began in the 1990s (as part of the SEMEFO collective) and continues to the present day, are explored from such theoretical perspectives as the philosophy of death; the difficult spectatorship of death and the corpse; approaches to the representation of death and dead bodies in art from inside and outside Mexico; and the response of art to traumatic events in Mexico during and since the 1990s. The extensive scope of the study is a significant contribution to scholarly material on the artist, attending to difficult questions around art and ethics; its analysis of Margolles’s work is situated within the contexts of the long tradition of the display of real bodies and body parts in Mexican visual culture, against the backdrop of the effects of NAFTA and the War on Drugs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Release date: Jun 15, 2015
• ISBN: 9781783162512

Book preview

Introduction

The artist Teresa Margolles has devoted her career to exposing the effects of violence on the individual and the social body, examining the relationship between violence and absence and confronting the viewer with uncomfortable realities. Using various methods, she comments on traumas of the recent past and the present, and underlying all of her work is an interest in traces. She has worked directly with such human bodily remains as body parts, fluids, fat and blood as well as with such other materials as air, water and cloth that have been used as carriers to transport the bodily remains between sites of collection and exhibition, and also with debris collected from sites where violent incidents have occurred. Her work avoids an easy categorisation as simply reiterating the supposed affinity of Mexico with death, although unavoidably it is referenced. At first glance, her work may be seen to align with this well-worn association, but in fact it reveals and revels in a life, what the artist has herself called ‘la vida del cadáver’ or ‘the life of the corpse’. Margolles’s work goes beyond the dead body, in that her use of materials to make objects is an act of creation. The physical and social death of individuals cannot be entirely negated by such an act, but Margolles’s work forms human networks and connections that span vast geographical and cultural distances.

Margolles began her artistic career as one of the founding members of the SEMEFO collective in 1990,¹ and has been working as an independent artist since 1998.² SEMEFO started as a heavy metal band that staged highly confrontational performances; later, the creative focus changed, and Margolles and the group’s other members (Arturo Angulo, Carlos López and Mónica Salcido) channelled their energy into producing visual art installations that meditated upon the post-mortem disintegration of the physical body. The name SeMeFo is the acronym of Mexico City’s Servicio Médico Forense (Forensic Medical Service), the organisation that collects corpses and delivers them to the morgue. According to Margolles, the name gives rise to two potential layers of interpretation:

Phonetically, the word sounds strong and dry – it is a bureaucratic acronym like many others in Mexico City. Conceptually, however, the name SEMEFO represents this city, the largest in the world, which – like the morgue – is a great funnel through which hundreds of bodies fall into a very small space.³

The name of the collective connected its work with the contexts in which it operated: the morgue and Mexico City, both explicitly linked. The physical space of the morgue itself thus became a microcosm of the sprawling megalopolis that gave it its social backdrop. Margolles more recently has risen to prominence internationally as an independent artist, winning the prestigious Artes Mundi 5 award in December 2012, following an exhibition of her and other competitors’ work in Cardiff. In its latest development, her work has moved out of the morgues, reflecting the increase in violence related to the narcotics trade and the War on Drugs; many of her works also take in other locations both inside and outside Mexico.

Fragments and residues constitute material memories of past lives of bodies and objects. Death, as Margolles consistently and convincingly shows, is not the great leveller it is so often presumed to be. She draws our attention to the treatment of the bodies of poor and disadvantaged individuals, and victims of crime; she works with the traces left by murder, echoing the work done by crime scene investigators and highlighting their ineffectiveness and the impunity of the crimes’ perpetrators. The shift in Margolles’s loci of investigation into traumatic realities testifies to the artist’s social engagement. Her work has tracked the spilling out of violence, signs of violence and the destruction left in its wake, from the morgues into the streets – an increase in the visibility of death outside of the morgue that has, in fact, made necessary the transition into public spaces and the growing engagement of living participants. Margolles’s interest in traces is what ties together all of her works, in disparate geographical locations, with dead and living bodies, materials that acquire other meanings through contact with what remains. She is an archaeologist of trauma.

A selection of artworks by Teresa Margolles and SEMEFO will be explored in what follows from a range of perspectives (including the sociology of the body, the sociology of death, philosophical approaches to the experience of contemplating death and the corpse, spectatorship and participation), employing theoretical approaches that explore the nexus between individual and collective experience. The artist’s avoidance of the spotlight testifies to her not wanting to position herself as a celebrity, and is indicative of her artistic project having social activism as its central imperative. Her artwork is, of course, unavoidably mediated, but the focus is on the work itself, the bodies of those involved – corpses or living assistants and participants – and those of spectators implicated by the act of looking or even coerced participation. I would suggest that this is due in part to the nature of the materials that Margolles uses in her artworks; her employment of cadavers, body parts and bodily residues may cause understandably strong reactions. By inviting or forcing the viewer to react, and by not placing herself in the spotlight to guide interpretations of the work, the impact is more immediate. It is possible, though, that her artistic strategy could expose her and the work to harsh criticism,⁴ and being aware of this it is entirely possible that she may be deliberately choosing not to expose herself to such an immediate reception; furthermore, her engagement with the victims of drug-related murders may expose her to the more complex attention of cartels or law enforcement agencies. Margolles’s reluctance to answer questions may leave her work open to misinterpretation and criticism, but a stronger direction of potential responses to her work might indeed lead to questions over how much the artist wants the audience to be involved in experiencing her works actively.

Chapter 1 establishes a theoretical framework for looking at the social element of Margolles’s work, through an examination of relevant aspects of the sociology of the body, the sociology of death, and enquiries around the ‘Mexican cultural attitude towards death’. Chapter 2 explores the aesthetics of death. Margolles’s work will be situated within a long tradition of representing death and the corpse in visual culture, which is not specific to Mexico. Chapter 3 examines a selection of works that Margolles has produced using cadavers, where the focus is on the morgue, and chapter 4 looks at works that involve the performance of objects and substances, where bodies are less visible. Chapter 5 places Margolles within the wider contexts of the globalisation of contemporary art, conceptualisations of Mexicanness and political events in Mexico during the late twentieth century. For some texts cited, where versions in Spanish and English are available, I have cited from the English translation; for texts written in Spanish, the original citations are supplied in the endnotes.

Chapter 1

From Social Corpus to Social Corpse: social issues in Teresa Margolles’s artwork

The vertiginous escalation of violence in Mexico throughout and since the 1990s, particularly since the former president Felipe Calderón took office in 2006, has left in its wake the traces of countless crimes, thousands upon thousands of unsolved murders, as legacies of trauma on a national scale. Teresa Margolles’s artwork focuses on the victims of these crimes and those left behind to grieve, and holds up a mirror to challenge those in power to justify their failure to heal the wounds in society.

The artist channels collective mourning, exploring in recent years the question of who cleans up the blood left on the streets by acts of murder. Speaking in 2009, she said: ‘When it’s one person, it might be the family or a neighbor, but when it’s thousands of people, who cleans up the entire city’s blood?’¹ At the 2009 Venice Biennale, she used cloth that had been soaked with mud containing traces of the blood of murdered people to wash floors and windows, displacing the crime scene and its material trace evidence from their location in Mexico, and relocating them to another city where they travelled on the soles of the shoes of people who had passed through the Mexican Pavilion (see colour plate Cleaning, 2009). The absorption into and the covering and saturation of materials with tiny fragments of bloody soil is a powerfully physical reference to the alarming escalation in the murder rate during and since the 1990s and the fact that, effectively, living cities are saturated with the traces of multiple deaths. Violence is systematic and systemic.

Mexico in the 1990s and beyond: the backdrop to Margolles’s artistic production

Upon his election to office in 1988, President Carlos Salinas’s Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) government had promised to deliver economic stability for Mexico. One of the major components of this policy was the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), unveiled by Salinas in 1992 and implemented on 1 January 1994. This agreement, which Mexico was to enter into in collaboration with Canada and the United States, was to implement measures such as reducing trade barriers and tariffs in order to facilitate free trade, and the Mexican government gave assurances that this would improve both Mexico’s economic situation and her position in the global economy. The promised stability initially failed to materialise. Many commentators have noted the negative impact of free trade on Mexico in both economic and human terms. Rubén Gallo, for instance, asserts that the decade of the 1990s ‘was the most tumultuous in Mexican history since the Revolution ended in 1920.’² This period saw an increase in crime and violence, much of which was connected to the trade in narcotics. Long-running social and economic inequalities remained entrenched, and the persistence of the gulf between rich and poor drew many migrants from rural areas into the cities in search of employment.

A large number of maquiladoras (industrial plants manufacturing technological goods such as computer parts) were constructed during the 1990s in cities situated along the Mexico–US border, and Mexico saw an increase in investment in its border region. Many Mexican workers migrated to the northern cities, often finding accommodation in the shanty towns that grew to house this expanding population. Poor provision of facilities such as public transport and street lighting in these areas means workers often have to make long and dangerous journeys to the maquila. A high proportion of workers are female; the border city of Ciudad Juárez, in particular, has become notorious during and since the 1990s as the site of multiple disappearances and murders. Many bodies are never found, but some are eventually recovered from various body dumps in the remote desert. They are often difficult to identify because they are incomplete or severely mutilated, sometimes garbed in clothes that do not belong to them. There are many theories about the possible perpetrators and their possible motives for murder – including relationship killings; sex killings, where gangs are hired by paying customers to kidnap women who are then tortured, raped and killed; cartel revenge killings, where whole families are annihilated; gang initiation rituals; and serial killer(s).

It is difficult to gauge the exact numbers of murders and disappearances, with official statistics differing from figures estimated by independent groups. Gibler asserts that in the state of Chihuahua alone, hundreds of women have been murdered with hundreds more disappeared, and some Mexican states are not even attempting to count the number of unsolved murders of women.³ Protests have sought to draw attention to the authorities’ lack of urgency in dealing with these crimes. Watt and Zepeda reported that, by the late 2000s, the rate of femicides had intensified:

In Juárez alone, the number of femicides … reached unprecedented levels in 2009 and 2010, a 50 per cent increase on all those committed in the previous 16 years … Around 10 per cent of these feminicidios were committed against children and female teenagers. Additionally, according to the Attorney General of Chihuahua, there has been a dramatic rise in homicides against females there. In 2010 alone, almost 600 females were executed or killed, around 10 per cent of the total executions in the state.⁴

In 2010, Ciudad Juárez saw ‘almost 3,000 drug-related executions’ (p. 207). There have been worldwide responses to these crimes at such events as the Remember Them exhibition held in Liverpool, UK, between September 2013 and February 2014, which brought together artists and scholars from inside and outside Mexico.

The feminicidios have become inextricably associated with the maquiladora towns. Teresa Margolles has long held an interest in these cases, and has been travelling to the region for almost a decade to produce artworks that draw attention to the desaparecidas who continue to increase in number, often with little hope of the crimes being solved or of the perpetrators being brought to justice.

An Amnesty International report published in 2003⁵ lists a catalogue of examples of incompetence and negligence on the part of the authorities responsible for investigating the murders – including cases of falsified evidence, ignored leads, harassment of victims’ relatives and intimidation of human rights activists. Using information gathered from sources including official figures, legal and academic documents and the testimonies of the victims’ families, the report identifies correlations in such factors as the age and occupation of the victims. They tend to be young – in their late teens and early twenties – with the majority being students or maquila workers, and from poor backgrounds.⁶ The types of torture inflicted on the victims are sometimes similar between individual cases.⁷ Another major obstacle to solving these crimes is the lack of rigour in recording disappearances,⁸ which has given rise to uncertainty as to the true number of women who remain unfound. Notably, there has not been another report since 2003.

Narcoviolence

Gibler states that ‘of all the threats to the state in Mexico, there is really nothing so demonized, so dreaded and despised in the public discourse of politicians, as drug trafficking’.⁹ He also points out, however, that the transit of such high quantities of drugs through Mexico is facilitated by a certain permissiveness on the part of state officials at all levels. Aside from making the problem of drug trafficking an extremely difficult one to effectively address, this also complicates the notion of ‘corruption’ and its use as a term to describe deviation from acceptable conduct. According to Gibler, corruption as an idea

implies an aberration – someone breaking the rules to feed their own private greed. When activities thought of as corrupt become so prevalent in a government that it is impossible to speak of an institution free of them, when corruption ceases to be an aberration and becomes an integral part of the system, it is then no longer accurate to speak of corruption as such.¹⁰

As Watt and Zepeda indicate, whilst in government the PRI ‘controlled much of the trade and entered into pacts with traffickers to ensure that the state took its share of the profit’ (p. 8). The collapse of PRI rule, and the subsequent ousting of the party from government in 2000 with the election of the PAN candidate Vicente Fox, changed the balance of power, and the cartels in some parts of Mexico availed themselves of the opportunity to ‘empower themselves, moving in to capture elements of the state and to assume control over them’ (p. 8). The cartels have also benefited from a plentiful workforce thanks to rising unemployment and persistent poverty. The expansion of the maquila industry during the 1990s is key to understanding the cartels’ rise in power during this period. Migration to northern cities where the factories were constructed increased the number of people available for work. However, as the maquilas largely employ women, there has emerged a surplus of unemployed men, which has provided the cartels with a ready supply of willing employees.

The response of the government to the escalation in violence was the zero-tolerance ‘War on Drugs’, in which President Calderón engaged with gusto following his election to power in 2006:

Ten days after his inauguration, Calderón began his militarisation of the country and increased the number of troops on the streets to 50,000, more than Tony Blair had sent to invade and occupy Iraq in 2003. (p. 184)

Ostensibly concerned with tackling violence, the deployment of troops and anti-drug squads has been an opportunity for the government to militarise the country, and it has also been suggested that this is a tactic by which the government can re-establish the link between state and cartels that allowed for relative tranquillity (and a most prosperous relationship) during the PRI years. There have been many grassroots protests against the persistence of the problem of narcoviolence, a prime example being the journey of a caravan of protestors northward through the country in 2011 towards Ciudad Juárez, led by the poet Javier Sicilia and the No Más Sangre (No More Blood) movement. The blame for the many thousands of deaths that have occurred during the ‘War on Drugs’, has been laid at the feet of Calderón’s administration and its ‘insistence on militarisation’,¹¹ which, according to the view of the protestors, worsened the violence rather than reducing it.

The inevitable result of the increase in violence, has been an increase in the visibility of death and dead bodies, manifested during the 1990s as an increase in the number of corpses arriving at morgues, and later as bodies and body parts dumped in public spaces. This is a connection made explicit in artworks by SEMEFO and Teresa Margolles, which, using uncompromising representational tactics, reveal the causal link between crime, urban violence, violent deaths and absence. The use of bodies to draw the viewer’s attention to social problems has two effects: first, it highlights the persistence of poverty, socioeconomic inequality and structural instability in post-NAFTA Mexico and, second, it draws attention to the victims of injustice, re-locating bodies into the sphere of public exhibition.

Teresa Margolles’s work demonstrates that death is not the great leveller it is often presumed to be, erasing the inequalities and differences between people who occupied different social strata in life. In fact, as her work shows, social and economic inequalities persist after death as the reality of bodies that cannot be buried due to lack of economic resources, and their fate in mass graves or as cadavers for medical study. As stated by the Mexican cultural critic Cuauhtémoc Medina:

Contrary to popular wisdom, we all know that death does not make us equal. Social taxonomies are shown not just in causes of death, but also in the fate of our remains, the quality of our funerals and the public attention given to our absence.¹²

Margolles’s works are so effectively confrontational because they reveal that which is usually hidden away from mainstream society: the death and disintegration of the body. The artist directly confronts the viewer with images of corpses and, in some examples, real bodies and body parts, and the residues they leave behind after death. Her work, as well as being driven by its own aesthetic motivations, is strongly socially engaged. Her attention has not just been focused on traumatic events in Mexico, however. On 4 August 2011, Mark Duggan, a 29-year-old man, was shot and killed in Tottenham, north London, by police who were attempting to arrest him. It was alleged that Duggan had been carrying a gun when he was surrounded and shot by police in the minicab in which he was travelling. It was reported in the media at the time that Duggan had fired on police, but this was later revealed not to be the case. A protest march held two days later began peacefully but led to rioting, a turn of events of which the police had been warned if public reaction to Duggan’s shooting was not responded to sufficiently sensitively. Rioting spread to other locations in London, and later to other cities in England such as Birmingham and Nottingham. The television and print media broadcast a seemingly endless stream of photographs of apocalyptic scenes: burned-out buildings and gangs of youths looting shops and destroying property. An inquest was held into Duggan’s death and, after three months, the jury concluded in January 2014 with an 8/2 majority that his killing had been lawful, stating that Duggan had not been in possession of the gun at the time he was shot but that he had probably thrown it away (it was recovered a short distance from the scene). The verdict damaged already fragile police and community relations as well as provoking further protests in response, with hundreds gathering at a vigil in Tottenham following the publication of the inquest’s verdict and the suggestion that evidence was ignored.

The aftermath of the violence is the story told in the traces left in its wake; debris in the streets as material evidence of the disruption to streets and cities, individual lives and wider communities. Margolles travelled to the scene of some of the destruction in London, collected some of the charred remains of buildings destroyed by fire, and had them made into an industrial diamond by one of only two manufacturers so skilled worldwide.¹³ Titled Un diamante para la corona/A Diamond for the Crown (see colour plate 6 and Fig. 38), the jewel was exhibited at the Glasgow Sculpture Studios in 2012.

Theories of death and the body

There is a large corpus of sociological literature around the subject of death and its perception in industrialised societies, which examine specifically the ways in which we deal with death and dying. Lomnitz observes that:

The denial of death and the isolation of the dying have been identified by historians of death as core characteristics of Euro-American society of the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. The premium of preserving the life of the citizen above all else has been a guiding principle not only of medicine but also of the modern state.¹⁴

Death defies any structure established by human beings which would attempt to regulate human lived experience, because it is the point at which it is impossible to exert control, arguably rendering human endeavours to social and self-regulation ultimately fruitless – at least in the view of a belief system whose central tenet is the preservation of life. It is this inevitable end to life, embodied existence and subjective consciousness which is so terrifying and gives rise to the obsession with the control and regulation of death and illness.

Mellor notes the ‘apparent contradiction between the absence and the presence of death in contemporary society’.¹⁵ He describes death as ‘an unavoidable biological constraint upon various attempts at its cultural containment’ (p. 19), which explains our discomfort at the prospect of our own mortality and perhaps the consequent prevalence of literature surrounding the subject due to its fascinating unfathomability. Berridge and Shilling have also observed this contradiction, which contrasts the removal of the sickness and death of bodies from communities into private spaces such as hospitals and funeral homes, with a prevalence of representations of death in film and television. Shilling also posits how the notion that body projects aimed at health and youthfulness may be seen as a survival mechanism in denial of death, and how it has taken over the role of religion which had previously provided a way to ‘deny the finality of death’¹⁶ through its doctrines on the immortality of the soul.

Death