Christian Viveros-Fauné

Continuity and Change

For personal and professional reasons, Alberto Montaño-Mason quit making art sometime around 2001. Nearly a decade of travel and study later, Montaño-Mason took to his studio like a man possessed. Residing presently in Mexico City—his earlier art studios were located in Paris and New York— Montaño-Mason’s new workshop traded in many elements from his previously successful practice for a new set of high tech tools. Gone were the paintbrushes and stretchers. In their place appeared 27’ iMacs, digital plotters and LCD video projectors.

Changes that signaled an important shift in this artist’s creative process, these advances continue the investigation of subjects Alberto Montaño-Mason has consistently made his own. Among these subjects are the themes of life and death, the commingling of art and life, the confrontation of real history with subaltern art history, as well as—finally—a deep-seated affirmation of this particular artist’s freedom to visualize alternate realities and harness personal misfortune to a restless, personal artistic vision. 

Old Obsessions, New Signatures

FManifested variously in what amounts to a second career for Montaño-Mason—he now also uses his mother’s last name and refers to work made after 2001 as his “21st Century work”—the cardinal themes of life and death recur in the different bodies of work this artist has confected since returning to active art making. Consider, for example, the images contained in this folder. Works that take as their starting point the pictorial and sculptural minimalism of the 1960s and 70s, Montaño-Mason’s 21st century art employs multiple media to refresh an image bank conjured in equal parts from art history and personal obsession.

In a first case, for instance, Montaño-Mason turns a perfect circle—that recalls, among other works, a canvas by Robert Mangold—into a three-dimensional live seedbed or planting, as he calls it. Appearing as a digitally produced photographic image in its final state, Montaño-Mason makes use of this planting as an artistic signature. With it he prods tradition and, quite literally, bring the hermeneutics of minimalism down to earth. 

Other tropes of classic pictorial minimalism come in for similar treatment. Presented here in the shape of circles and stripes—invoking, alternately, prehistoric symbols (i.e., the veritable circle of life) as well as minimalism’s predecessors and practitioners (i.e., Barnett Newman’s zips or Sean Scully’s lines)— Montaño-Mason rescues them from their perishable planting via the immortalizing power of photography.  

Further experiments with seedbeds decant into actual three-dimensional sculptural objects with which Montaño-Mason refers, alternately, to Dada (think of Meret Oppenheim’s fur-lined teacup), Duchamp’s canonical urinal as well as to fetishes like women’s shoes, men’s hats (after the artist’s dead father) and the veritable bedchamber that is the cradle of life, death and procreation.

Icons and Repetitions

As with the images in the previous folder that actively quote the hermetic codes of minimalism and playfulness of Dada, in subsequent art works Alberto-Montaño Mason casts back to older, more canonical artistic sources in order to establish a dialogue between tradition and his own contemporary artistic practice. In these and other series, his repetitions of familiar art historical images serve to underscore—while remaining indebted to the documentary nature of conceptualist art practice—the importance of his sources and also to establish a working method with its own organic and aesthetic order.

Using the silhouettes of artistic icons like Botticelli’s Venus and the Venus de Milo, Montaño-Mason embarked on a series of plantings whose subsequent photographic record present highly aestheticized images of a naturally dramatic process. This process is made up, quite simply, of the cycle of life of Montaño-Mason’s plantings themselves: Green shoots give way—in Montaño’s diptychs and triptychs—to images of dry verdure, then eventually to images of vegetal residue floating fleetingly atop scarred earth that resembles nothing so much as a the craquelure of old paint. 

Other icons Montaño-Mason submits to this circular process of bloom, wastage and death are Duchamp’s stool (sans bicycle wheel), Magritte’s bowler-hatted everyman and, most poignantly for a non believer, the Virgen de Guadalupe, possibly Mexico’s single most emblematic and revered image. Photographic records of the transitory nature of monumental achievements as well as testaments to the devotion they inspire, Montaño-Mason’s photographs of living and dead icons query belief independently of source, orientation and intensity.

On Women and their Representation

AContinuing in the same elfin, Dadaist vein Montaño-Mason employed in his previous three-dimensional sculptures, a third body of work highlights this artist’s preoccupation both with real live women and their historical representation. Made up of photographs that appear essentially straightforward yet conjugate eroticism and its conventional opposite—namely, the cycle of reproduction—Montaño-Mason’s pictures of women prove at once images of a highly personal nature and try on various artistic influences, including, among others, that of Edouard Manet and the contemporary photographer Nobuyoshi Araki.

Pictures that feature the same dark-haired model in various stages of dress and undress, these photos flout traditional taboos against reproducing beauty and menstruation in the same image. The fact that Montaño-Mason frankly presents images of both recalls a rhetorical question posed by Titian’s friend, the poet Pietro Aretino: “Why should I be ashamed to describe what nature was not afraid to create?” Montaño-Mason’s photographs—like Aretino’s famously erotic writings—clearly display no such compunction. 

For example, one such work from this series arrays two images of Montaño-Mason’s topless model atop the same white stool, dressed in a skirt, bobby-sox and patent leather shoes. A nod toward the aforementioned Japanese photographer, this diptych alternately hides, then brazenly displays what popular culture has long referred to as “the female curse.” Another work from this series features Montaño Mason’s model reclining on a bed like an odalisque. A picture that recalls Manet’s Olympia far more than it does Matisse’s decorative maidens, Montaño-Mason arranges his model in act of splay legged sexual candor with rivulets of blood included. 

A final diptych provides a potent colophon for this series: an image of the seated model revealing her blood stained panties is paired with a fertile outline of the model in soil and grass.

Tombs

“Guilt,” the philosopher Elizabeth Kubler Ross said, “is perhaps the most painful companion of death.” Words that haunt the series Montaño-Mason’s prosaically calls “Tombs,” Kubler Ross’ utterance describes works whose photographic support this artist employs differently to remember the departed. Photographs that mine a mixture of public and private sorrow, such images are elegies to the dead and dying, be these actual people, forgotten ideas or passing life events like childhood and youth.

Take several images Montaño-Mason made of a prone woman lying head down on a cracked cement floor. No nonsense pictures of a crumpled model with her hair and clothes in a state of disarray, the subject’s facelessness effectively evokes las caidas de Juarez—the countless, largely anonymous women who have been murdered in that infamous Mexican border town. A second image, in which Montaño-Mason blindfolds and ties his model’s hands behind her back only to figuratively “bury” her under a sheet of yellow latex, makes these connections stand out even more poignantly.

FA heightened sense of mortality and loss informs Montaño-Mason’s photographs of broken dolls and children’s toys buried among grown grass and actual soil. Pictures that at once literally enter childhood, these images inhabit a special place in Montaño-Mason’s artistic universe: they raise creative life from the images of ambiguous “tombs” in a manner similar to the way this artist’s plantings grow shoots from dead earth.

Beyond the Studio

Montaño-Mason’s next series can be seen both as a progression of and an amplification of the process-oriented work involving his signature plantings. These processes, on the one hand, harken back to the earliest technologies know to man—namely, agriculture and the raising of livestock. On the other, they require sophisticated digital tools to be turned into this artist’s 21st century photo and video–based art.

Starting with a planting whose long, dried-out grasses describe the outline of a single sheep, Montaño-Mason moved on to work with an actual herd of live sheep which he led into conforming the shape one of the central symbols of visual postmodernism: a Robert Smithson-type spiral. Another work in this series required this artist to corral hundreds of Monarch butterflies into a perfect circle. The videographic documentation of these few fleeting moments recalls the words of the 17th century British classicist John Stuart Blackie: “creation is the production of order.”

Works like these and others drove Montaño-Mason out of the studio and into the world, where he was able to establish his own, evidently more modest version of land art with the use of animals. A significant move beyond his previous artistic practice, this series additionally afforded Montaño-Mason the possibility to incorporate video technology into his creative arsenal, an opportunity he would use to full advantage in subsequent art works.

From Video to Installation Art

Alberto Montaño-Mason’s most recent series of works acquire significant new dimensions for an artist who for many years worked exclusively with paint and canvas. Having established an entirely new artistic idiom for his ouvre, he has actively and continually developed relations between his art works. These relationships take on a whole new complexity where his sculptural and video installations are concerned.

Beginning with his work “Muro,” which consists of bibles stacked end to end and mortared like bricks, Montaño-Mason has sought to expand his particular artistic language into the realms of popular culture and culture at large. An impulse he has followed by making complex interactive video works that—in several instances—present young lovers literally interrupted by the presence of the viewer (thanks to a motion detector), Montaño-Mason has clearly accepted the challenge of working with new media and new subject matter while, at the same time, mining concerns that have been at the source of his art for decades.

One especially sophisticated video installation is the work “Cinco Generaciones.” A multi-channel piece that confronts the viewer with a cacophony of women—who are all related to the artist by blood—their images and voices speak through various generations of a single family to the basic universal fact of being, as it were, representatives of the family of woman.

Change and Continuity

Since 2004, Alberto Montaño-Mason has made of the principle of stylistic variability a working method. A changing practice that embraces both manifold tools as well as a core set of concerns that provide a continuous thread for his changing work, this artist has harnessed low-fi means of constructing artistic meaning (his plantings) as well as the latest technology to power his multi-channel video installations.

Art that challenges notions of both continuity and discontinuity, Montaño-Mason’s plantings, two dimensional objects, three-dimensional sculpture and video installations shape-shift a creative imagination that doggedly pursues elemental and personal questions about the role of artist. What place does humor play in the making of art? What form can we give our obsessions? What does sorrow look like? What new elements can be brought to bear on the artistic imagination and what results will they produce? 

OThese are just some of the questions Montaño-Mason brings to his capacious art. He has developed these and others throughout at least two art careers and several lives. As viewers, we should count ourselves lucky just to follow along.