Artistic Resistance at the US-Mexico Border:
From Chicano Art to Tactical Media
Working paper by
Marie-Chantal Locas, University of Ottawa
[email protected]
Presented at
“Politics in Hard Times: International Relations Responses to the Financial Crisis”
SGIR 7th Pan-European Conference on IR, Stockholm, 2010
[D]ès lors qu’il y a un rapport de pouvoir, il y a une
possibilité de résistance. Nous ne somme jamais piégés
par le pouvoir : on peut toujours en modifier l’emprise
(Foucault, 2001 : 267).
Introduction
In the early eighties, the US-Mexico borderlands saw the emergence of an art that
explicitly addressed a variety of border issues. Even if the cultural production of this
region has been very prolific throughout history, art as a political strategy, i.e. artistic
manifestations and performances that deliberately address border politics, is relatively
recent. However, what is often referred to as “border art”, which is art that engages the
border both as a site and as a subject, was produced prior to the eighties, and still
influences the work of today’s artists. Beginning in the late 1960s, a period of identity
politics extends through the early 1980s when many artists participated in political
struggles by ethnic and gender minorities (Berelowitz, 2003: 144). In the San DiegoTijuana border region this engagement was articulated by artists who identified with the
Chicano Movement, an activist endeavour that fought institutionalized racism and
sanctioned violence against Mexican-Americans and Mexican immigrants in border
towns. In order to affect political change, these artists deployed their art and looked for
representational icons allowing them to articulate their group’s identity and to offer its
members positive self-images. According to Jo-Anne Berelowitz, this form of
counterhegemonic politics “was based on a praxis of resistance against the mainstream
Anglo culture and an affirmation of Mexican and indigenous roots” (145).
In her study of border art since 1965, Berelowitz identifies two other movements
that each corresponds with a tendency in the art world, and also in the world in general.
From the middle of the 1980s through the 1990s multiculturalism developed out of
identity politics, and was embodied by the Border Art Workshop/Taller de Arte
Fronterizo (BAW/TAF). Rather than identification within a particular ethnic group,
engagement with border issues constituted the criterion to become part of this collective.
As the Chicano artists, members of the BAW/TAF were concerned with issues of
identity, selfhood and otherness, but they approached them from a different perspective.
Instead of selecting icons that foregrounded their alterity in order to establish their
identity, they operated on the premise that cultures and ethnicities evolve in a dynamic
dialectic, which means that the identity of a subject is always in a state of becoming and
has no fixed essence (158). As conceptual artists, one of their main focuses was to
reframe the concept of border because they rejected its dominant representation as a
chasmic barrier dividing two nations. Rather, they concentrated on the border’s liminality
and they viewed it as a zone of transformation and as a laboratory for social and aesthetic
experimentation (Berelowitz, 1997: 71).
In the 1990s, Berelowitz has identified the culture of globalization as the
dominant trend in border art. Established in 1992, the InSITE exhibition represented this
tendency by staging art at various sites on both sides of the US-Mexico border. Initially
administered solely on the U.S. side of the border, Mexican institutions got more and
more involved in the organization of this event. Throughout the years, InSITE became
characterized by a growing collaboration between Mexicans and Americans, the
internationalization of its curatorial team, and the expansion of the concept of “art work”
into a larger cultural field (Berelowitz, 2003: 170). In 1997, a highlight of the exhibition
was Marco Ramírez’s Toy an Horse, a thirty-foot tall two-headed wooden horse
straddling the San-Diego/Tijuana border. This piece of work was a demonstration of
contemporary experimental art practice which goal is to create an imaginative space in
order to allow the emergence of alternative perceptions of social and political realities
(Cándida Smith, 2003: 235). According to Louise Amoore and Alexandra Hall “Toy an
Horse disrupted the everyday ways of seeing and defamiliarized the border crossing,
making it strange, incongruous and extraordinary” (2010: 300). In this sense, the work
effected by Ramírez opened up possibilities for critical relation to the normal and the
habitual.
In the last few years, we have witnessed a technologization of artworks and
performances that critically respond to border politics. Inspired by the Critical Art
Ensemble (CAE), which observes a shift in revolutionary investments that correspond to
a shift in the nature of power that has removed itself from the street and became nomadic,
many artists now resort to tactical media (Raley, 2009). Rather than being oriented
toward a grand sweeping revolutionary event, these new media art projects engage in a
micropolitics of disruption. For example, the Transborder Immigrant Tool engages the
use of Global Positioning System (GPS) at the US-Mexico border in order to repurpose
the technology by “putting it in a different context and using it in a different way” (Micha
Cardenas quoted in Amoore and Hall, 2010: 305). In this sense, tactical media create an
interruption that allows us to look more attentively at the border ritual, and to question
border politics. As Walter Benjamin puts it, this interruption constitutes the true potential
of art’s political provocation (314).
In this paper, I will study the evolution of various artistic manifestations and
performances at the US-Mexico border in order to analyse the evolution of what can be
called artistic resistance. Inspired by the definition of cultural resistance given by Stephen
Duncombe in his Cultural Resistance Reader (2002: 5), I will define artistic resistance as
art that is used to challenge the dominant political, economic and social structure. Here, I
will focus on border art that aim at creating a “free space” where alternative ideas and
practices can emerge. As Duncombe argues, we have to free ourselves from the limits
and constraints impose by the dominant culture, or the dominant representational regime,
before we can experiment with new ways of seeing and being that allow us to develop
tools and resources for resistance (5). Intimately
Power
This paper is part of a larger research project that will trace on one side the history
of the securitization and technologization of the US-Mexico border, and on the other the
evolution of artistic resistance vis-à-vis this complex process. By doing this, I will
explore the relation between the exercise of power and resistance at the US-Mexico
border. But the border will not be considered as a space of exception where the state still
exercises its sovereignty. Rather, the border will be presented as a milieu where it is
possible to observe the way power now operates and how it interacts with resistance. In
this context, the concept of assemblage will be particularly useful for understanding the
way complex webs of actors, discourses and logics influence border politics. In fact, the
concept of assemblage represents more than a network of actors such as governments,
private companies, or lobbyists; it represents “a series of discrete and separate—even
conflicting—collections of actors, pressures and networks that nonetheless results in a
convergence of phenomena” (Muller, 2010: 41). Since an assemblage consists of a
multitude of heterogeneous objects whose unity is not the result of mutual agreement, but
of the functional entity they form (Haggerty and Ericson, 2000: 608), the use of this
concept allows us to focus on how various strategies converge into a system of control1.
According to William Bogard, power and resistance function in a multiplicity of
ways. Because there is no universal form of power, there is no universal form of
resistance to power (Bogard, 2009: 28). For this reason, we should not privilege political
over aesthetic, ethical, technical or other forms of resistance. In fact, resistance is always
specific and immanent within a concrete assemblage. In this sense,
[p]oints of resistance are present everywhere in the power network. Hence there
is no single locus of great Refusal, no soul of revolt, source of all rebellions, or
pure law of the revolutionary. Instead, there is a plurality of resistances, each of
them a special case (…) The points, knots, or focuses of resistance are spread over
time and space at varying densities, at times mobilizing groups or individuals in a
definitive way, inflaming certain points of the body, certain moments in life,
certain types of behaviour (Foucault, 1998: 94).
1
This is where the concept of assemblage differs from the concept of governmentality put forward by
Foucault. Unlike governmentality, assemblage doesn’t assume a common impulse to govern (Salter, 2008).
Strategies of resistance thus change to reflect strategies of power. In fact, as the
securitization and technologization of the US-Mexico border intensify, so too does the
artists response, which has gained throughout the years an urgency and a critical
sophistication (Raley, 2009: 35).
If there are multiple forms of power and thus multiple forms of resistance, why
then focus on artistic manifestations and performances? As many authors suggest,
resistance is immanent within particular technologies of power. With a particular form of
power comes a particular form of resistance. Since I will argue that control has emerged
as the dominant diagram of power at the border, and in society in general, I will explore
one of the strategies proposed by Gilles Deleuze to elude this exercise of power, which is
creative resistance.
By tracing the history of border politics in the last decades, we observe the
emergence of a biopower specific of what Deleuze calls a “society of control” (Deleuze,
1990). According to this author, societies of control have gradually replaced disciplinary
societies that emerged in the 18th and 19th centuries, reached their height at the outset of
the 20th century, but have been in crisis since the end of the Second World War. In
societies of control,
"[t]he numerical language of control is made of codes that mark access to
information, or reject it. We no longer find ourselves dealing with the
mass/individual pair. Individuals have become "dividuals," and masses, samples,
data, markets, or "banks" (…) The disciplinary man was a discontinuous producer
of energy, but the man of control is undulatory, in orbit, in a continuous network”
(5-6).
Rather than being considered as a new form of society, control should be
considered as a new diagram of power. In this sense, the society of control can be
compared to a rhizomatic assemblage in which every node is a potential gate or filter. In
this context, the border represents one these nodes where the body has become a
password linked to various databases and risk profiles in order to distribute or reject
access and status2. At the border, each individual is now scanned, identified and profiled.
Thus, “[a] databank is accessed, a record created. An entry occurs, or perhaps access is
denied. Such is the changing texture of borders” in the era of control (Walters, 2006:
197). Throughout this process, the polysemic nature of the border has increased since it
creates a privileged population whose mobility becomes easier, and filters out the same
time a risky and excluded remainder (Balibar, 2002).
Within the society of control, the proliferation of sites where the subject must
provide incessant proof to legitimate identity to exercise its freedom constantly imprisons
it in diverse circuits of control (Rose, 1999). As one of the sites where the individual
becomes a "dividual", that is to say a fragmented subject whose elements can be
modulated (Deleuze 1990), the border operates as an order of subjectification that has as
its objective the production of “calculable subjects operating in calculable spaces”
(Dillon, 1995). However, rather than staging a subject able to rationally assess the risks it
faces and to adjust its behaviour accordingly (Dillon, 2007; Aradau et Van Munster,
2007), this border participates in the emergence of a neurotic subject, that is to say an
anxious subject increasingly insecure which constantly growing fear of the Other (the
stranger, the migrant, the terrorist, etc.) is articulated through discourses and practices
which represent the border as the boundary allowing to preserve its security and
tranquility (Isin, 2004). Therefore, we can say that the evolution of US border politics has
2
With the growing use of biometric technology, combined with algorithmic method, the individual is
inserted in a target population with which it maintains a closeness index (Bigo, 2005). Through this
process, the imprints of unchangeable parts of the controlled individual’s body are transformed into
numerical codes from which it is possible to determine his risk profile and then, to authorize, or not, his
access to a given space (Ceyhan, 2004).
been characterized by an increasing securitization, which is engendered by, while
participating in, an era of “biogovernance which systematically links primitive collective
emotions of fear and anxiety with postmodern technologies of surveillance” (Kroker,
2006: 61).
According to Bogard, ‘dividuals’ are the product of ‘new dividing practices’ that
distribute information instead of bodies and use networks to distribute functions rather
than physical enclosures. ‘Dividuals’ are not disciplined, normalised nor self-controlled;
they are ‘controlled in advance’, more designed than docile. “Dividuals are databases
constructions, derived from rich, highly textured information on ranges of individuals
that can be recombined in endless ways for whatever purposes” (Bogard, 2009: 22).
Thus, as William Walters suggests, the main goal of control is not to train, moralize,
reform or remake the individual. Contrary to discipline, whose political dream was the
penetration of the rule in the smallest details of life through a hierarchy that allowed the
exercise of what Foucault called capillary power, control “relinquishes the dream of an
all-encompassing, normalized society [and] is less bothered with reforming the young
offender, than with securing the home or the shopping mall against their presence”
(Walters, 2006: 192).
Resistance
In his description of the society of control, Gilles Deleuze demonstrates how
people are homogenised and how their desires are controlled and channelled. In this
context, Deleuze argues that possibilities of resistance are strongly diminished. To
counteract the weakening of resistance that he observed, he insists on the importance of
the process of subjectivation (Andermatt Conley, 2009: 36). Along these lines, Vivienne
Jabri suggests that certain forms of art can provide indication of how resistant
subjectivity might emerge (Jabri, 2006: 832). Since the society of control is characterised
by the accelerated circulation of information and increased communication, one way to
resist may be “to invent ways of thinking that would enable people to break with the
onslaught of information” (Andermatt Conley, 2009: 36). Because speech and
communication have been corrupted and permeated by money, Deleuze affirms that
“[w]e’ve got to hijack speech” (Deleuze, 1995: 175).
In a society characterised by increased communication and an incessant flow of
information, Deleuze suggests that one possible way to elude control would be to create
what he calls vacuoles of non-communication or circuit breakers at the level of
micropolitics (Andermatt Conley, 2009: 37). In other words, new resistant spaces have to
be opened. One question that should be addressed here is where can we find such spaces
and what forms of politics will take place in these spaces? For Saul Newman, we need to
put in place ‘micropolitics’ that would no longer be organised around themes of identity
and difference (Newman, 2009: 105). What we need is radical politics that would
construct a certain universality, i.e. a politics that goes beyond the logic of differences
and particularities (117). As Verena Andermatt Conley suggests, “[t]he ultimate goal for
the utopian thinker espousing the cause of rhizomatic thinking is smooth space that
would entail the erasure of all borders and the advent of a global citizenry living in ease
and without the slightest conflict over religion and ideology” (2006: 96). Deleuze thus
have faith in what he calls a ‘becoming-revolutionary’ of the people. In fact, he believes
that subjects continually undermine control by creating new lines of flight and tracing
new maps that open smooth space (99).
Therefore, resistance arises in Deleuzian theory as a matter of lines of flight
created by ‘minorities’ in their struggle against ‘majorities’. Contrary to power relations
that are entirely situated inside the diagram of control, resistances are in a direct relation
with the outside (Deleuze, 1986: 95). Hence, what is unbearable for the powerful
majorities is the fact that minorities can formulate their own desires that do not flow from
the system. However, there is always the danger for minorities to be reinscribed or, as
Situationists put it, to be recuperated. Throughout this process known as ‘axiomisation’, a
line of flight is drawn back inside the dominant assemblage from which it has fled by
being ‘mediated’ and ‘alienated’ (Karatzogianni and Robinson, 2009:14-15). In this
context, struggles of minorities that arise as demand for inclusion, even if they are
important, ultimately do not go far enough.
In the society of control coercive machines that work at prolonging the established
order operate through restriction, blockage and reduction that repress flows and contain
them in narrow categories. Because these reactive forces have primacy over active and
affirmative forces, the dominant forms of subjectivity are characterized by ‘neurosis’ and
‘paranoia’. To counter reactive forces, the ethical impetus of Deleuzian theory is to put
desiring-production at the basis of action. As Karatzogianni and Robinson suggest, one
can bring something new into the world by subordinating social production to desiringproduction. For these authors, “[d]esiring production refers to the productive flows of
desire at a molecular level, in which networks of connections are formed” (17). Through
these connections, energies and forces that are trapped in repressive assemblages can be
freed and then construct new and creative ones. In this process, Deleuze calls for an
absolute deterritorialisation that occurs if forces and energies do not form new territories,
but, rather, operate in a smooth space. To operate in this smooth space and avoid
reterritorialisation, singularities have to form communities without affirming specific
identities; humans have to co-belong without any representable condition of belonging
(28).
Border Art
As Deleuze puts it, “to create is to resist” (Andermatt Conley, 2009: 36).
Therefore, I argue that possibilities of resistance vis-à-vis the way power has operated
throughout the years at the US-Mexico border lie in artistic manifestations and
performances that aim at the creation of new spaces and new subjectivities in order to
dispel the values conveyed by the dominant diagram of power. In this section, I will thus
briefly describe various forms of artistic resistance at the border in order to analyse the
multiple tactics employed by the artists.
Chicano artists
As Jo-Anne Berelowitz observes, a first model of border art emerged in the late
1960s in reaction to racism and sanctioned violence in border towns. Acknowledging that
their group, composed of Mexican-American and Mexican immigrants, was stereotyped
by the majority, Chicano artists developed icons that exaggerated their alterity and
entrenched them trangressively in difference. In the San Diego-Tijuana border region,
these artists worked on the establishment of a park in Barrio Logan Height and of a
cultural centre in Balboa Park. In their struggle for territory, representation, and for the
constitution of an ideological-aesthetic language (Berelowitz, 2003: 144), the Chicano
wanted to create a space where citizens could articulate their own experience, their own
self-understanding of the border region. In other words, their battle aimed at re-creating
and re-imagining a dominant space in a community-enabling place (150). To do so, they
used an iconography that aimed at articulating an identity politics. Their goals were
nationalistic, i.e. they included principles such as self-determination and the preservation
of the indigenous culture.
Figure 1: Chicano mural in the San Diego/Tijuana border region
In their battle for space, voice and representation, Chicano artists created murals
on different sites they claimed. The imagery on these murals was in accordance with their
binational and bicultural counsciousness, since they found their roots not only in Mexico,
but also in the pre-Hispanic American-Indian past (145). Chicano border art was also
site-specific, which means that it was bound up with the site, and that it would have lost
its meaning if transported elsewhere. For the San Diego city authorities, art made by the
Chicano about their transborder identity was viewed as a political confrontation. In this
sense, we can say that this form of artistic resistance bore the potential to undermine the
dominant diagram of power by creating new lines of flight and by tracing new maps.
However, these lines of flight were reterritorialised, which means that Chicano artistic
resistance resulted in the formation of new territories, and was recuperated by the
dominant majority. In fact, their struggle was for inclusion and for the recognition of their
rights. As I already suggest, this form of resistance that work at the addition of axioms is
important in Deleuzian theory, but do not go far enough to really disturb and undermine
the dominant diagram of power.
Multiculturalism
In the middle of the 1980s, multiculturalism emerged as the dominant model of
border art. According to Michael Dear and Gustavo Leclerc, multiculturalism marked the
beginning of the “postborder art” era, and was a distinct break from the preceding
tradition (2003: 27). Rather than focusing on identities, postborder art is “a
representational aesthetic concerned with the production of hybridities in the
liminal/intersticial boundaries between political ideologies” (14). Postborder artists view
the border as a liminal/in-between space and locate its transformative capacity and
potential for resistance in the production of hybrid subjectivities. Thus, subjects of
postborder art include borders, hybridity, and resistance.
For Dear and Leclerc, the most influential collective representing multiculturalism
and postborder art was the Border Art Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo (BAW/TAF).
From its founding in 1984 to its dissolution in 1990, the BAW/TAF staged 16
performances-installations that proposed a new polymorphous, polyglot, hybrid and
binational ‘border subject’, “a new type of subject, postmodern and postnational, a result
of the confluence of the many different realities peculiar to this porous border zone”
(Berelowitz, 2003: 158). The BAW/TAF was a group of artist from the United States and
Mexico whose “revolutionary dream of a borderless world of multi- and intercultural
exchange, mutual respect, and peaceful cooperation [was] imbued with belief in the
transformative power of art” (159). In this sense, they believe in the ability of the creative
and aesthetic dimensions of art to represent a universe that differs from the established
reality (Dear and Leclerc, 2003: 19-20).
According to this model, art can transcend its social situatedness and alter the way
we perceive ourselves (Holo, 2003: xi). In this sense, artists are social interventionists
since they are capable of, at best, transforming spaces of restriction into spaces of
openness or, at least, changing stories that are told about contested spaces. For
Berelowitz, border artists are visionaries that perceive the complexity of the border zone,
and see how it is possible to work for a better future (Berelowitz, 2003: 159). To achieve
their goals, members of the BAW/TAF worked with a multiplicity of media such as
performance, video, installation, book art, radio, fax, and mail art (Berelowitz, 2006: 48).
Their aesthetics were characterised by a quotidian emphasis, a transgressive and
confrontational ethic, and a use of satire, irony, paradox, farce, etc. As Louise Amoore
suggests, this kind of tactics are important forms of artistic resistance since they “make
comedy of a particular system of order, ridiculing its practices and opening up the space
to see things differently” (Amoore, 2005: 8).
For Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Emily Hicks, two of the most important members
of the BAW/TAF, the border was a mobile, elasic, and theorizable concept rather than
being a site-specific geopolitical demarcation. In their work, the border thus became
disengaged from its dominant signification, and took on the ambiguity of “a link in the
chain of mobile signifying system” (Berelowitz, 2003: 155). In this sense, they did not
consider the border only as a specific social-geography; it was more a deterritorialised
form of subjectivity (167). These artists also viewed the border as a social microcosm of
the future of the Americas. In fact, the BAW/TAF asked their spectators to imagine a
future where international boundaries would not exist anymore. To do so, they proposed
a new way of seeing the world, a task that necessitated inventing new languages.
Therefore, the BAW/TAF made art that challenged official notion of territoriality in order
to expose the way geography is inscribed in politics and ideology rather than being an
innocent spatial vessel for social life. One of the main objectives of the BAW/TAF was to
alter the dominant discourse deployed around the US-Mexico border. Thus, they worked
at changing the language in which the border was then represented. To do so, the
BAW/TAF artistic manifestations deconstructed and challenged representations of border
issues that fostered divisiveness (160).
As Chicano artists did, members of the BAW/TAF wanted to create a new space
to elude the prevailing representation of the border region and of the border subject.
However, their struggle was not for the recognition and inclusion of a particular ethnic
group. Rather, art made by the BAW/TAF allowed the emergence of subjectivities
situated outside the traditional identity politics, thereby avoiding binaristic relations.
BAW/TAF is thus part of a creative resistance that questions the discourse conveyed by
the dominant majority about the US-Mexico border by creating lines of flight and tracing
new maps that challenge the dominant diagram of power.
Globalization
In the 1990s, postborder art became characterized by a culture of globalization.
After the dissolution of the BAW/TAF, the InSITE exhibition that represented this new
tendency turned out to be the most influential border art manifestation in the San-DiegoTijuana region. Officially, InSITE was not about the border. In order to avoid the delicate
question of who has the right to make art about the border, InSITE’s directors stated that
the art they sponsored was not border art, but rather art about other issues that were in
many ways related to the border. Contrary to the BAW/TAF whose members came from
or lived in the border region, InSITE had an expanded artist base composed of everyone
who might interestingly address the region’s complex issues. For these artists, the border
was definitely not site-specific. In fact, the border was one site among others in their
journey. In this sense, Berelowitz argues that border artists became “international
flâneur”; they were nomads that developed an intense sensitivity toward cultural politics
of multiple institutional sites (171).
The work of Tijuana artist Marco Ramírez is one of the best illustrations of what
postborder art is and how it operates. In 1997, Toy an Horse was installed at San Ysidro,
the most heavily trafficked international border crossing in the world. According to
Louise Amoore and Alexandra Hall, this piece of work disrupted people’s perception of
the border. In fact, Toy an Horse interrupted the routine of the 50 000 tourists,
businessmen, shoppers, government officials, and workers daily crossing the border, and
questioned the familiar, normalized checking, verifying and authenticating constitutive of
the security rituals (Amoore and Hall, 2010: 300). Following Walter Benjamin, Amoore
Figure 2: Toy an Horse by Marco Ramírez
and Hall argue that this interruption allowed them to notice the “repetitive sequences of
the border—the multiple calculations and identifications that constitute the (…) practices
of authorization – that make the very idea of security possible” (301). The interruption
works by suspending the sequences of events that have become settled by security
practices, thereby exposing their existing conditions and rendering them strange.
For Marco Ramírez the main objective of Toy an Horse was not necessarily to
impact on the process of crossing the border between the United States and Mexico.
What counted was to distract the border crossers such that they would pay attention to
that which would have otherwise slip away from their view. In his artistic intervention,
Ramírez also illustrated the borderland culture as a provocative site where the binary
opposition between “us” and “them” is constantly challenged. By being positioned across
the borderline, his dual-faced wooden horse insisted on the double-reading of notions
such as homeland and strangeland. As Amoore suggests, “Ramírez’s horse can be seen
not only as a reminder of the hybridity of the actual physical borderlands, but also as a
metaphor for the plurality of forces within and between all aspects of the contemporary
drawing up of borders” (2008: 128).
As Richard Cándida Smith argues, we do not turn to artists for policy
recommendations. Rather, we turn to artist for critique3, for provocation, and because we
seek alternatives to complex realities and images with the power to put ideas back into
play (Cándida Smith, 2003: 244). The representations of a postborder world that art
brings to us are not the same as the ones provided in a legal, commercial or political
context. Through his creative enterprise, the artist becomes a mediator of human
experience that opens the possibility of moving between multiple ways of seeing the
world. Therefore, he creates a new space that do not necessarily have a direct impact on
social relations, but that reveals social facts as unsettled, fluid, and suitable for
negotiation (245). Instead of prescribing one specific way of looking at the border, the
artist encourages the emergence of critical relation to the normal and the habitual. In this
space created by postborder art, individuals discover the imagination of autonomy from
all categories of identity. In fact, postborder art works within a politics of subjectivity,
3
Here I use Michel Foucault’s the definition of critique: “Une critique ne consiste pas à dire que les choses
ne sont pas bien comme elles sont. Elle consiste à voir sur quels types d’évidences, de familiarités, de
modes de pensée acquis et non réfléchis reposent les pratiques que l’on accepte” (2001: 999).
which offers “a position to his audience by which they can disengage themselves from
that which they occupy un-self-reflexively” (237).
Once again, we see that postborder art is part of the creative resistance defined by
Gilles Deleuze. In fact, postborder art aim at interrupting and disturbing the ritual of
border security in order to create a space where alternative representations of the border
can emerge. By rendering strange what previously seemed familiar and normal, artistic
manifestations and performances open the possibility for the creation of new and less
repressive diagram of power.
Tactical media
In the early 1980s, the technologization of border security began with the
repatriation of Vietnam War devices and their redeployment in the Us-Mexico border
region. Since the attacks of 9/11, this process has increased so that security technologies
that were previously only used in pilot program have broadened their scope (Ceyhan,
2008: 102). As the technologization of border politics increased, so too did artistic
resistance. In the last few years, Rita Raley has observed a growing use of tactical media
in artworks and performances that critically respond to the securitization of the USMexico border. In its most extensive definition, “tactical media signifies the intervention
and disruption of a dominant semiotic regime, the temporary creation of a situation in
which signs, messages, and narratives are set into play and critical thinking become
possible” (Raley, 2009: 6). As postborder art, the purpose of tactical media is not to
impose a definitive countermessage. By replicating and redeploying the existing semiotic
regime, tactical media provoque, reveal, defamiliarize, and critique (7). Therefore, as
Amoore and Hall argue, the possibility of an alternative politics to border security as we
know it is located in the work of artists who use technologies in a disrupting way. These
artists do not take position on the place of technology in the contemporary society.
Rather, they work on the potential for different and more affirmative ways of engaging
technologies. By doing this, they allow us to question the place of these technologies in
the world, and in our lives (Amoore and Hall, 2010: 306).
This attitude toward technology is exemplified by the work of Ricardo
Dominguez, a former member of the Critical Art Ensemble (CAE), who has participated
in many operation of electronic civil disobedience (ECD) at the border throughout the
years. According to CAE, “the architectural monuments of power are hollow and empty,
and function now only as bunkers for the complicit and those who acquiesce… These
places can be occupied, but to do so will not disrupt the nomadic flow [of power]” (CAE
quoted in Raley, 2008: 206). Since a total system crash is not the only option, or even a
viable one, resistance should now be viewed as a matter of degree. Thus, the objective of
tactical media practitioners is a temporary disruption of the flows of power. In this
context, “[t]here is only permanent cultural resistance; there is no endgame” (Ricardo
Dominguez quoted in Raley, 2008: 207).
In its latest project, the Transborder Immigrant Tool, Dominguez continues his
provocation and disturbance of the US-Mexico border technological governance. In order
to redeploys security technologies of tracking and tracing in ways that playfully
reconfigure the landscape and aesthetics of border crossing, the Transborder Immigrant
Tool directly engages Global Positioning System (GPS) technology used at the border in
order to detect suspect migrants (Amoore and Hall, 2010: 301). Combining various
distributed geospatial system, GPS technology, and the Virtual Hiker Algorithm
developed by artist Brett Stalbaum, the Transborder Immigrant Tool can be implemented
on cracked cell phones to identify new trails and safer routes to cross the desert in the
border region between California and Mexico. By using the device to cross the desert
themselves, artists make the border crossing a public performance that can be accessed
and visualized. By doing this, artists interrupt “the ritual of the Mexico-California border
Figure 3: Transborder Immigrant Tool
crossing, repositioning the technology’s relationship to the landscape and providing
‘people with the way to make their own maps’” (Amoore and Hall, 2010: 305). By
orienting the desert crossers, the Transborder Immigrant Tool seeks to create an
alternative spatiality where everyone can cross the border, and where the desert becomes
a safe and pleasurable landscape.
Conclusion
In this paper, I addressed the issue of artistic resistance at the US-Mexico border
by focusing on artistic manifestations and performances that work at creating a space
where ideas and practices challenging the dominant diagram of power can emerge.
Influenced by their Chicano predecessors, we observed how postborder artists went
beyond identity politics to embrace a multiculturalist trend, and then, a globalization
culture representing the border as a liminal space where element of different worlds
simultaneously mutate and coexist (Holo, 2003: xi). As I already mentioned, this is only
one part of my larger doctoral research in which I examine the way resistance interacts
with power at the US-Mexico border. Therefore, I will also have to analyze the way
power operates. To do so, I will focus on the evolution of the securitization and
technologization process of the border to demonstrate the predominance of the diagram
of control in this milieu, and in society in general.
In a context, where power is more and more decentralized, and operates through
multiple nomadic flows, critical responses to its manifestations and material
consequences have to adapt its means and logics. As CAE argues, activism and dissent
should not be looking for a sweeping revolutionary event, but must enter the assemblage
of power in order to engage in a micropolitics of disruption and interruption (Raley,
2009: 1). In this paper, we observed how artistic resistance at the US-Mexico border
evolved from identity politics to globalization culture, and from murals anchored in a
specific territoriality to deterritorialised tactical media. By opening new spaces in which
new subjectivities can emerge, all these artistic manifestations and performances are
oriented toward the formation of lines of flight and new maps that could lead to the
creation of a smooth space where new and creative assemblages can emerge.
Since it is a work in progress, this paper leaves many unanswered questions. Is
artistic resistance effective? In Deleuzian theory creative resistance is said to be
immanent to the diagram of control, but can it really alter the way power operates at the
border? In Foucaldian theory, “la résistance est première” (emphasis in the original
Deleuze, 1986: 95), which means that to understand the exercise of power, we have to
understand the various forces that resist it. What will the study of artistic resistance at the
US-Mexico border reveal about the diagram of power that dominates this milieu? In the
last few years, we saw that power and resistance have become increasingly technologize.
By using the very technologies, techniques, and tools employed by the dominant
majority, is the resistant minority condemned to reinforce or repeat the structure of
power? Should dissent and activism really put aside the idea of revolutionary change and
promote temporary disruptive actions? According to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, a
general limitation of the concept and practices of resistance is the risk of getting stuck in
an oppositional stance. Therefore, “[w]e need to be able to move from resistance to
alternative and recognize how liberation movements can achieve autonomy and break
free of the power relation of modernity” (Hardt and Negri, 2009: 102). Can artistic
resistance offer an alternative and move away from the society of control?
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