The restless eye: Finding art in Mexico's no-man's lands

BY FABIOLA SANTIAGO

fsantiago@MiamiHerald.com

Parres I, 2004, 35mm film. Courtesy Galer?a OMR, Mexico and Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich.">

MELANIE SMITH

Still from Parres I, 2004, 35mm film. Courtesy Galer?a OMR, Mexico and Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich.

• Slide show | Melanie Smith with Rafael Ortega: Parres Trilogy

IF YOU GO

What: Melanie Smith with Rafael Ortega: Parres Trilogy

Where: Miami Art Museum, 101 W. Flagler St., Miami

When: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday to Friday; until 8:30 p.m. on third Thursdays; noon to 5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, through June 29

Cost: $8 adults; $4 seniors; free admission every second Saturday

Info: 305-375-3000 or www.miamiartmuseum.org

Twenty years ago, Melanie Smith left her native England to live and work in Mexico City. It was the end of the Thatcher era, a time she remembers as ''dead for art'' in London. The world's third largest metropolis beckoned with opportunities for cultural and artistic development.

''Mexico City was fantastic, like a huge fair,'' says the 42-year-old artist, in South Florida for the debut of her exhibition Parres Trilogy at Miami Art Museum.

Consisting of a three-part film produced with Mexican cameraman Rafael Ortega, a painting behind a cement wall and a ''negative painting,'' the show is a MAC@MAM collaboration curated by Rina Carvajal.

A small but exquisite sample of Smith's acclaimed contribution to the visual arts emerging from Mexico, the exhibition reflects upon the tensions and contradictions of urbanity, as well as on the process of creating art.

PRODUCTIVE YEARS

The last two decades have been productive for Smith, who was trained as a painter but also has worked in photography, video and installation. She is fluent in Spanish and peppers her conversations with such words as ''inquietud,'' the state of restlessness that brought her to Mexico and continues to fuel her art.

''I couldn't just sit there and paint all day,'' Smith says.

Smith has come a long way since her arrival in 1989, when she lived in one of the city's poorest neighborhoods and mingled with fellow roving European artists -- among them Belgium's Francis Alys, now well-known for his cutting-edge work -- and with some of the Cuban artists who had fled to Mexico and now live in Miami.

All were penniless but intellectually charged.

''There was no place to show our work, so we were showing in each other's homes,'' Smith recalls. ``We were very connected and aware of what we were all doing. It was a really good moment.''

Smith relished examining her daily experiences and the ''micro'' components of the city's glut of color and history.

''Walking around became part of my own work,'' she says.

Among her first serious projects was the series Orange Lush (1994-96), which stemmed from her fascination with neon-orange everyday objects she found all over the city -- from consumer goods to the rows of tents at a sprawling Chinese market.

She made her contribution to the electric orange glow with Orange Lush I, a collage on foam and plywood she assembled from objects of synthetic, fluorescent quality -- curtain tassels, balloons, paper weights -- ``junk, really, sold in the center of the city.''

Another piece, Orange Lush III, consisted of a box lit by fluorescent lights that cast an orange glow and was filled with odd objects Smith collected: tiny soccer balls (one of them deflated); yellow and orange shoe laces; orange tulle; orange string.

''All this chaos was contained in this sort of minimalist object,'' she says of the box.

In 1997, Smith began to collaborate with Mexican cameraman Rafael Ortega, who later became her husband and father to her two young children. Smith and Ortega began to examine ''macro'' aspects of the city, hovering in a helicopter above one of the poorest neighborhoods in Mexico, a place of no vegetation, and photographing and filming in spirals as if they were making an abstract painting.

BLACK AND WHITE

The resulting black-and-white photographs and video, Spiral City, reference the earthwork of the late Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty in Salt Lake City.

After that project, Smith and Ortega began to work on their poetic Parres Trilogy. They focused on the rural highway town of Parres, 16 miles from the center of Mexico City. They discovered that the town once had thrived as a stopover for the railroad Mexico-Cuernavaca-Acapulco but that it had become a no-man's land after a modern highway replaced the train.

''It's this very sad place,'' Smith says. ''Most people leave it to go to Mexico City to work. It's a non-place, de paso.'' A pit stop.

The work is shot in 35-millimeter, and each clip chronicles the place's grim reality and ''heightens the artifice of film-making,'' Smith says.

In Parres I, a man walks toward the camera and gradually sprays a light mist of paint on a screen, casting the view of Parres behind him in a fog. The film's soundtrack is the mournful voice of an opera singer who changes her pitch to the tune of the man's strokes.

Parres II marks the first time Smith has inserted herself into her work. She stars as a woman left in the rain in front of a deserted blue house where the only living creatures seem to be a tied horse and a roaming black dog. The soundtrack is a folk song about childhood memories.

''It wasn't a self-portrait, although there are elements of it,'' she says. ``Where I come from, rain is part of daily life, so there is an element of nostalgia for a place where I am no longer living.''

In Parres III, a man diligently cleans a grimy screen, and as he works he seems to create a painting with his wash-rag strokes, Pollock-style, drips and all. The soundtrack is ''highly constructed'' -- the ringing of bells, the bark of a dog, the languid horn of an approaching train.

''As he cleans the screen,'' Smith says, ``there is almost a sense of hope.''

In all three films, Smith and Ortega find art in Mexico City's famous pollution and in the way the relentless rain turns the gravel road into a river of mud.

Parres Trilogy was exhibited at Tate Britain in 2006.

To accompany the films in Miami's exhibition, Smith added two works this year: Negative Painting, a blank rectangle framed by the spillover of paint from a canvas, and Installation for Parres 15, in which a six-foot, gray cement wall partially blocks the view of a gray landscape painting, also by Smith.

Museum-goers are not allowed to step behind the wall to see the painting and are prevented by a museum guard from crossing a bright pink demarcation line.

''Negative Painting does not comprise a painting as such but a negative space,'' says Carvajal, the curator. 'Marks and bobs around the edge of the painted rectangle suggest what `was' or, more accurately, what might have happened.''

Decline of marriage is destroying our pupils, say teachers

Comments (51)

Children with 'chaotic' home lives turn up at school too troubled to learn (picture posed by models)

• They're too mixed up to learn
• They've more eating disorders
• They're more prone to suicide

The decline of marriage is leading to widespread underachievement and indiscipline in schools, teachers warned yesterday.

Children with "chaotic" home lives turn up at school too troubled to learn, wrecking their prospects of success in exams, they said.

Growing numbers are being brought up in splintered families by mothers with children by different fathers, leading to behaviour and mental health problems including eating disorders and suicidal thoughts, a teachers' conference heard.

They are more likely to lead "dysfunctional" lives themselves, creating a "toxic circle" that no amount of investment or initiatives directed at schools can reverse.

Members of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers demanded a proper recognition of the impact of family breakdown on education and called on ministers to do more to promote marriage.

They said research from around the world showed that lack of stability at home can hamper children's learning.

Secondary school teacher Phil Whalley told the ATL's annual conference in Torquay that 40 to 50 per cent of youngsters born in Britain this year face a greater risk of failing at school because they will be born to unmarried couples or single parents.

Mr Whalley, a teacher at Hardenhuish School in Wiltshire, said: "We all know from professional experience the extent to which chaotic home lives and family breakdowns are damaging the educational prospects of children in this country.

"We know that no matter how brilliant the lesson, or how much has been spent on rebuilding the school, if a child comes in angry and in emotional turmoil because of their family life they will not learn.

"Family stability, or the lack of it, is an important determinant of a child's education outcomes.

"This means that we have a significant problem in Britain because we already have worrying levels of social dysfunction and family breakdown and the situation is getting worse."

He added: "The great sadness is that the consequences of an unstable family background are felt long into adult life.

"Those who under-achieve in their education are more likely to go on and live dysfunctional lives and be unable to support a stable family life for their own children.

"In short, as a society we are in danger of creating an expanding, perpetuating and toxic circle."

Mr Whalley said evidence from 16 countries in Europe and America showed that even cohabiting couples contributed to the problem. They are twice as likely to separate as married couples, he said.

He went on: "Further research shows that even if re-marriage occurs or parents find new partners the damage continues.

"The educational outcomes for all the children in so-called blended families are worse than the achievements of children brought up in traditional nuclear families."

Mr Whalley called for "openness and honesty on this critical issue".

He said: "If we are not careful we could reach that crossover point when no matter how much we invest in education, and no matter how hard schools and teachers try, they will not be able to overcome the negative impact of broken and dysfunctional families."

His call follows a report claiming that three out of four ordinary families are better off living apart under Labour's benefits and tax credits system.

Lesley Ward, the ATL's junior vice-president who has taught for 32 years at Intake Primary School, Doncaster, described the impact of family breakdown. "Every year we have to check out the surnames we are going to call pupils," she said.

"We have some girls who have got babies by six, seven, eight different chaps.

"They don't think they are dysfunctional at all, but look at them from an educational point of view and some of them are very dysfunctional.

"Some manage really well but there's a large minority who are struggling just to survive and that leads to a culture of 'If my mum can't buy it, I will nick it'.

"It's exacerbated by the inflow of economic migrants. They perceive them, falsely or not, as taking the jobs they could have."

An ATL survey released at the same time showed that a lack of support at home is the main reason for pupils failing to do homework.

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