Amalia Mesa-Bains has been collecting fragments of a life for decades now, and the lives in her art go back deeper still. “Archaeology of Memory” is at once a career retrospective, a family history, and a great tradition. These are both personal and collective memories, and at age eighty she is still digging.
The concluding work at El Museo del Barrio, through August 11, is no more than a circle of chairs, laden with shiny fragments. It is her Circle of Ancestors, but she leaves it to you to imagine them as people. The tchotchkes would make for uncomfortable seating for anyone. The circle facing inward, toward candles on the floor, could assert her place or exclude her—just as, she implies,
the art scene and the United States have turned their backs on Mexican American women like her. She claims the memories as hers all the same. For so obsessive a collector, the claim will always be a work in progress.
Mesa-Bains lived and worked through the heyday of the “Pictures generation” and critical theory, and her show’s title plays on The Archaeology of Knowledge, by Michel Foucault. He sees knowledge itself as a means of dominance, but does she? Well, yes and no. El Museo del Barrio sticks to work from the last thirty years, much of it from the 1990s, including the four “chapters” of Venus Envy brought at last together. It is by no means satisfied with penis envy, but by no means triumphant. This is the territory of Queen of the Waters, Mother of the Land of the Dead.
The chapters start with First Holy Communion, Moments Before the End, and surely, some might say, the Catholic church is as repressive an institution as any. A life-size doll lies beneath its blanket as if dead. Maybe so, but display cases contain flower petals, family snapshots, lace dresses, and white curtains along with saints. The installation also has a dressing-room table, for more of a girl’s or a woman’s world. Later a “great green monster,” the proverbial earth mother reduced to wallowing in earth, has a hand-held mirror, too. For Mesa-Bains, parodies and protests are never easy to distinguish from models and memories.
The next chapter comes to a proper library, a fine-wood table laden with the Bible, a skull, a compass, and a globe. It belongs to Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, a seventeenth-century scholar, proto-feminist, and nun. It is just one of the chapter’s “enclosures,” including a harem along with A Virgin’s Garden, adapted from illuminated manuscripts. Apparently the artist can claim the Enlightenment and the Renaissance as her own, too. The final chapter, The Road to Paris and Its Aftermath, has a large photo of the Arc de Triomphe draped in electric colors. Mesa-Bains can claim the city of the Mona Lisa, Gertrude Stein, and Modernism as well.
Just a year ago at the museum, her sphere seemed more modest. She was at the center of a show of “Domesticanx” and domesticity, including younger artists (and I leave a proper report to my review then). Even now, she conceives of her installations as altares, or home altars, and ofrendas, or domestic offerings to the dead. Yet her claims here cover a lot of ground, and so do her memories. The solo exhibition could serve as a model for other museums, returning to one exhibition to add context and depth. It need not leave the past behind.
Mesa-Bains still treats personal and collective memories as one thing. As a guard said when I asked where to begin, anywhere, because it is all “a thing,” and he was right. The remaining chapter centers on codices, or ancient manuscripts, and botanical texts from the past, both overlaid with snapshots and paints. It does so, she says, because she loves them, but they have a personal meaning as well. She worked on them while recovering from a near-fatal accident. Her faith in herbal healing is sentimental as can be, like so much of her art, but the pipettes and vials are evocative all the same.
As another title has it, these are Private Landscapes and Public Territories. One last work could never be hers along. It turns to the border with Mexico for What the River Gave Me. Growing up in California as the child of illegal immigrants, she could not have known it as an obstacle or seen it shine, but no matter. The water becomes half globes of blown glass, set on a bed of shattered glass between banks of vaguely humanoid brown earth. Let it shine.
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