Epilogue

In this epilogue, the author reflects on his time in Mexico City during one of those routine visits characteristic of fieldwork follow-ups. In particular, he talks about the announcement made by Subcomandante Marcos, the charismatic leader of the Zapatista Liberation Front, that he was going to retire. Marcos's announcement was enigmatic and of great signifcance to anthropologists. He took everyone by surprise because of the insistence with which his message wished to update both the metaphorics and materiality of his usual mask with the vernacular of digital media. The author wonders why Marcos chose to replace the mask with the meme and the hologram, and without removing the mask. He concludes with the belief that what will remain of Mexico is an assemblage of friends, incurable-images, a hologram, and the task of curating anthropos: an ars curatoria in search of an anthropology to come.

The Incurable-Image

This chapter introduces concept of the ‘incurable-image’: a species of images that throws us into clinical, ethical and pedagogical struggle. A limit to both ethnographic and curatorial practice, this struggle is symptomatically devalued, concealed, and discouraged by what can be called our ‘states of curation’. The chapter considers three lessons that can be learned from the work of the incurable-image and shows how concept-work and conceptual art gradually emerge as anthropology's incurable-images. It also examines the opening sequence from Rubén Gámez's experimental ethnographic film La Fórmula Secreta: Coca Cola en Las Venas (1965), which provides us with an incurable-image and an intriguing point of intrusion into the diseased body politic of the post-Mexican condition, as well as the autopsies and modalities of intrusion celebrated by the curatorial platforms it has affinities with.

The Incurable Park: Fundidora

This chapter is a pedagogical experiment in curatorial design that takes issue with humanist and socially oriented forms of collaboration in the age of ethnography. In 2013 the author had the opportunity to conduct a one-week seminar and deliver a public lecture in the context of the ‘Curation and Critique’ series programmed by Javier Toscano at the Escuela Adolfo Prieto in Mexico's industrial city of Monterrey. The seminar was designed to explore the concept of the incurable-image with twelve participants active in Monterrey's contemporary art scene. To this end, participants embarked on a thought experiment and a collaborative essay that would diagnose one of Monterrey's postindustrial landmarks: Parque Fundidora. This chapter first describes Toscano's curatorial work before discussing the interplay of control and curation in the layout of what seminar participants refer to as the ‘Incurable Park’. Through collaboration, this chapter tests the limits of ethnography, curation, and conceptual pedagogy.

Curatorial Work

This chapter examines the dominant concepts that form the so-called ethnographic turn in contemporary art, including the cross-cultural approach. It first provides an overview of the notions of montage and animation that have been added to the media anthropological repertoire before discussing post-Mexican assemblages. It then looks at Roger Bartra's notion of a ‘post-Mexican condition’, Silvia Gruner's archaeophobic video Don't Fuck with the Past, You Might Get Pregnant and Eduardo Abaroa's iconoclastic installation The Total Destruction of the National Museum of Anthropology, highlighting the lessons that can be learned from this assemblage of seemingly nihilistic gestures and post-anthropological attitudes. It also introduces the contemporary anthropologist's mode of curatorial work and argues that the stakes behind this ‘assemblage-work’ are nothing less than the differential futures brewing in the contemporariness of contemporary anthropology and contemporary curation.

Post-Mexican Fugue1(Farewell to ¡Que Viva Mexico!)

This chapter focuses on the watershed curatorial project Mexperimental: 60 Years of Avant-Garde Media Arts from Mexico. Curated in 1998 by Jesse Lerner and Rita Gonzalez as a visual and conceptual probe into the post-Mexican condition, Mexperimental has had an enduring impact on the ethics of curation and pedagogy of moving images. One of the incurable-images of Mexican modernity and visual culture is the maguey plant, which has left an enduring impression on the anthropological, political, optical, and curatorial unconscious of post-revolutionary Mexico. The chapter examines three contemporary experimental documentaries that propose an alternative montage to nationalist and vanguardista uses of the maguey: Rubén Gámez's Magueyes (1962), Olivier Debroise's Un Banquete En Tetlapayac (2000), and Jesse Lerner's Magnavoz (2006).

Roger Bartra: Intrusion and Melancholia

This chapter explores the post-nationalist and post-cosmopolitan diagnostic work of Roger Bartra, leading public intellectual figure in contemporary Mexico, in relation to what he calls the ‘melancholic post-Mexican condition’. ‘Bartra’ stands here both for the conceptual persona of the Anthropologist and for a sign of a slow and patient disarticulation of the historically constituted racialized citizen-subjects and media-objects staged by post-revolutionary cosmopolitan modernism and avant-garde art/film practices. Bartra has evaluated the dominant forms of affectivity transmitted by the nationalist and national tradition of Mexican anthropology: a composite of pride, abjection, enthusiasm, and melancholia. The chapter considers the mutual intrusions between Bartra and the author as well as Bartra's intellectual vocation and anthropological motion in and out of Mexico, along with the implications this has with regard to the assemblage at work in the anthropological turn in contemporary art.

Untimely Futures

This chapter speculates on the future of contemporary anthropological ‘installations’ by reappropriating the very term ‘installation’ beyond its traditional home in the art world. Such reappropriation — indeed theft — invites the reader to sense the incurable-image as a form of life that harbors and struggles with a futurist mode of care. This symptomatology enables a renewed encounter between the conceptual personae composing this book's assemblage — curator, anthropologist, artist. The personae they repeat are ‘not just a matter of diagnosis. Signs imply ways of living, possibilities of existence, they're the symptoms of life gushing forth and draining away’. Ultimately, these incurable-images and iterative assemblages begin to release untimely futures in which the artists, anthropologists, and curators use inter-media experimentation as part of a demanding ethics of immanence to endure our states of curation.

Introduction

This book examines post-Mexican film and media arts and proposes a conception of curation as both repair and counter-actualization. It does so by introducing the concept of the incurable-image. Building on a participant-observation of curatorial platforms and experimental media arts in Mexico City, the book animates a trans-media assemblage that grew out of a convergence of three interconnected themes: the role played by the discipline of anthropology in shaping the contours of Mexican modernity and its avant-garde media arts and visual culture; the lessons learned from the tradition of experimental ethnography and the important ‘Writing Culture’ debates in academic anthropology in the United States during the 1980s; and the so-called ‘anthropological turn’ in visual studies and contemporary art since the 1990s. The book turns its attention away from cross-cultural geographies towards a geophilosophy of departures and arrivals modulated by Mexico City's chaotic intellectual life.