New Take on Old Work: San Diego Museum of Art Surveys Prof's Punk Period

Sheena Ghanbari | August 22, 2011

Rubén Ortiz-Torres. Catrín con Peńafiel. Gelatin silver print, ca.1986 (reprinted 2011). On loan from the artist.

Punk music was once banned from Mexican stages and airwaves. In spite of that, or maybe because of it, punk left its mark in Mexico – at the very least on one man, artist Rubén Ortiz-Torres. The longtime UC San Diego professor of visual arts is the subject of a solo exhibition at the San Diego Museum of Art (SDMA), “Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man: Works by Rubén Ortiz-Torres,” which chronicles his early curiosity about and political interest in punk music.

Featuring artwork from the early 1980s through early ’90s – including pieces that have not been seen in the United States before – the show opens July 30 and will remain on display through October 30.

The exhibition curator, SDMA’s Amy Galpin, describes the body of represented work as sophisticated and rigorously technical. But Ortiz-Torres also notes the youthful and obsessive quality of drawings, photographs and film on display.

Rubén Ortiz-Torres. No hay paso. Gelatin silver print, ca.1984 (reprinted 2011). On loan from the artist.

Calling the show “relatable,” Ortiz-Torres hopes that his UCSD students will find the exhibit interesting and relevant.

As an adolescent going to school in Mexico City (where he was born in 1964), Ortiz-Torres grew up in an environment with little exposure to the punk scene. Punk music was not allowed on the radios, and rock concerts were also prohibited. Ortiz-Torres’s first experience of punk was through written works and movies that incorporated punk concerts. He was compelled by the anarchist messages. Drawing inspiration from such iconic bands as the Sex Pistols, Ortiz-Torres saw punk music as a form of aesthetic rebellion against an oppressive regime.

Ortiz-Torres calls his interpretation of punk a “concoction of the original scene.” His photographs of friends and people in the Mexican punk scene, he says, embody a sense of “absurdity and contradiction or cultural clash.” The characters in the foreground are dressed in a way that contrasts with the Third-World setting of the image.

Rubén Ortiz-Torres. Fumadores. Gelatin silver print, ca.1984 (reprinted 2011). On loan from the artist.

In conjunction with the exhibition, Ortiz-Torres revisits his interpretation of punk through an essay in the forthcoming anthology “Punkademics,” edited by Zack Furness. The essay looks at the ways that disenchanted youth reacted against the traditional values of Mexico and its politics.

Ortiz-Torres, a graduate of the California Institute of the Arts, has been teaching at UC San Diego since 2001. His work is included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (MoCA), Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD), and many others, both private and public.

For more information about “Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man: Works by Rubén Ortiz-Torres”: The San Diego Museum of Art

The artist’s own web page is RubenOrtizTorres.org