"The Hunter and the Factory," 2013. Installation view. La Colección Jumex, Mexico.
The Hunter and the Factory
April 11–July 28, 2013
Fundación/Colección Jumex
Vía Morelos 272
Col. Santa María Tulpetlac
Ecatepec, México
Curated by Magalí Arriola and Juan Gaitán
Santa María Tulpetlac, a Sunday afternoon. A familiar modern setting: rivers, lakes and forests have given way to the urban and industrial sprawl after being drained, razed and paved over. The city's limits, which once clearly marked the boundary between city and countryside, are now but an abstract trace on a map, while the actual distance between the city and the countryside keeps increasing. On street corners, languid dogs rest like unavailable witnesses. The bare trees that surround the ponds rise from the ground like smoky lace. Here and there, people saunter in and out of the haze and sunlight into a phantom world.
It has been speculated that the detective is the archetypal investigator of the city, and that its origin can be traced back to the figure of the hunter: there is a rifle concealed behind every tree branch, each branch's multiple ramifications indicating different paths or trails to follow. The gaze rests on these figures, the detective and the hunter, that walking among reptiles, wild beasts and enemy tribes, navigate society, its laws, and the duplicities and betrayals of their accomplices. However, here rat and bear are not real animals, they are men in costume, disguised as animals, who, after a wave of social unrest (various sources blame the lack of communication between painter and viewer), launch an inquiry hoping to make lots of money, this time, off of art.
What can one make out of the relationship between the urban grid, artistic production, and contemplation? The political significance of this coexistence of rat, bear, and hunter in the factory does not lie in the allegorical representation of social types—clowns, prostitutes, flâneurs, clerks, detectives, soldiers, or nurses—but in the attempt to affirm them as equally legitimate viewers within the economy of spectatorship, hoping to transcend the division between artistic producers and consumers in contemporary society.*
*With excerpts from Walter Benjamin, Roger Caillois, Stephen F. Eisenman, Fischli & Weiss, Pierre-André Lienhard, Tom McDonough and Robert Smithson.
The exhibition includes work by Doug Aitken, Miguel Calderón, Maurizio Cattelan, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Sam Durant, Olafur Eliasson, Peter Fischli & David Weiss, Rodney Graham, Jonathan Hernández & Alberto Baraya, Roman Ondák, Damián Ortega, Fernando Ortega, Ugo Rondinone, Anri Sala, Wolfgang Tillmans and Danh Vo.
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