Christopher Knight Mexico joins global club, Los Angeles Times Calender 23 June 2004, E1, E4
"For Made in Mexico, the new group exhibition at the UCLA Hammer Museum, Francis Al˙s has contributed an extraordinary humane and provocative work he made a decade ago. Al˙s, a Belgian expatriate long resident in Mexico City, has been instrumental in creating international interest in new art in Mexico.
"The installation is titled The Liar, the Copy of the Liar. It begins with small paintings that the artist based on commercial signs he encountered around the sprawling city. In one, presumably meant to advertise men's clothing, the image of a young man dressed in business attire is partly overlaid atop another very similar image . . .
". . .
"Al˙s made his small copy of this strange vernacular image, then took the copy to different sign painters - rotulistas - around Mexico City. He hired three of them to paint larger copies.
"Juan Garcia, Enrique Huerta and Emilio Rivera made versions that differ radically from one another . . .
" . . . and also difffer from the the painting Al˙s asked them to copy . . .
". . .
"Al˙s' marvelous installation finds its ancestry in classic Conceptual art from the 1960s. The most pointed example is several terrific series by John Baldessari, who employed commercial sign painters to execute canvases that formerly would have been made by artists. This is notable because Conceptual art stands as the marker for aesthetic legitimacy today . . . full-scale entry into the international fold of post-Conceptual art.
"Conceptual art was not just an American or Western European phenomenon . . .
". . .
"So when 32-year old Gabriel Orozco nailed a plain plastic lid from a yogurt cup to the wall of über-hip Marian Goodman Gallery in New York 10 years ago [1994], it was like Martin Luther nailing his 95 theses on the door of the castle church. A Mexican artist hadd rigorously asserted the ineluctable primacy of Conceptual art for the contemporary world.
"In the Hammer show, Orozco is represented by a 1995 sculpture based on the design of a chessboard. (From a local collection, it was included in his MOCA survey.) Like his other work, it pointedly invokes artist Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), the French chess fanatic and godfather of Conceptualism . . . "
[Consider also a possible reference to Georges Perec.]