The title of Emilio Chapela’s exhibition Man is the Measure takes its name from a phrase by Protagoras (5th Century BCE), the Greek pre-Socratic philosopher who said, “man is the measure of all things”. The show contains a number of works that deal with the issue of boundaries and borders and maps from a human scale and perspective.
The issue of boundaries as an element of exclusion was dealt with by Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason by completely separating ideas like rationality and sensation, knowledge and faith, among others.[1] Since then, different philosophers, such as Hegel have tackled the subject of boundaries as dialectical relations in which to denote borders as well as their nexus. [2]
The political atmosphere in which Kant was forming his ideas was one in which the notion of the Nation-State was being developed. Although this concept first appeared in the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, in this later understanding the nation appears tied to territorial boundaries for the first time and is presented as an entity that divides and excludes.
La Mojonera (2014) is a sculpture that revisits the milestones that were placed during the second half of the 19th century to define the border between Mexico and the United States established by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo after the war of 1848. The borderline was denoted by a succession of two hundred and fifty eight milestones in the shape of obelisks. There is no set distance between each milestone: the only requirement was that from each obelisk one could see the ones beside it. In other words, the imaginary line between these two nations was drawn according to what the human eye is able to perceive. By the end of the 20th century, the crossing of Mexicans into the United States became a problem that the simple demarcation of territories could not solve, so the United States government undertook the building of a dividing wall.
Radio Latina (2013), is a video that emerges as part of a larger project in which the artist goes on a “road trip” through Mexico using images from Google Street View. The piece takes us on a tour along the border wall while we listen to Radio Latina, whose main audience is comprised of immigrants, including a large population of illegal aliens. The video contains a dual reference to the use of technology: on the one hand, it opens the debate surrounding the manipulation of power, and questions why Google generates these images and what their purpose is. On the other hand, the employment of audio from Radio Latina makes us aware of how radio waves transcend the partitions imposed by the borderline, and serves as a metaphor for how people continue to cross it in spite of the efforts made to divide the territory.
The defining of borders took on new relevance after the implementation of the idea of the Nation-State, spurring the need to create maps that marked the boundaries between countries. Maps were thus no longer used solely to aid navigation or travel through a territory, they became instruments for prospecting and control and symbols of political and economic domination.[3]
List of Countries by GDP (Nominal) (2014) is an installation in which Chapela uses colored cubes to represent the economies of the 182 currently existing nations, and assigns each continent a color. The size of the cubes corresponds to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) index published by the International Monetary Fund in 2010, so that the larger-sized cubes represent the bigger GDPs. This is a map that does not represent territories, but something even more abstract: wealth, and therefore, power.
At the end of World War II, the world was divided into two blocs that sought a new ideological course to expand beyond the known geographical territory, beginning the so-called Space Race. The leading countries of each bloc–the United States and the Soviet Union–and their respective space agencies, dedicated themselves to exploring outer space and to placing satellites in orbit, but also to sending men beyond terrestrial borders. Holmdel Antenna (2014) is a piece that features the Holmdel Horn Antenna: an instrument built to detect satellite communication signals and through which the noise produced by the Big Bang was first heard. In this work, Chapela recovers an old photograph of the Holmdel Horn Antenna, which he displays next to a sculpture that reproduces the antenna’s horn on a reduced scale. The fabricated quality of the replica emphasizes the original object’s formal value in such a way that it somehow recalls the sculptures created by Russian Constructivists. This work examines this instrument of space exploration that, like a giant ear, listens to the universe in the context of what the discipline of physics understands as the problem of the cosmological horizon.[4]
Boundaries and their representations, be they political, economic or cosmic, are one of the salient themes of this exhibition. From his research on the Holmdel Horn Antenna, Chapela generates pieces such as One Second of Noise and Cosmic Microwave Background, projects in which he seeks to depict different maps of the universe, produced according to the information originally detected by the antenna and other technological artifacts. In both cases, the artist resorts to traditional and manual techniques. Lithography was used in the series One Second of Noise, and, for Cosmic Microwave Background, a hand woven rug was commissioned from a workshop of artisans in Teotitlán del Valle in the Mexican state of Oaxaca. The use of these media generates a technical contrast with the images that they construct, which come from instruments of scientific measurement that employ complex technology. In other words, he joins modern cosmology of the universe with a traditional Zapotec technique in the same object.
The works in Man is the Measure speak to us about the instruments through which we seek to exercise power and control over territory. However, they move away from the Kantian idea of boundaries as exclusion and move closer to the Hegelian proposal that boundaries don’t necessarily divide, but unify. Chapela’s artwork transforms maps as elements of political control, as proposed by cultural geographer Denis Cosgrove, into cultural artifacts.[5]
Text by Magnolia de la Garza
[1] Fred R. Dallmayr, "Borders on Horizons - Gadamer and Habermas Revisited," Chicago-Kent Law Review: Vol. 76: Iss. 2, Article 6; 2000, p. 1. Read in: http://scholarship.kentlaw.iit.edu/cklawreview/vol76/iss2/6
[2] Ibid. pg. 16.
[3] James Corner, “The Agency of Mapping” in Mappings; Denis Cosgrove (ed.) London: Reaktion Books, 1999; p. 232.
It was in the 18th Century, with authors such as Rousseau, that economic policy emerged as government power. Foucault, in his idea of Bio-Politics, speaks about how with economic policy the goal is no longer to control the individual but the population.
[4] The cosmological horizon consists of a set of physical constraints that limit the extent to which we can obtain information about events in the Universe. In other words, it marks the limit of the observable universe.
[5] Denis Cosgrove, “Introduction: Mapping Meaning” in Mappings; Op cit; p. 15.