text Laura Barreca
28.10 / 01.12.2010
While I think, you see this
In her first italian personal exhibition, Milena Muzquiz presents a series of works gathered together in a project planned during the last year in Palermo. Very well known worldwide for her musical performances with Martiniano Lopez-Crozet, together they are Los Super Elegantes, Milena Muzquiz represents a combination of visual art and theatre, she walks the edge between music and art. She walks and dances on stage disco-pop rhythms in a seductive way , Martiniano acts as a lover, a fighter, partner of theatre performances played in a punk-psych style, almost neo-dadaist. They are the duo, that with an amateur and low-fi style, has performed worldwide for many years, at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, at the Biennal of Whitney Museum in New York, in special projects with Assume Vivid Astro Focus, at the Frieze Fair in London.
The work of Milena Muzquiz is not part of the traditional aesthetic standards thanks to its eclecticism. It’s not part of rankings and bounds to structures and contents, it shows an attitude strictly related to the performance itself, to the amateur dressing-up, to the pop music that is a way to communicate but also to the making up of different techniques and languages works. From these elements it’s possible to understand how her research has evolved in the years, writing texts, staging stories, improvisating, making sculptures, objects, scenographies for her musical performances but also creating odd clothings and masks to wear as a tableaux vivant. Personal life is often mixed with the existence of an artist. That’s why the recent displacement in Palermo has inevitable results on the Mexican artist’s identity. Make clear the great number of suggestions lived, or those only imagined, is what the exhibition Mentr’io penso tu vediti questo (While I think, you see this) aims to. A sort of manifesto, the expression used to link a series of sculptures, objects, wall installations gathered in two areas, that share the background music written and performed by the artist. The tracks are recorded on some environment noise, as the street noise that draws our attention, or the performer on stage that is not alone, embraced by the people chatter.
In the project created for Domani, a Palermo (Tomorrow, in Palermo) there are different levels of reading, from the reference to the work of a great conceptual artist to the remark more personal, but also to a politic stance as another act of an original and extreme freedom of expression. Among all these references there is the homage to the works of De Dominicis, to the life-long ideas of immortality and invisibility of the Marchigian artist. In Questa è un’opera di De Dominicis (This is a work of De Dominicis) with a self-evident truth, Milena Muzquiz turns the wall installation of ceramic and letters into the big caption of the reenactment of Statua, the work displayed in Rome in 1979, along with 10 other vertical sculptures manifested by some “hints” as a hat and a pair of shoes.
That’s how Milena Muzquiz reaffirms the poetic freedom of quotation, reforming the ideas of immortality and invisibility as a memory and as part of the present, staging the hints of something else or someone else. Memory is part of the sculpture Memoria di una notte alcolica (Memory of an alcoholic night), a magmatic rock, impulses, emotions, memories together that see the light in an abstract way and anti-aesthetic, whose base is a postmodern and pop object. Trovato in fondo al mare (Found at the bottom of the sea) is a ceramic sculpture covered with shells, shellfish and small objects gathered together to form a totem or something similar to a wonderful ziggurat coming out from the sea. A phantasmagorical aesthetic, kitsch in a sense, as in some baroque Sicilian sculptures is behind the stratification, the assemblage and the freestyle.
The work of Milena Muzquiz, as her music lyrics, come along with words written and located at the base of the sculptures, on the wall, on the floor, around the space that host the works and the words. In a clear display cabinet there is a children dress knitted by the artist. That’s a live and let live declaration from the artist, the same attitude that she has to affirm the freedom of creation. The work is titled Liberate I vostri bimbi (Free your children) and it’s dedicated to the young Leone and to the maternity experience of the artist, as an observation to the mother-son relationship and largely to people-society one. To conclude, the invitation for “a drama for empty chairs” ends up in a joke, an interrupted action, where the chairs are not used, because Io sono l’invito (I am the invitation) is a prayer to not be there or maybe simply a prayer.
Milena Muzquiz was born in Tijuana (1974).
