“Escribo como artista, no como crítica.” 1 

-Mónica Mayer

A line: una raya. To draw a line or draw the line—to leave a trace. A gesture that has the capacity to bend, excavate, or fold in on itself. Curved or straight, thick or thin, lines lead us to trace the edges of a form, the contours of which define and emphasize a single object or subject. Materially, it could at once be saturated with time while temporally also enduring beyond a fixed beginning and end. In Spanish, the infinitive verb rayar comes from the word raya. Roughly translated, rayar can be defined as “to make lines on a surface”—a boundary, a sketch, a scratch, a path, a horizon, a measure, an edge, a connecting point, an inscription, an emphasis, something that repeats—or even, “to make something yours.” Rayando voy, rayando vengo. Una raya is a distant trace that indicates something that might have been, never was, or has yet to arrive. This accumulation of expressive gestures, at once marking lines of inquiry and scratching away at the autonomy of art, takes shape as a poetic device in Mexican artist Mónica Mayer’s life and practice.

For Mayer, rayar suggests poetic possibility, performative process, and formal technique. Since the early 1970s, Mayer has forged an artistic practice committed to exploring diverse languages of visual and conceptual art through performance, drawing, collage, and printmaking. In tandem with organizing feminist actions and social interventions, she has been an educator, archivist, writer, publisher, translator, curator, critic, and mother. As much an activist as she is a visual artist, her practice is often in friction with traditional conceptions of art(work)—questioning the autonomy of art from social and political life. She has dedicated her life to challenging systems of oppression related to gender and class and critiquing the exclusivity of the art world in Mexico and beyond by creating dialogues that propose better conditions for life. In the context of the quotation that introduces this text—“Escribo como artista, no como crítica” (I write as an artist, not as a critic)—rayar can be thought of as an outcome of the relationship between performance and language that is at the center of Mayer’s practice.

Mayer began her career at a moment in which Mexican artists—primarily in urban areas of Mexico City—promoted a vision of collective practice that came to be known as “los grupos” or the Group Movement. The movement toward grupos developed in response to state violence, suppression, and sociopolitical struggles 2  epitomized by the Tlatelolco Massacre of 1968. 3 

During this period, Mayer was at the forefront of art-based feminist activism in Mexico City, investigating connections between visual culture and the social role of women and presenting performance as an emancipatory form of art. Argentine art historian and curator Andrea Giunta charts Mayer’s practice in relation to the particular circumstances of artistic feminism that emerged in Mexico in the late 1970s and early 1980s. She argues that “the Mexican case stands out among the Latin American artistic feminist scenes for its historical formations, its continuity, and the diversity of practices in which its postulates were unfolded.” 4  Emerging from and later leading this radical scene, Mayer prioritizes collaboration as an instrument of aesthetic experimentation capable of counter-hegemonic disruption. Her practice often takes diaristic, participatory form by inviting intimate and diverse responses to femininity without essentializing the relationship between womanhood and the body. At the core of her critical mode of work is the archive, which, she says, with its networks of connection, is “an act of self-defense against invisibility.” 5 

Mayer's longest collaboration is with artist—and Mayer's life partner—Víctor Lerma, with whom she runs Pinto mi Raya (I Paint My Line), a far-ranging archival project in which pedagogy and performance converge. Together Mayer and Lerma have forged and sustained an independent system of production, documentation, circulation, and activation of art that intervenes in the traditional hierarchy in which institutions have more power than individual artists. In their words, the project is a durational artwork of “applied conceptual art.” 6 Since its inauguration in 1989, Pinto mi Raya has amassed more than forty thousand documents, spanning criticism, blog posts, ephemera, installation images, videos, and sound recordings about contemporary art, some related to their own collaborative and individual performances in public spaces. Their discourse and practice remains immersed in education as a practice itself. Mayer and Lerma continue to congregate artists, form conversation groups, host radio programs, produce independent diffusions of projects, and make digitally accessible countless materials and resources that rewrite (a) contemporary Mexican art history.

Pinto mi Raya began as a gallery started by Mayer and Lerma to support ephemeral, experimental, and ludic exhibitions that were difficult to present in traditional spaces like museums, collections, art fairs, and commercial galleries. Pinto mi Raya joined a coterie of independent artist-run centers that included La Quiñonera, which, founded in 1988, was one of the first experimental art spaces in Mexico; Temístocles 44 (active 1993–95), a collective founded by a group of artists that included Eduardo Abaroa, Abraham Cruz villegas, Franco Aceves Humana, and Sofía Táboas; and La Panadería (active 1994–2002), founded by Miguel Calderón and Yoshua Okón. By the 1990s, Mexico City was animated by a fervent enthusiasm for the exchange of ideas that transcended the confines of existing, restrictive state and institutional structures of the post-1968 regime. Artists across the city turned to DIY formats that could be employed in spaces that belonged to the community. At the time, contemporary art was seen as a marginal practice—pre-internet and pre-globalization—that gave rise to various collective models emerging from a refusal of single authorship and institutionalization. This alternative spirit was underpinned by social engagement, intergenerational dialogue, and reinvention. Above all, there was a curatorial line that was not self-contained but rather existed in a cyclic loop that invited experimental Mexican art to be in dialogue with itself and with an international art scene.

Propelled by this framework, Pinto mi Raya underlines (in Spanish, subraya, a term used frequently by Mayer and which echoes rayar) 7  the importance of process in their effort to “lubricate” the Mexican art system. 8  Their mission is to converge critique and memory while destabilizing normative institutional dynamics. In brief, Pinto mi Raya intervenes within exclusionary structures in defense of unconventional practices and positions. 

This posture frequently takes up an intersectional feminist praxis in the form of participatory performances, like the series Yo no celebro ni conmemoro guerras (I Don’t Celebrate or Commemorate Wars, 2008–ongoing). In this work, Mayer and Lerma engage a radical feminism that questions displays of patriarchal oppression in Mexico within a broader critique of a global cult of war. The project—which centers on the titular statement—has materialized as a performance, through graphics displaying the statement on screen printed flags, caps, stickers, buttons, and t-shirts, and in dialogue with a public that is invited to discuss the implications of the phrase. Here, Mayer and Lerma propose a strategy based on “tagging”—inscribing everyday objects with a mark or symbol made up of words. The work incites a dialogical and reflexive participation with art, bringing into focus the complex tensions between historiography and archival practice, which both interpret past and present yet manifest differently when, in the context of performance, historiography challenges the archive. The printing of this phrase on articles of clothing prompts us to ask how the body is implicated within political conflict, state organized violence, and the validation (or as the title proposes, celebration) of a global military industrial complex.

In projects such as Raya: Crítica, crónica y debate en las artes visuales (Line: Criticism, Chronicles, and Debate in the Visual Arts, 1991–2014), Pinto mi Raya continues to contend with archival work as a practice of continual non(line)ar reflection. The project began as an effort to gather documentation and think pieces on different themes (including criticism, chronicles, reviews, and correspondence) published in various major Mexican newspapers. 9  The title invokes the term rayar in reference to methods of collecting and cataloging. Both are archival strategies and tools of record-keeping that here simultaneously conserve and annotate a memory of contemporary Mexican criticism. Pinto mi Raya’s investment in conversation as critique manifest in archival research emerges as an active line of inquiry imbued with movement and debate: a line that is blurred or smeared. What was once a line transforms into a smudge—a mark that calls attention to itself in question of why it is there. 

In commemoration of Pinto mi Raya’s twentieth anniversary, the couple’s project Archivo Activo (Active Archive, 2011) exists as an echo of this material archive. Continually finding new ways to revisit and disseminate the cultural significance of their projects, for Archivo Activo Mayer and Lerma organized a collection of 10,986 texts to piece together an indispensable history of contemporary Mexican art through ten themes: artistic education, public art, performance, architecture, alternative spaces, photography, installation, women artists, criticism of criticism, and digital art. These resources were digitized on ten CDs (each one dedicated to a specific theme), of which twenty sets were donated to public libraries, universities, and art schools in Mexico. Across these and many other projects, Mayer and Lerma’s commitment to access and engagement functions as a unit of measure. A quantifying effort perhaps more concerned with what an archive can do for the present than what it can do for the future. Archivo Activo proposes a broad line of discovery; one energized by aesthetics within the archive that are associative and performative and make visible how artwork can be reascribed meaning via movement, documentation, and redistributed resources.

Mayer's project makes visible the ordinary and exceptional ways in which navigating a city somatically impacts the body. How does safety emerge or recede between architectures, and between people navigating its streets? Where might a proverbial safety be demarcated or foreclosed—for and by whom? Agency in public space is at once embodied, often denied, sometimes reciprocal, always relational—yet asymmetrical, bringing into closer focus our own quotidian negotiation of lines in the relationship to urban space. Artist, writer, and DJ Juliana Huxtable writes,

TRAVEL ACROSS AND, IN AN ACT OF 

FREEDOM (NO CARS) AND RITUAL, IN THE 

NAME OF PHYSICAL UNBOUNDEDNESS, 

EVEN IN SPITE OF POLICING THE SAME…

LINES AND BODIES, CONGENIALITY 

IMBUED IN THEIR COLORFUL MOVEMENT 

AND ALSO SOMETHING OTHER… 

SINISTER, SARDONIC, AND DYSTOPIA. IN 

THEIR PREDILECTIONS… 

LINE, FIGURES IT GRANTS CERTAIN VITALITIES TO 

A REVELATORY POWER

THE NATURE OF THEIR WIDE AND RAPID PROLIFERATION…

SYMBOLS, DEPLETED KINETIC AUDACITY

A SUGGESTION / MARKER

INVITATION TO LINES, BODIES TRANSFORMATIONS

OF EMBOD-IED ENERGIES

IN ON A JOKE / COGNIZANT OF A MISSION

HOMAGE TO THE RECURRENT TENDER AGE 12 

While time continues to pass, so too do a city’s shapes, lines, and infrastructures change. Through El Tendedero, Mayer’s investment in archives emerges in her commitment to foreground the ways that the city itself is enmeshed in the lives and histories of people whose presence occupies fluctuating definitions of marginality and visibility. The work considers, perhaps, the ways that different people’s presence in the city is imperiled or empowered by social implications amidst phenomena like economic and housing crises, gentrification, and displacement. While the installation echoes experiences in public space, the clothes(line) as an object itself contests the significance of a domestic space, a place where, in the words of artist June Canedo de Souza, “knowledge about the body, particularly the woman’s body, is imposed.” 13 

“OF EMBOD-IED ENERGIES, IN ON A JOKE / COGNIZANT OF A MISSION,” as Huxtable proposes—a liberatory vision and culture-making that multiplies outward with symbolic measure because of its opacity. Worldmaking sometimes emerges on the margins, small pockets of claimed space where folks invent new ways to live and love. In a world where there are no material consequences to gendered violence, Mayer’s Tendederos ask what we might make of collectivity in spite of it, attendant to what José Esteban Muñoz calls “ephemera as evidence.” Ephemera, as Muñoz uses it, is linked to alternate modes of textuality and narrativity like memory and performance. It does not rest on epistemological foundations but is instead interested in following traces, glimmers, residues, and specks of things. 14  This archive, much like the poetic device rayar, is an ephemeral witnessing, a material reality.

...ni somos todas las que están, ni están todas las que somos. . . 15