[Nettime-bold] borderhack

[TONGOLELE@aol.com]

Dear Fran Ilich,
 I realize from the nettime-latino list that you are currently receiving 
heated emails from critics about your borderhack event and don't want to give 
the impression that I just want to add fuel to the fire. However, for a long 
while now, each time I read your postings, I am left wondering why you 
present your borderhack endeavors as if there had never been an organized 
attempt before yours to develop a critical/artistic approach to the US-Mexico 
border. It may just be that you believe that using computers makes everything 
different but the content of the work you present and the content of your own 
essays read like re-runs of the manifestos of the Border Arts Workshop in the 
1980s. They too wanted to bring the border down, explore the area as a zone 
of intercultural exchange, point to human rights violations, and theorize a 
border sensibility using the notion of the deterritorialized undocumented 
Mexican as a trope. They brought the hybrid pop cultural forms of the region 
into the spotlight, from norteņo punk rock to Tijuanense detective fiction, 
to Bart Simpson in sombreros and velvet paintings of Elvis. The didn't work 
with computers so much, but they used radio, fax machines, cheap printing 
processes, and connected with alternative information distribution networks 
via the mail art circuit, an important precursor to the current net.art 
arena. They organized cultural events at the border, did performances across 
the border fence, and in a metaphorical way, were "hacking" long before you 
got there, and before any mainstream museum ever took interest in the area. 
Scores of academics in both the US and Mexico started thinking about the 
border as the starting point of hybridity because of the work that BAWTAF has 
done, and because of the contributions of such writers and artists as 
Guillermo Gomez-Peņa, Gloria Anzaldua, Alurista and so on. In addition, from 
the 1960s onward, Chicano artists were talking about a territory without 
borders and making art about the region, laying a groundwork for the 
sensibility you now claim as your own. It is dismissive and even ignorant to 
describe all these efforts as "cliched" approaches to the border - I honestly 
don't see that what you propose as very different other than that you propose 
to transpose this work into a virtual context. The other real difference I 
see is that you want to draw a predominantly European and Euro-American 
net.art crowd from nettime to TJ and link the US-Mexico border scene to the 
European art scene -- now what would that do for the border and the people 
who live and work there? Still, it is historically inaccurate to suggest that 
artists first got concerned about borders in Europe first during the last 
Documenta as you have written -- artists have been working on the US-Mexico 
border for much much longer than that. What does seem terribly odd is that it 
would appear that you must erase the history of border culture in order to 
cast your own venture as the starting point. Now why would that be necessary? 
Why make net.art partake of that violent modernist tradition of having to 
demolish everything in order to make one's own creativity seem original? Why 
not bring all your peers and colleagues from a variety of disciplines and 
histories into dialogue together to share border culture? Why turn your back 
on the past and even on other artists working in the present (BAW TAF still 
exists, for example) and only pay attention to one digerati clique that too 
often mistakes itself for the only politicized avant garde to have ever 
emerged in the history of the world?
Sincerely,
Coco Fusco


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