Performing Mexicanidad: Vendidas y Cabareteras on the Transnational Stage

5. Ximena Cuevas’s Critical Collages

151 M exico City–based video/conceptual artist Ximena Cuevas is obsessed with the fine line between truth and fiction, the performance of everyday life, and what she perceives to be the “impossibility” of Reality. Highly regarded in the United States, Cuevas has been consistently producing intimate yet hyperlayered video collages and video performances since the early 1990s, when, after becoming disillusioned with the film industries in both Mexico and the United States, she purchased her first home video camera, a Video-8, in 1991. Prior to her incursion into self-produced video pieces, Cuevas had principally held film-related jobs, first by working in Mexico City’s Cineteca Nacional (Mexico’s National Archive) “repairing” films, which mainly “involved cutting scenes that were going to be censored by Gobernación [the State Department],” as she told Sergio de la Mora (“Chilli in Your Eyes,” n.p.). Though she had always been a film addict—skipping classes and going to an average of four films a day while living in Paris with her family in her early teens—it was after working in the basement of the Cineteca when she was sixteen years old, splicing segments of films that offended so-called national mores, that the smell of celluloid seduced her. And, after working as an art assistant on the production of Costa Gavras’s film Missing (1982), Cuevas found a way to further solidify her already quasi-religious relationship with the moving image. As a result she moved to New York City to study film, first at the New School for Social Research and then at Columbia University. During the CHAPTER 5 XIMENA CUEVAS’S CRITICAL COLLAGES 152 remainder of the 1980s and into the 1990s Cuevas held multiple film-related positions, from production assistant to script editor, working on various full-length features from Mexico and the United States, including John Huston’s Under the Volcano (1984) and Arturo Ripstein’s Mentiras Piadosas (Love Lies, 1987). However, after working in an environment that was almost exclusively male dominated (in the production end) and that offered limited possibilities for full control in the production of images, she “retired” from film, and although she continued to work sporadically in films, editing Ripstein’s El Evangelio de las Maravillas (Divine, 1998), she immersed herself almost exclusively in the conceptual world of video art.1 CUEVAS AS A (MEDIATING AND MEDIATED) GUIDE Because of the increasingly easy access to video production2 and editing equipment and the intimate nature of the postproduction phase, the video format has given Cuevas complete control over her obsession; that is, the magic of the movies provides “the possibility of the impossible, how everything is possible within a frame” (“Chilli in Your Eyes,” n.p.). As I have discussed in “Reframing the Retablo” and “Mexican Nationalism, Mass Media, and Gender/Sexuality,” the moving images that the video artist produces most readily challenge head-on the national(ist) fictions regarding gender, sexual, and cultural identities as well as the corruption and heterosexism of the political system.3 Video art is a perfect vehicle for Cuevas; it enables her not only to explore her personal and intimate feelings regarding queer desire but also to delve into the various layers of constructed myths that circulate in contemporary Mexican culture. Film critic B. Ruby Rich has said that Cuevas is “half magician, half mermaid, master of all she surveys.” Rich continues: Cuevas looks upon her beloved metropolis of Mexico City with an eye both jaundiced and passionate. At the same time, she has turned her camera back on her own daily life and charted the quotidian pleasures and crises found therein. Her camera is expressive and inventive, her editing style jaunty and edgy, her musical taste unerring. Whether her subject is lesbian romance or heterosexual machismo, you couldn’t ask for a better guide.4 However, as the work of other experimental film and video practitioners in Mexico continues to be produced, Cuevas’s role as XIMENA CUEVAS’S CRITICAL COLLAGES 153 153 “guide” is hindered by the fact that her videos are seldom seen outside of reduced avant-garde art circles. Save a number of public and/or mass-media interventions, which I discuss in more detail in the pages that follow, and just like Chicana performance artist Nao Bustamante, Cuevas is principally considered a conceptual or experimental artist. Though her work is more readily available in the United States...