Ruben Ortiz Torres: Desmothernismo

by Ruben Ortiz Torres

Desmothernismo surveys the work that Rubn Ortiz Torres has produced over the last seven years as he's commuted back and forth across the U.S./Mexican border, using diverse media to explore the linguistic, aesthetic, and social collisions of art and culture. This exhibition catalogue includes the full range of his wildly eclectic work, including paintings/pictograms combining modern art symbols with ethnic stereotypes; photographs of scenes from both sides of the border that mix allegory with documentation; customized baseball caps that make a twisted fashion statement about the relationship between aesthetics, history, mass media, politics, sports, and community; and his acclaimed recent installation Alien Toyz.

72 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published July 1, 1998

Reviews

[Weston · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ruben's show at the Getty was probably one of the first major contemporary (and by that I mean work from the last 5 years at the time) exhibitions I had a chance to see in person. Having been stuck in environments where my exposure to a range of contemporary work was severely limited (or moderately outdated) it pretty much blew my mind. I still find a lot of his work quite interesting. His lowrider "transforming" La Migra vehicle is still one of my favorite pieces.