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AS INTERNATIONAL BORDER TENSIONS RISE BOB DICKINSON SEES A RETURN TO THE POLITICS OF PARANOIA
While artists Christoph Büchel, Marcos Ramirez and Margarita Garcia Asperas negotiate President Trump's proposed Mexican wall, others like John Byrne, Park Chan Kyong and Sean Snyder tackle existing barriers.
The Swiss-icelandic artist Christoph Büchel is no stranger to causing affront. His career includes the launch of a somewhat dubious Community Centre at his gallery, Hauser & Wirth, in Piccadilly (one of the most expensive parts of London) in 2011, opening a sex club at the Vienna Secession in 2010 and, for 2015's Venice Biennale, turning a medieval Catholic church into a mosque, which was promptly closed by the city authorities (Artnotes & Reviews AM387).
His latest stunt may take the biscuit, however. He is attempting to preserve eight, 30ft-high prototype versions of President Trump's proposed border wall between the US and Mexico, on the grounds that the prototypes, situated only yards from the existing border fence near San Diego, amount to a significant example of contemporary land art. Furthermore, Büchel is doing this under the auspices of a non-profit art organisation called MAGA, consciously referring to Trump's 'Make America Great Again' campaign slogan. Büchel has even offered guided tours of the prototypes at $20 a head - causing local artists and curators to call for a boycott of both Hauser & Wirth and the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, where the sell-out tours meet before crossing the border to the Tijuana side to view the prototypes from a dirt track.
So far, Büchel has not commented on the criticisms levelled at his no doubt ironic but highly insensitive grandstanding scheme. The prototypes are militaristic and grim, and offensive to Latin American people. And the idea that Donald Trump might in some way be considered a conceptual artist is beyond a joke.
In an era of widespread anxiety over territory and movement, the issue of borders in contemporary art remains pertinent, as has been argued previously by Marcus Verhagen in his features 'Nomadism' (AM300) and 'Border Control' (AM364). But while artists and curators travel the world, basing themselves in different communities and countries in an endless parade of experience and experiment, capitalism continues to mutate. The anthropologist Anna Tsing...