Rough trade The ICA’s Mexico state of mind BY CHRISTOPHER MILLIS

With the easing of trade barriers resulting from NAFTA, with President Bush’s recent announcement of amnesty for illegal alien workers — affecting an enormous population, particularly west of the Mississippi — and with the ever-increasing awareness that Spanish-speaking people constitute a major cultural force in the United States, expectations run tremendously high for the ICA’s latest exhibit, "Made in Mexico." In my three visits to the show over the last week, viewers, and there were many of them, wore expressions of hungry expectation, as if the exhibit could help resolve some deep, unspoken tension.

"Made in Mexico" meets the challenge of those expectations with a deeply admirable level of ambition. Not only does it put forward the work of eight contemporary Mexican artists, as you’d anticipate, it goes to even greater lengths by including work both by artists who have made Mexico their home and by a third group who live elsewhere but are fixated on some aspect of Mexican culture.

Ultimately, however, the success of any art exhibit — no matter how inclusive, expansive, or politically charged — isn’t a function of the merits of the thesis that has inspired it. It’s a function of what it feeds the eyes. And by that most essential measure, "Made in Mexico" offers up a surprisingly bland, unnourishing menu.

Somewhere along the way the wit and daring of including only eight Mexican artists out of 20 in a show called "Made in Mexico" got lost. When I learned those numbers, I immediately expected that the exhibit would be organized along a provocative continuum — how else would it make sense? I figured the show would take on the challenge of asking what it means to belong. How does the work of artists who have adopted Mexico as their home differ, if at all, from those who are native? Conversely, how does the work of artists who have made no commitment to living in or experiencing Mexico, but whose imagery participates in its culture, compare to its native or near-native sons and daughters?

Such questions, I suppose, are the art world’s version of the nature- vs.-nurture debate in the social sciences — is Mexico a place or a state of mind? Where can the line be drawn that separates an artist’s connection to the external world of culture and the inner world of experience? "Made in Mexico" looked like a test case for Virginia Woolf’s wry observation that it takes a stranger to know a place.

Unfortunately, the show’s been organized along very different lines, lines sufficiently obtuse that for the most part I can neither tell them apart nor understand what they mean. For instance, "Social Space" claims to be a category of artistic output that addresses "the social and political situation in Mexico." So, you might ask, how do Teresa Margolles’s bubble-making machines — four black, breadbox-sized units on shelves up near the ceiling — that spit out by the minute hundreds of bite-size soap bubbles, qualify as addressing anything, let alone the social and political situation in Mexico? Answer: read the wall text to En el aire (In the Air) and learn that the water used to produce the bubbles originated in a morgue in Mexico City, which somehow makes the bubbles more than bubbles. For all that her installation looks and feels like a kid’s birthday party, we’re supposed to appreciate it as protest.

Another of the show’s organizing categories is "Mexican Modernisms," which claims to explore "European modernism within the context of Mexican architecture, design, and sculpture." Emblematic of that exploration is Anton Vidokle’s defiantly dull Nuevo (2003), a four-minute film of the front of a building. In Vidokle’s homage to Mexico we witness a series of fadeouts as a ’70s-era, honeycomb-style building, not unlike the JFK Federal Building near Government Center, gradually goes from its original, unpainted grey-white cement to red. No workers, no scaffolds, no human activity, just a succession of shots of the building’s front as it gets a paint job. If it weren’t so humorless you might mistake it for a gag.

The third organizing principle of "Made in Mexico" is called "Local Identities," which claims to treat "how contemporary artists . . . approach the essential characteristics of Mexican identity through popular imagery, cultural iconography, and traditional art forms." One of those treatments, in fact the very first piece you see on entering the exhibit, is Yasumasa Morimura’s gigantic (overall, its size exceeds six feet), color-drenched photo of Frida Kahlo — the camp version. Festooned in a three-tiered frame of gaudy plastic flowers, Morimura’s Kahlo is a deliberate caricature — his own drag self-portrait as the Mexican artist — a send-up of a cultural icon that never gets past being a tasteless extravaganza. The nearby wall text informs us that Morimura has never set foot in Mexico, but as the catalogue explains, his fascination with Kahlo has led him to make connections between "traditional Mexican and Japanese styles of dressing and adornment." Maybe. And the idea of cojoining two oft-stereotyped cultures as one is provocative, but the idea doesn’t help the final image.

While stereotyping doesn’t dog much of the exhibit’s art the way it does Morimura’s, there’s an unremittingly overblown aspect to the show — big pictures, big installations, big screens. The strongest work in "Made in Mexico" belongs to a small subset of contributors whose art, for the most part, bears no particular stamp of its country of origin. Foremost among the exhibit’s noteworthy contributions are five table-sized, ethereal sculptures by Mexican artist Eduardo Abaroa. Made out of plastic drinking straws that have been sliced into fingernail-thin circles, the tiny, open disks have been glued together to form shapes that alternately look architectural and fungal, decisive and airy. For all their lightness and transparency, they cast a magical spell. Would that the exhibit recognized their charm — they’re crowded together on a low-slung table at the top of the third flight of stairs and are consequently easily missed or dismissed.

Ethereal, too, yet gradually overpowering is the German artist Andreas Gursky’s nine-foot-tall, six-foot-wide color photograph of a garbage dump somewhere beyond Mexico City. The first six feet of the image, measuring from the floor to the ceiling, represents a long shot of the dump. It looks both limitless and strangely attractive, and the size of the frame makes you feel like you’re about to hear glass break or plastic crunch if you move a step. When you look up, the distant, thin upper quadrant of the picture, which depicts a bright but overcast sky, appears to have barely discernible debris floating in it. It’s as if the dump were evaporating.

Other strong work in the show includes Gabriel Orozco’s human skull painted to resemble a chessboard, Thomas Glassford’s light sculptures that look like suspended explosions, and Spanish artist Santiago Sierra’s series of photos of a Mexico City traffic jam and a perfectly crude and inescapably passionate video of a group of Chiapas women who do not speak Spanish, trying to say in unison, "I am being paid to say something the meaning of which I do not know."