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Francis McKee travels to MEXICO CITY to bring back work from the unique Jumex collection of contemporary art, as Ruth Hedges discovers.
t‘s Christmas time and Francis McKee is bouncing around in a minibus heading to the Jumex Juice Factory and major intemational art collection 40 minutes outside Mexico City.
He's being driven by long-term employee of
Jumex. ‘El Perro‘ — the dog — who points out features in the landscape including the sprawling barrios. McKee. the curator of Glasgow lntemational. is researching his major show for the festival and is spending a week shuttling between the city and thejuice plant.
The .lumex Collection. located in the hills. is a remarkable bank of more than 1200 works by major contemporary artists from around the world. started in I997 by director of Grupo Jumex. Eugenio Lopez. El Perro drove a truck for the factory for 20 years before running the minibus service to and from the base and has even appeared in one of the art works — we'll come to that later. ‘lt's a giant factory complex.‘ says McKee. ‘You go in and there are hundreds of trucks full of fruit — crates of fruit. You can smell it everywhere. the air is full ofjuice — it's thick and sweet: you almost get high from it. You could almost cut it it‘s so thick; there‘s a chilli factory there as well. There‘s a lot of production going on.
Amid the fruit mashing and chilli crushing are deep vaults of amazing art which McKee is in the enviable position of plundering. Positioned in the library (next to the gallery space). he gets to work on the databases. ‘1 made lists. I made lists constantly and then honed it down and honed it down. It was an incredible luxury.‘ he says. ‘They‘d pull them out on those moveable walls and I‘d go. “Ah. a Mike Kelley. yeah. I'll have that.”
Initially McKee had intended to create a show from the Scottish works in the collection. but his Christmas days at the plant turned up another theme which proved too strong and pertinent to overlook. Just as the art collection comes from the fruits of the land. much of the work is preoccupied with land and territory. ‘The interest
16 1'"! LIST 14—28 Apr 2005
in land seems to come in different ways.’ says McKee. ‘There is an obsession with how politics and history can influence landscape and on the other hand there‘s an interest with how landscape itself can influence history and politics.‘
Another strand to emerge was a perversion of minimalism. One of the artists in the show. Santiago Sierra. is a maverick and some might even say pervert. who plays with convention. bordering on exploitation. He has in the past paid people nominal sums to have a line tattooed across their backs. homeless people to sit in boxes. Cuban male prostitutes to masturbate and an Irish tramp in Binningham to walk around a square telling people that he's getting paid £5 to do it. Which is where El Perro comes back into the story. The truck driver-turned-minibus courier showed his artistic flair when he agreed to drive a lorry backwards down a motorway to block access to Mexico City for five minutes. ‘lt caused havoc.’ says McKee. Though by Sierra‘s standards he got off lightly.
The show that McKee has eventually crafted from the juice vaults features work by Sierra. including ‘Obstruccion de una via con diversos objectos‘ and ‘Eight remunerated people to stay in the interior of cardboard boxes‘. as well as the notorious work ‘Cuando la fe mueve Montana’ by Francis Alys (pictured above). a documentary of his project in which a group of 5(X) volunteers moved a mountain four inches from its original position. Alongside these McKee has placed ‘Diamond Sea' by Doug Aitken. several works by Stefan Bruggerman. a new work by Minerva Cuevas. and ‘Arena‘ by Anri Sala. plus work by Cynthia Gutierrez. Marine Hugonnier. Mike Kelley and Melanie Smith. Alys is planning a new work based in Glasgow for next year.
With the big themes of politics. history. land and perverted minimalism on the cards. it’s enough to get yourjuices well and truly flowing.
This Peaceful War - The Jumex Collection, Tramway, Fri 22 AprnSun 22 May
CAMPBELL’S SOUP
I The soup in question has been sieved through the vigorous figurative imagination of the artist Steven Campbell. Taking Campbell’s contributions to and influence by both Scottish culture and international post-modern painting as a starting point, art historian and writer Mulholland has set out with this ambitious exhibition to make connections through Campbell. Mulholland creates his soup from the stock up from Scottish multi-disciplinary artists John Byrne, Alasdair Gray and Campbell himself before adding some disparate garnish of influence - noir, performance art, Cubism, Darwinism, Michel Foucault, Wodehouse, Paisley pattern, Henreich Hoffman’s Der Struwwelpeter, Brideshead Revisited and, of course, fellow dandy Oscar Wilde. Contemporary artists include Keith Farquhar, Michael Fullerton, Lucy McKenzie, Rabiya Choudhry and Lucy Stein. Mulholland aims to be eclectic. ‘None of this is supposed to be so simplistic, but among other things I am interested in debunking the myth of the New Glasgow boys (Currie, Campbell, Wiszniewski) whose moment was seen to have come and gone in the late 19803/early 19903,’ says Mulholland. Indeed, in his exhibition notes and writings Mulholland refers the viewer back to Currie’s article on the matter, ‘New Glasgow Painting in Context’ from the Edinburgh Review 1986. Even then, Currie noted that this bunch of artists only shared ‘a predilection for figurative imagery as a reaction against the semi-abstract painting that flourished in Glasgow School of Art for years. They had no common programme, rarely exchanged ideas, and were fuelled by a passionate, often violent, rivalry.’ Mulholland also wants to purvey that dark sense of humour in art that seems to belong particularly to the west coast. ‘lt’s that feyness,’ Mulholland chuckles. ‘The idea of working-class Glaswegian guys getting dressed up like toffs - a tradition that came from a distant place through Campbell and on to Belle and Sebastian and more recently Franz Ferdinand.’ Welcome to the arcane world of Campbell. It is a world of rest for the lateral thinker. (Paul Dale) I Campbell's Soup, Glasgow School of Art, Mon 18 Apr—Sun 8 May; Steven Campbell appears at a symposium at GSA, Fri 23 April, 70am-2pm. 77ckets from 353 4500.