“Everyone dies, but not everyone is murdered”: Teresa Margolles, conceptual resignification in postautonomy art”

• In Event: Death Drive in Contemporary Latin American Culture

Abstract

The work that Mexican artist Teresa Margolles (1963) does with human remains and waste products from the morgue and sites of violence seems to engage the public into a coerced citizenship by pushing embodied practices on them and forcing in them the recognition of México’s reality during recent decades. She reconfigures critical concepts, in order to obligate the gaze of the public toward the realities of the extreme Neoliberal exclusions: 120,000 disappeared, 45,000 of them children; more than 150,000 people murdered in the last 8 years; the heavy imposition of NAFTA which caused huge displacements of people and shoved over 45.5% of the population into poverty, with as much as 20 million Mexicans living with less than USD$1.50 a day. Margolles’ works make it impossible to the viewer to claim ignorance. This paper explores her works “La promesa” (2014) and “A través” (2013), by first studying the gendered inconsistencies between a reality (México) and the imaginary (the global public) that Margolles portrays. Secondly, I contest that her works dissolve the perceived autonomy of the roles of spectator, artist, and art object. And finally, I examine the concept of the ethical aesthetics of postautonomy pieces and its relation to the socio-historical context, not only of México, but of the Global South.

Author

• Edith Patricia Beltrán Mínehan, University of Wisconsin/Madison