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Octopus
Artist
Yoshua Okón
(Mexican, born 1970)
Date2011
MediumFour-channel video installation with six buckets
DimensionsDuration: 18 minutes, 31 seconds
Credit LineOctopus was produced as part of the Hammer Museum’s Artist Residency Program. The Hammer Museum’s Artist Residency Program was initiated with funding from the Nimoy Foundation and is supported through a significant grant from the James Irvine Foundation.
Collection of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Museum purchase, The Friends of Art Endowment Fund
Object number2014.3
Status
Not on viewCopyright© Yoshua Okón
Category
Label TextYoshua Okón staged a pantomimed military operation in a busy Home Depot parking lot for Octopus (Pulpo in Spanish), 2011. Different filmic perspectives of the operation are projected onto four walls: Customers tackle to-do lists while a group of fighters rolls by on a flatbed. An American flag flutters in the breeze as two men take fictitious bullets. Their “corpses” provoke a double take, but no one stops.
Okón’s art layers document with fiction and humor to produce scathing social commentary. Without permission from the store, the artist hired day laborers—all Maya from Guatemala’s highlands—to choreograph and perform the maneuvers based on their experiences in Guatemala’s 40-year civil war. A metaphor for imperialism and corporate greed since the end of the nineteenth century, “octopus” became the nickname of the United Fruit Company in Guatemala because of its extensive control of the country’s resources. When a 1954 land redistribution program threatened its assets there, United Fruit convinced the United States military to intervene. The destabilized government collapsed into civil war.
The protagonists in Octopus are veterans from opposing sides of the war. They have immigrated, illegally, to the US and now meet regularly in this Home Depot parking lot, which is a tacit marketplace for construction labor. Presentation and cinematography replicate the men’s actual and fictional dislocations, forcing the viewer to turn around in the space to take in multiple screens and shuffling viewers between the roles of shopper, squad member, and object of the patrol. Slogans such as “Vote for a New Foreign Policy” and “Rent by the Hour” slide in and out of the frame, perhaps encouraging observers to consider their part in the fusion of commerce and exploitation that enables the American way of life.
Okón’s art layers document with fiction and humor to produce scathing social commentary. Without permission from the store, the artist hired day laborers—all Maya from Guatemala’s highlands—to choreograph and perform the maneuvers based on their experiences in Guatemala’s 40-year civil war. A metaphor for imperialism and corporate greed since the end of the nineteenth century, “octopus” became the nickname of the United Fruit Company in Guatemala because of its extensive control of the country’s resources. When a 1954 land redistribution program threatened its assets there, United Fruit convinced the United States military to intervene. The destabilized government collapsed into civil war.
The protagonists in Octopus are veterans from opposing sides of the war. They have immigrated, illegally, to the US and now meet regularly in this Home Depot parking lot, which is a tacit marketplace for construction labor. Presentation and cinematography replicate the men’s actual and fictional dislocations, forcing the viewer to turn around in the space to take in multiple screens and shuffling viewers between the roles of shopper, squad member, and object of the patrol. Slogans such as “Vote for a New Foreign Policy” and “Rent by the Hour” slide in and out of the frame, perhaps encouraging observers to consider their part in the fusion of commerce and exploitation that enables the American way of life.
2013-14