Laboratorio 060 at CUE Foundation

cu e art foundat ionmarch 13 – april 19, 2008

With a per formance of Ancient Chinese Secret , or iginal score by Jef f Morr is

Thursday, March 13, 2008

curated by pablo helguera

[foreword]

We are honored to host this exhibition by Laboratorio Curatorial 060 [tk]

laboratorio curatorial 060

CUELaboratorioCat(txt).indd 1 2/9/08 3:12:03 PM

[artists’ statement]


art as a strategy for thinking

Laboratorio Curatorial 060 is an interdisciplinary arts collective that strives to question the ideas that both define and contain contemporary cultural practices and their insertion in the social terrain.

By working in an array of cultural fields, Laboratorio Curatorial 060 seeks to reaffirm new territories for symbolic operation and looks to be-come a cultural mediator that displays imagination as an inhabitable space. Laboratorio Curatorial 060 actively explores art at the fringe of its own discur-sive (im)possibilities. The art system becomes thus both narrative and an excuse for further theoretical developments.

More than branding and locating ourselves under a specific language usage, a set of practices or categories, we prefer to dwell around creative yet critical points of departure. As a collaborative of art-practitioners, we are interested in borders and their active exchange—borders between disciplines; between producers and receptors; between social systems; between art and life. In other words—we look to touch upon artistic projects at the border of what is and what is yet to come—borders not as divides, but as articulations.

We intend to find ways to create our own interconnectivity and develop it functionally in a socially-oriented way. We believe that sharing thoughts, building up knowledge networks and creating an experiential ground of international

nature, finding both the common and the seem-ingly inconsequential differences, will encourage interested participants to talk about the necessary ingredients in cultural life: practices that stem out of each one’s own composition, creativeness, weak-nesses and strengths.

“We seek new strategies for expressing cul-tural identities and creating communities within the relational sphere of art.” In the end, we feel that art is an excuse for dialogue, an experiment into social possibilities, a sketch for possible futures. More than a universal language, a useful methodology in which ideas can travel, be given form and voice, bypassing borders and cultural barriers.

—Lourdes Morales, Javier Toscano & Daniela Wolf


[curator’s statement]

pablo helguera

Laboratorio Curatorial 060 is a Mexico City-based collective formed by three individuals (Javier Toscano, Lourdes Morales and Daniela Wolf) who together bring a variety of personal and profes-sional interests, ranging from curatorial and artistic practice to philosophy, architecture, art history and economics. They originally came together in 2003 as part of a seminar on curatorial practice in Mexico City. From the onset, the range of proj-ects generated by this collective has existed in the interstice of the curatorial and artistic practices and between the straightforward presentation of art and the renouncing of it in favor of a purely social or political activity. The members of Laboratorio 060 are equally attracted to using contemporary art strategies to communicate with peripheral com-munities in Mexico as well as inserting unusual collaborative dynamics in the traditional gallery space.

The experimental practice of Laboratorio Curatorial 060 is indicative of the temperament and creative state of mind that characterizes the new generation of Mexican art. While the members of Laboratorio Curatorial 060 nourish themselves from the richness of a post-conceptual and high-modernist narrative and collective dia-logue that has flourished in Mexico City over the last two decades, their work is also an active critical reflection of the paradoxes of making contemporary

art in such an urban reality, particularly the evident contrasts between the art-star-oriented, contempo-rary art marketplace supported by a small base of local collectors and the realities faced by a country with deep economic and social divisions. In this context, the interest of using art to generate a new sense of community and produce meaningful social exchanges has become central to this collective.

Through its hybrid practice, Laboratorio Curatorial 060 seeks to erase borders between audience and artists, producers and consumers, thinkers and listeners, art and non-art, constantly searching for new types of meaningful relationships. There is something openly playful and utopian about their practice, as their experiments seem to carry an implicit acknowledgement of their precarious and vulnerable nature and maybe even of their potential inoperability as art, as social practice, or both. But even if that were to be the case, each one of Laboratorio’s experimental projects functions as an engaging case study of unusual interactions and each one exudes an energy clearly rooted in a very firm belief in the urgency for changing the art practice from an end onto itself into a vehicle for building better societies.

The present exhibition seeks to showcase docu-mentation of some of Laboratorio Curatorial 060’s recent projects, including one specifically made for the show at CUE Art foundation.


Tráfico (Traffic), November 2004Curatorial actionPeriférico Sur, Barranca del Muerto & Altavista, Mexico City

An itinerary exhibition in the true meaning of the word, or even possibly a hybrid, a “curatorial ac-tion.” Artist’s photographs were displayed away from the exhibition space and phrases from politi-cal discourses that spoke about progress and the future were taken out of context. We approached street vendors in order to work with them and learn a series of urban survival tactics. At the end, 30 people ended up walking inside the Periférico, Mexico City’s main freeway, at peak hour, creating this clandestine show which lasted 47 minutes until the police were notified and the art-activists had to be confined to their safety area again.

Se Busca Venus (Looking for Venus)Action and exhibition, November 2005El Mirador, Insurgentes Square, Mexico City What is beauty about these days? How do people relate to it? Does it still have a link to art and every-day life? Our project for El Mirador, a street-food-vending-box turned into a gallery by the Miniplugs (Paulina del Paso and René Peñaloza), set to pose some answers to these questions. We used the box first as a studio and then as an exhibition space; a place where we would receive passer-by women who would assume with their own bodies a power-

ful, yet political, appropriation of a sign of beauty, in this case that well-known and ever-present femi-nine figure that pervades the Western art tradition —Venus—throughout various representations in different points of history.

Frontera. Esbozo para la creación de una sociedad del futuro (Frontera. A sketch for the creation of a future society)Series of interventions, 2006-2007Frontera Corozal, Chiapas, MéxicoAn experimental project that operates above all from a symbolic territory, opening questions that pertain to the yet unexplored possibilities of con-temporary art, all while putting to a test specific is-sues of the artistic discursive field by placing them outside their usual course of action. This project takes a small Mexican town in Chiapas, border-ing Guatemala, as a point of departure. It explores the way the public life of a community can be al-tered through artistic strategies, fusing different perspectives on the art-life exchange in the same place, generating through diverse means a collec-tive memory beyond the “documentary frenzy” of the cultural apparatus—usually conceived as a plain ideological “giver” of meaning.

For the exhibition at CUE Art Foundation, the project will be presented as a performance based on an oral tradition strategy.

[projects]



Traffic, curatorial action, 2004Video still: (“La solemnidad de un ritual y la seducción de un espectáculo” /“The solemnity of a ritual and the seduction of a spectacle,” Octavio Paz, 1994,referring to the movement of the Ejército Zapatista Liberación Nacional (EZLN))


Traffic, curatorial action, 2004Video still: “No somos la excepción” / “We are not the exception,” common saying and “Las recaídas son cíclicas” / “Relapses are cyclical,” Octavio Paz, 1994, referring to the movement of the EZLN (Photograph by Jorge Camarillo)


From the curatorial action Traffic, 2004“May God make you like Juan Diego.” Karol Wojtyła ( John Paul II) during his visit with Vicente Fox, President of Mexico, in July 2002

QUE DIOS LOS HAGA COMO JUAN DIEGO


Traffic, curatorial action, 2004Video stills (Photographs by Marco Antonio Cruz)


Venus of Milos (winner), 2005From the project Looking for Venus35mm slide


Ruben’s Venus (winner), 2005From the project Looking for Venus35mm slide


Picasso’s Venus (winner), 2005From the project Looking for Venus35mm slide


Overview of Frontera Corozal and the Usumacinta river at the borders between Mexico and Guatemala, where the project Frontera. Sketch for the creation of a future society was realized between 2006 and 2007.


View of the main street of Frontera Corozal, 2006From the project Frontera. Sketch for the creation of a future society


Taquería el Talento (Taco place), 2007From the project Frontera. Sketch for the creation of a future societyDigital image


Radio killed the video star, 2007Performance


Ancient Chinese Secret, 2007Score by Jeff MorrisFrom the project Radio killed the video star


Ancient Chinese Secret, 2007Score by Jeff MorrisFrom the project Radio killed the video star

Bell, Triangle, Drums, 2007From the project Radio killed the video starDigital images

Radio killed the video starPerformance/Video, March 2008CUE Art Foundation, New York, NY

What is left to be done in the New York public sphere? How does one creatively stir someone to action and distinguish this plea from a spectacular mediation? Our project for CUE Art Foundation intended to answer critically these types of ques-tions by setting up a creative, yet conceptual practice. With a certain melancholy of sorts, we published and distributed an open call looking for musicians and composers who would like to hear their work played over the public radio of this me-tropolis. Our collective turned into mediator for mass distribution of a musical piece, assumed this negotiation while simultaneously affirming the playful possibilities of invasion of the public realm through radio waves—probably the only incursion left—and the signaling out of the limits of the art system as part of the show business industry. Only intuitively and from an aesthetic perspective, music is proposed as a means that can re-write and speak out a distant experience. If radio can work as a testimony for poetics, for the spoken word, for ono-matopoeia, maybe it can also bring about the traces of unattended differences and carry over the voices of those dissenters that only ephemerally try to alter the New Yorker’s experience of the everyday.


laboratorio curatorial 060 is an interdisciplinary arts collective based in Mexico City, founded in 2003. Their line of work implies an experimental and critical approach to the public sphere and the articulation of a curatorial practice as a medium for artistic performance.

Some of the most relevant projects realized by the collective are:

Repertorio sistemático de consulta rápida para el estudiante y profesional con definiciones acordes con la realidad del mundo actual (Systematic repertoire of quick reference for students and professionals, with definitions according to the actual world), 2005, Canaia Gallery, Mexico City, Mexico.

Tráfico (Traffic), 2004, a curatorial action at the speedway, Periférico Sur, Barranca del Muerto and Altavista, Mexico City.

Frontera. Esbozo para la creación de una sociedad del futuro (Frontera. Sketch for the creation of a future society), 2006-2007, a series of artistic interventions at the border between Mexico and Guatemala.

(in).COMunidades ((dis).COMmunities), 2007, an exhibition on electronic arts practices as part of the International Festival for Electronic Arts, Transitio_mx02, Mexico City.

In 2007 the collective won the First Prize of the Best Art Practices award from The Italian Culture

Department of the Provincia Autonoma di Bolzano for the Frontera project. They have produced several projects and presentations developing the idea of an artistic production as a strategy for further critical developments. Articles about Laboratorio 060 have been published widely in Mexican media (including TV and radio programs), Art Press (United States), ART (Germany), Exibart (Italy), Sarai (India) and Exit (Spain).

[biographies]


pablo helguera (Mexico City, 1971) is a visual artist living and working in New York City. His work generally acquires unusual formats, ranging from experimental symposiums, the creation of fictional artists, phonograph recordings, exhibition audio-guides, publications or nomadic museums and touches on topics of pedagogy, cognition, politics, history, fiction, and memory. His project The School of Panamerican Unrest (2003-08) consisted of driving the entire length of the Panamerican highway with a portable schoolhouse, conducting workshops and performances along the way and is considered the most extensive public art project ever realized. A traveling monographic exhibition of this project will be presented in 2008 at the Stanley Picker Gallery, London, UK; El Museo del Barrio, New York, NY; and Casa del Lago, Mexico City, amongst others.

He has presented his work individually at MOMA (performance, Parallel Lives, 2003), Royal College of Art in London, UK; and at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington DC. He has participated in many international biennials, including the 8th Havana Biennial, the Liverpool Biennial, and PERFORMA.

He is the author of four books, including: The Pablo Helguera Manual of Contemporary Art Style ( Jorge Pinto Books Inc., 2007), a social etiquette manual for the art world; the novel, The Boy Inside the Letter ( Jorge Pinto Books Inc., 2008); and musical works The Foreign Legion (2005) and The Witches of Tepoztlan (2007).

He currently is the Director of Adult and Academic Programs of the Education Department of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.


CUE Art Foundation is a 501 (c)(3) non-profit forum for contemporary art and cultural exchange between artists and the public. We value the astonishing level of creativity that artists provide and the importance of their activity in the social context of the city.

CUE provides artists, students, scholars and art professionals resources at many stages of their careers and creative lives. Our programs include exhibitions, studio residencies, publications, professional development seminars, educational outreach, symposia, readings, concerts and performances. Since 2002, we have operated from our 4,500 square foot storefront venue in the heart of New York’s Chelsea Arts District.

CUE exhibiting artists are chosen by their peers and a rotating group of advisors and curators from across the country. This pluralistic process ensures that CUE consistently offers diverse viewpoints from multiple disciplines of artistic practice.

Simply put, we give artists their CUE to take center stage in the challenging world of art.

Board of DirectorsGregory Amenoff Theodore S. Berger Patricia Caesar Thomas G. Devine Thomas K.Y. Hsu Brian D. Starer

Advisory CouncilGregory AmenoffBill BerksonWilliam Corbett Michelle GrabnerDeborah Kass Kris Kuramitsu Jonathan Lethem Lari Pittman Irving Sandler

StaffExecutive DirectorJeremy Adams

Director of DevelopmentBryan Markovitz

Programs DirectorBeatrice Wolert-Weese

Programs AssistantRyan White

Development AssistantTalia Spetter

PreparatorWilliam Bolton

All artwork © Laboratorio Curatorial 060Catalog design by typeslowly

Printed by mar+x myles, inc. using 100% wind generated power on FSC certified paper

isbn-13: 978-0-9797964-3-2 isbn-10: 0-9797964-3-1


Documents

Laboratorio 060 at CUE Foundation