Bob van Orsouw

Mario Ybarra Jr.
Scarface Museum...For All I Know He Had My Friend Angel Killed

“Scarface Museum...For All I Know He Had My Friend Angel Killed” is the title of the first European solo exhibition of Mario Ybarra Jr. (1973), an artist living in Los Angeles, whom we are happy to present here in Zurich. Ybarra has won broad international recognition for, among others, his solo exhibition at the CCA Wattis Institute of Contemporary Arts in San Francisco, as well as for his contributions to the Whitney Biennial, New York (2008), the Prague Biennale 3, the Tate Modern and the Serpentine Gallery, both in London.
Ybarra’s Mexican roots permeate his engagement with the phenomena of contemporary art, street culture and social reality. As an artist who opens “a fresh perspective on the fusion of cultures, practices, and aesthetics”, he belongs to a new generation of Chicanos who have stopped questioning their identity and origin against a background of social exclusion. Quite the contrary, Ybarra appropriates and parodies an American mainstream culture that frequently sees itself as hegemonic. He does so by fusing low- and highbrow culture into critical and ironic installations.
Having grown up near the Port of Los Angeles, Ybarra became familiar at a young age with the political actions of the dockworkers, their parades and aesthetic insignias. Ever since then he has analyzed the socio-cultural features of his environs with an anthropological antenna and come to the realization that signs, images, language, clothing and habitus are the semantic conveyors of everyday culture. Thus he transformed a barbershop in Los Angeles Chinatown into a temporary art room where various actions, performances and exhibitions of local artists and marginal groups could take place, a barbershop that was faithfully reconstructed in London’s Tate Modern on the occasion of the exhibition “The World As a Stage”. Within the Tate’s institutional framework, Ybarra then reinstated the original function of the barbershop by setting up a hairdressing competition there. At the same time, the barbershop functioned as a platform for discussion, political action and personal reflection on aspects of cultural identity.
On view in our exhibition, the installation “Scarface Museum...For All I Know He Had My Friend Angel Killed” was first presented at the Whitney Biennial, New York and assembles the memorabilia and devotional objects from Brian De Palma’s film “Scarface”. The objects in the glass cases stem from the collection of Ybarra’s friend, Angel Montes Jr., who slipped from drug-dealing to serious crime. A wall painted red and inscribed with the words “For All I Know He Had My Friend Angel Killed” refers to a performance that Ybarra mounted in 2005, during which he did a reading of violent scenes from the “Scarface” script. The installation represents, for one, an homage to Ybarra’s friend Angel Montes Jr., for whom the protagonist of the movie “Scarface”, Tony Montana, embodied unscrupulous success and wealth. As a Cuban immigrant, Montana worked himself up to become the underworld boss of Miami of the 1980s and so personified the rise and fall of a drug emporium. And two, Ybarra establishes a link to personality cults, such as have been cultivated since the beginning of the film industry in all its facets. The personal objects of stars are treated as artifacts with quasi religious character and serve the individual as well as the masses as a means of constituting identity. The artist transforms the gallery into a kind of shrine in which a fictive character is worshipped, one who appeared in a film considered to be “Hollywood’s greatest underworld drama”. The unequaled brutality of the film stands, still today, for the decadence of unlimited power and the corruption of social systems.

Birgid Uccia