Postmodern Culture

Embedded in an unassuming point on the 1,952-mile Mexico-US border, the scene of counter-surveillance that ends “CCTV”—the collaborative video-poem by Mexican multimedia artist Chantal Peñalosa and Xicano poet José-Luis Moctezuma presented here—subverts through an aestheticized, albeit still uncanny surreality. Rising to the pro-voyeuristic height of the cop car on the hill, the rooftop sitter stages a standoff that, in this landscape, parodically echoes a Western shootout, but more so invokes a laser-like Magrittean absurdity, suggested even more strongly by the perpetual cloud panel of the dual-channel video.¹ The cross-border filmic perspective from the Mexican side meets the surreal with the surreal, drafting the border patrol into an Ionesco anti-play that exposes the police’s own theater of the absurd. The real abstraction of the border is taunted by what Moctezuma calls “system of cloud,” continually asserting its impertinent, blissful autonomy from nation states and their would-be compartmentalization. Elsewhere in the piece, Peñalosa verbally reports a cognate scene: blaring the US national anthem as a sonic duel, the US border patrol aggresses through a cacophonous miasma inversely made of nationalism. If the hourly musical interludes of the town clock help create a shared habitus and specifically Mexican identity for inhabitants, that acoustically grounded form of life is degraded by a trespassing neo-imperial counterblast.² Another of her prose passages registers yet further Yanqui climate control, weather modification through cloud-seeding: “son los americanos, ya están otra vez tirando hielo para que llueva.”³ At the end of this closing segment of inside-out domestic arrangements, a new shot captures a street sweeper raising dust, the dingy street, and the mere serviceability of the domicile: the aesthetic is desublimated, and we end by viewing its supports.

Such a focus on the revelatory “back-of-the-house” echoes the moments in the poem-video that feature service labor in a typical café, or rather the ritualized, compulsive doubles of such tasks. In this sousveillance video, Peñalosa works her actual day job as a subversive form of maintenance art, treading an infra-thin line between work and work-like tasks that points to the hollowness of alienated service labor through repetition, hypertrophied duration, and useless perfectionism (even if, in the case of polishing a spoon, it produces a version of Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror). If “la perruque,” as theorized by Michel de Certeau, is a form of time-theft as an employee does work for themself in the guise of work for an employer, surely by surreptitiously turning her wage labor at the café into sessions in an artist studio, Peñalosa engages in the practice; yet since her art, made on the boss’s clock, assumes the mode of an exaggeration of her work tasks, it also forces la perruque into a paradoxical form.⁴ Over against a perverse, excessive, messy, inefficient attention to saltshaker levels (Duchamp anyone?, and don’t the other workers [managers?] seem on the cusp of noticing?), Peñalosa’s miniature theater of hand and object nonetheless also possesses a certain tenderness. It seems to sacralize these mundane tasks and to make real and felt the time in which they are performed, as in the care with which the entire surface of a copy of Chihuahuan novelist Jesús Gardea’s novel Sóbol (1985) is painted with coffee grounds by gloved hands and then wiped clean— taking up almost a minute and a half of the ten-minute piece—an act of inoperative undoing saturated with intention.⁵ With her commentary on interior ambience and an external ambient, Peñalosa also keeps the atmospheric in focus.

José-Luis Moctezuma’s poetics of interaction with the video seek neither to frame nor to explicate the visual feed.⁶ The relation of his poetry to the video is further complicated by Peñalosa’s own verbal contributions to the piece, which consist of excerpts from her work diary. The ekphrastic mode of some of Moctezuma’s verse mimics and signifies on...