Dick pics from police or what it means to be an artist
In Mexican Spanish the word “güero” refers to a white person. It’s often used towards foreigners, and in this instance I’ve noticed it may also carry an extra meaning: someone naive who doesn’t know much about life in Mexico. Güeros get pickpocketed at rush hour in the metro because they choose the most crowded wagon; güeros get food poisoning from eating at the wrong taco stand; güeros overpay for fruits at the San Juan market.
My friend Sasha is a güera in every sense of the word. She is a blue-eyed blond who once bought a blanket from street vendors just so they would leave her alone. I met her at an art party in Mexico City about three years ago: a common friend introduced us, saying “This is Aleksandra, she speaks Russian too!”
Besides Russian, Sasha also speaks English, Spanish, German, French and Polish — her native tongue. Her Eastern-European origins, or rather the stereotypes they represent, inspired her piece Niña de Polonia or ‘Polish girl’:
I made this project because I felt misplaced in Mexico. I would feel a gap between what I know or feel about myself and what would be added as an extension because of my origin.
Although this is me in the picture, Niña de Polonia is a phantom, a shell, an empty object, a projection you get from other people. As you see, the tin is empty — Niña de Polonia is a perfect container, which looks good, but you can put anything inside of it. I don’t really like this project anymore, but it had something to do with the idea of taking the face of somebody else.
“People aren’t what they seem but we should respect appearances,” says the wife of the protagonist in The Face of Another, a Japanese new-wave film from the 60’s that Sasha often refers to when we talk about looks. The main character’s face gets disfigured in a work accident so he has to wear bandages that make him look like a living mummy —until the day his doctor makes him a tempting offer to give him another man’s face. The face promises a new life, but there is small-print: it might set him free by granting him absolute anonymity, but it might also imprison him in loneliness, since he will have to keep his real face a secret. The doctor is also concerned that the flesh mask will dominate his patient, modifying his personality: “Masks could utterly destroy all human morality. Name, position, occupation…all such labels wouldn’t matter anymore. Everyone would be strangers to each other.”
Masks don’t only hide what we don’t want to reveal; they also expose what we want others to see in us. Can a uniform be a mask?
November 2016, Mexico City. Two armed men on a motorcycle attacked Sasha from behind, hitting her with a gun. As soon as the faceless men in helmets left, faceless men in uniform arrived. Police didn’t do much: they talked to her briefly and then left while the robbers were cruising around them with Sasha’s bag in their hands. From that night she remembers dark helmets, dark uniforms and a jumble of numbers and letters she glimpsed from the receding motorcycle.
The next time I met the police was in an OXXO [a corner store], maybe a month later. They started hitting on me, asking what I was doing here, if I was having a lot of fun in Mexico. I was really pissed off. I answered that I wasn’t having any fun and they told me that I should get a policeman boyfriend so he could protect me, and then I wouldn’t get robbed anymore. I found these double standards worth exploring. Sometimes I feel that if a project would make me feel uncomfortable, it is exactly what I need to do — to go against myself. I didn’t want to talk to policemen or meet them, so I did it.
Helmets as a guarantee of anonymity, uniforms as guarantee of impunity. “Looking For a Hero” is another personal project Sasha made in order to work through the trauma from the robbery and help herself cope with it. She talked to five policemen, asking them what animal they identified themselves with, how they saw themselves and how they saw her. Based on their answers, Sasha made five objects she could carry with her like talismans to protect herself from evil. The policemen morphed into a dog, a chicken, a snake, a fish and a bat.
The artworks were small plastic containers filled with tiny objects: a figurine of the animal they identified themselves with and accessories based on their values —one of them was driven by money, another by witchcraft, another by the Catholic church. Of course it was how they presented themselves. What they told me was what they wanted to tell me. I also got dick pics from some of them — the chicken and the fish.
This piece was another güera-move —one that cost Sasha her art studies in Mexico City. To get kicked out of an art school, especially after five years of cybernetic engineering she studied in France, is extremely punk rock. When I ask Sasha about her inspiration she talks about Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics, Banach spaces and mathematical paradoxes:
What interests me is that you have a universe which follows its own rules that you can define. I feel this way about my art. It’s not that I’m talking about some equations and drawing them. I’m not inspired by the equations. I’m inspired by the idea that you can immerse yourself in this universe and create a mental space that would be real and unreal at the same time.
My favorite artwork by Sasha is called “Irgendwie aus dem Kopf” (Somehow Out of the Head). It’s also a collaborative project: she showed abstract drawings she had made to the patients of a mental facility and asked them to give them titles and descriptions. To observe art from a different perspective, Sasha invites us to look for a crazy genius not in the artist but in the spectator: “If there is a tortured genius present, who is it actually? Is it she who drew, or the individual patients who took these found objects and gave them meaning? Was what they saw/interpreted already present in the work, or was it a fabrication of their own?”
It was more of a social experiment because I couldn’t control the process, and the results depended on other people. I also was a patient in this institution. During my stay, I was drawing a lot, but I didn’t know what to do with those drawings — it was a very intuitive and emotional type of art. I was looking for some answers that I couldn’t answer by myself because of my sickness. So I decided to ask other people to help me with this. I wanted to connect with them, remember them, explore and get feedback on my art. There is a mental health stigma, but there is also a belief that mental health patients are artistic, creative or have some special gifts. I wanted to confront this idea because it could be so, but it doesn’t have to be. Creativity is not related to mental issues.
A mental health facility is also a separate universe that follows its own rules. As Sasha noticed, meeting somebody in a mental health institution is very different from getting to know them in other circumstances, because nobody tries to hide anything by playing social games. The masks are off.
Some patients were really into it: they were giving titles to the paintings or explaining to me the meaning. There was one guy who called the painting drawing with strings. Another patient wrote a whole text about the drawing. She described a wound that was covered by flesh, but there was still a wound inside. I think she wasn’t talking so much about the drawing, but about herself.
Before she left Mexico, Sasha gave me a tin of Niña de Polonia as a gift. Her face stares at me indifferently from the lid, the beautiful face of my dear friend, with an expression that conveys complete detachment from reality. At first I wanted to fill it in, but soon I realized that Niña de Polonia didn’t need any filling. It exists as a thing-in-itself, as a promise of better luck, a better life, a better face —a promise I don’t want to be fulfilled since I remember what’s written on the small-print.
Could having a face be such an important requirement? Was being seen the cost of the right to see?
