En el aire...

to understand life, we have to understand dead. To understand modern art we have to notice that it not the object, but the concept, the idea behind the object,

Teresa Margolles

MUSEUM FÜR MODERNE KUNST, FRANKFURT, GERMANY

In the museum’s soaring hall children play under bubbles that come from Teresa Margolles’ piece En el aire (In the Air, 2003). Running, laughing, catching, they are fascinated by the glistening, delicate forms that float down from the ceiling and break up on their skin. A common motif in art history, the bubble has long been used as a memento mori, a reminder of the transitory nature of life. The children’s parents, meanwhile, studiously read the captions. Suddenly, with a look of disgust, they come and steer their offspring away. The moment of naive pleasure turns into one of knowing repulsion: they have learned that the water comes from the Mexico City morgue, used to wash corpses before an autopsy. It’s unimportant that the water is disinfected; the stigma of death turns the beautiful into the horrific.

This is the ploy at work in most of the pieces on display in Margolles’ first large-scale European solo show. Despite the show’s title, ‘Muerte sin fin’ (Endless Death), death itself is not directly visually displayed; it is only in the viewer’s psyche that the silent, minimal, often quite beautiful work is transformed into something appalling. In Aire (Air, 2003) the viewer simply moves through a humid room; in Llorado (Wept, 2004) water drips from the ceiling. In the former, it is the same disinfected morgue water moistening the room; in the latter, it is plain tap-water. We are appalled at the idea that we have absorbed the tincture of death. How are we, then, not appalled that the same water washes from autopsy rooms into the drains and is recycled into tap-water?

The artist herself is clearly haunted by the production of these works. They are not a catharsis for the poverty and violence she witnesses; they are the production of mourning. Modern psychiatry defines normal grief as a process of emancipation from the bondage to the deceased, of readjustment to the environment in which the deceased is missing; acute grief, on the other hand, is the inability to make these adjustments. Margolles suffers from acute grief for her country. At her own avowal it would be impossible to make representative images to describe her reality; it would simply be too appalling.

By Amanda Coulson (http://www.frieze.com/issue/review/teresa_margolles/)

En el aire:

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