Sensacional! Mexican Street Graphics
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
701 Mission St.
San Francisco, CA
18 November 2006 – 4 March 2007

Review by Tonya Warner

Upon walking into the Yerba Buena galleries, you are greeted by a statue of a giant luchador admiring a cup of coffee, a testament to the intersection of commerce and pop culture celebrated in Sensacional!: Mexican Street Graphics. This is an exhibition not of graffiti, but of the usually untrained and underappreciated folk art found on mundane streets of Mexico. Included in the show are advertisements painted on independent shops, printed ad posters and covers of raunchy pulp magazines, alongside various packaging and informational posters. This is a traveling show organized by the independent Mexican publishers Trilce Ediciones, beginning in 2001 with an exhibition at the Museo de la Cuidad de Mexico, the show has since been to Los Angeles, Spain, and New York. In addition to a catalogue for the exhibition (which seems to be the best format for viewing this work), they have designed a website specifically for the show (as of now only available in Spanish) where people around Mexico are encouraged to contribute their own photographs of this home-brewed art form.
Overall, the appeal is to the viewer’s appreciation of kitsch and the sense that “bad” design is sometimes more interesting than “good.” There is also an element of (somewhat condescending) humor when an untrained artist tries to copy well-known cartoon characters – you end up with a sickly green Bart Simpson or Gizmo looking like he’s just ingested too much peyote – figures that, in their very wrongness, seem that much more endearing. However, what one comes away with is a sense that the technical accuracy or realism of the image does not matter so much as its visual potency. As a form of communication, these images are able to transcend barriers of language or culture while remaining indicative of the community in which they are created.

In the literature for Sensacional!, there is much talk of the merits of man-made, imperfect and unique design work in the face of both corporate monopolies and an ever-encroaching technology-driven society. This postulating about computers taking over our lives is nothing new – hell, Baudrillard suggested that we are symbiotically connected to our technologies back in the 90s. David Byrne (yes, that David Byrne), in the book accompanying the exhibition, even goes so far as to paint a hellish picture of perfectly mechanized beings as the endpoint of a mechanized world. He even adds to the “no duh!” annuals by stating that our imperfections are what make us human. All this to justify the importance of the work in this exhibition, work by anonymous and underappreciated artists who serve to remind us that we are not robots. Yes, how come we are not robots yet? It seems to be the logical conclusion of Byrne’s argument. Somehow we, as a creative species, prevail as individuals despite our self-induced demise. The problem with the anti-tech argument is that most people, unlike Byrne, do not necessarily need reminding of what is “human” or “real” – I would believe that the famous musician turned hopeful artist does not live in the “real” world, therefore, does he really need to be our spokesperson?

The issue of design versus anti-design – especially in terms of hand-painted graphics – is of particular note in the techsploited Bay Area, where rich programmers live alongside poor immigrant families, with young crafty artists somewhere in between. A lot of the novelty of some of these graphics is taken away by the fact that their equivalents exist here in as very real a form. If I were to mention to a friend “that taqueria with the dancing tacos,” there would be no question of where I meant. This sort of hand-designed advertising is so ingrained in Mexican culture it too has been imported to California.

Although they can be argued as countering mass-produced corporate branding, these images exist in a visual and cultural realm of their own. The beauty of these images, from an advertising stand-point, is that they are not competing for your attention against other posters and billboards – their uniqueness and quirky imperfections catch one’s eye and hold in the memory; the insidious corporate advertising technique of saturation and repetition has backfired.

An interesting point those heralds of the cult of “realness” have glossed over is the use of copyrighted figures – characters pillaged from various Disney and Warner Brothers cartoons and other pop culture references, appropriated to sell ice cream or auto parts. For instance, one image that appears in Sensacional! Is a rather disturbing picture of a dissected rabbit with the head of Bugs Bunny, designed to sell meat. That is the point – yes they are taking matters into their own hands, but these artists and storeowners employ such already recognizable characters to sell their wares. There is some thought put into these designs, they are not just painted out of personal expression, they are geared to grab the attention of their target audience – that of the local community. It is the definition of a grassroots art form. What to me seems the most notable is the attention paid to the audience, mixed with personal quirks and humor rather than to rules of design, market research, or generally any manner of formulae.

Which brings us to the exhibition at Yerba Buena; whereas in the exhibition in Mexico artists were invited to paint huge signs directly on the walls, for the displays elsewhere sign painters were commissioned to recreate paintings from photographs on large hanging fabric or wooden boards. The original images, as 4x6 snapshots, line up across the floor in overwhelming procession. It is a bit of a shame to compare the photos to their copies as the originals are undoubtedly better. There are also three-dimensional light boxes covered by pulp magazine covers copied onto transparencies. With a mixing of these reproductions, real “artefacts” and photos of the originals, all in a variety of scale and material, the display method is definitely gutsy. It effectively undermines the preciousness of the art object while attempting to capture their original spectacle. Sensacional!, as an exhibition, makes an effort to transcend mere documentation but at the same time seems to further distance the visitor from the “anonymous” artists and context. Perhaps this is why the book format seems more suited to this material. Nevertheless, these images, when presented within an art gallery setting – and therefore denied their original function – still stand up as beautiful cultural barometers.

http://www.ybca.org/tickets/production.aspx?performanceNumber=2116
http://www.sensacional.com.mx/
http://www.fecalface.com/SF/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=407&Itemid=90