Mondini-Ruiz home photo Misty Keasler /
Cheeses ofNazareth
photo courtesy o f Frederieke Taylor Gallery.
Mexican vendor or Indian trader with his crafts spread out for sale on a
blanket. This, incidentally, is a strategy also pursued by the ceramist Ken
Price who worked from 1972 to 1978 on a series of works titled Happy’s
Curios, which paid homage to the Mexican folk pottery of the 1950s that
might be seen in a curio shop.
The imagery of Mondini-Ruiz’s small, handmade works is also often
culturally specific, but they are broader in their sources and references.
They include pint-sized pinatas in the shape of Western art masterpieces
and sculptural assemblages composed of found objects culled from botani-
cas, souvenir shops and thrift stores, themselves often the product of small
family craft businesses. Other works play off museum replicas, plastic
food
[f ig u r e s ] ,
ceramic figurines, costume jewelry and cigarettes and cigars.
They present punning references to religion, art and consumer culture.
Thus, for instance, a plastic Nativity scene set atop a round of plastic Par-
mesan cheese is titled
Cheeses of Nazareth
[figure 6],
spoofing the religious
knickknacks that are part of Mexican folk culture.
Mondini-Ruiz plays hard and fast on both sides of the art/craft and
high/low divides. For a number of years he ran a botanica in San Antonio
that mingled the usual Santeria artifacts with found junk and works by
contemporary Texan and Mexican artists. Moving into more conventional
art contexts—including galleries and museums—he retains the shoplike
ambience of the botanica, selling found trinkets and artifacts alongside his
own fabricated objects. At the 2000 Whitney Biennial he located himself
outside the museum on the street, where he set up a display selling objects
for between 10 cents and 10 dollars. At ArtPace in San Antonio, he pre-
sented Infinito Botanica ©ArtPace, where he offered for sale hundreds of
items composed of found and fabricated elements, displaying them on
shelves that were replenished as objects were purchased.
As with Koons and Murakami, part of Mondini-Ruiz’s purpose is to
deliberately confuse conventional distinctions between art and craft and
between high and low. He adapts found objects associated with low taste,
reconfiguring them into handmade sculptures that are characterized by
punning references to high art and contemporary culture. He infiltrates
the institutions of the art world, turning them temporarily into parodies
of gift shops. Here he sells his works to art collectors for prices far below
those usually associated with fine art. In the process, he sheds light on
a world that would otherwise be invisible to his privileged Anglo audi-
ences, allowing them to share his pleasure in the vibrantly tacky aesthetic
of Latin popular culture and the merchandise of the street vendors whom
he playfully mimics.
All three artists undermine the purity of categories and the hierarchy
of high and low in ways that reveal how much those distinctions are depen-
dent on carefully constructed social and cultural realities. In their work
the frictions between art and craft become surrogates for questions of class
consciousness, ethnic identity and social hierarchy. They deliberately
confound conventional notions about the place of elitism, commercialism,
mass taste and mass production in art and craft. Leaping into the void be-
tween the two, Koons, Murakami and Mondini-Ruiz exploit the art/craft
debate to illuminate the contradictions and conflicts of society at large. +
Eleanor Heartney is author of numerous books on contemporary art, including
Art and Today (
Phaidon, 2008).
FIGURE 5
An example of Franco
Mondini-Ruiz’s plastic
food works inside his
home.
FIGURE 6
Franco Mondini-Ruiz
Cheeses o f Nazareth,
2005, clay Mexican
figurines, resin.
feb/mar 10
american craft 083
www.journal-plaza.net & www.freedowns.net
