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of exploring the politics of contemporary hope: Mejor Vida Corp. (Better Life Corporation). According to
Cuevas, the project started more or less spontaneously around 1997, and derived from her interest in defying
the structures of the art market by anonymously distributing smallscale art objects in public spaces. Later on,
in the winter of 1997 to 1998, while traveling in the New York City subway system, Cuevas saw a poster
produced by the train administration bearing the slogan "Awake is Aware," warning the passengers against
the dangers of falling sleep while traveling. To prevent passengers from having a "rude awakening" (the title of
a film that was advertised at the time of the "Awake is Aware" campaign), Cuevas started leaving small bags
with caffeine doses attached to the posters located in the cars, as if the subway administration were
distributing them in the guise of "safety pills." The more or less classical intention of defying the status of art
as a commodity was replaced with the more radical intention of playing with the goal of achieving public good
by means of art practice. The project was refined by the invention of a corporative identity. The company
would experiment with an unheardof modality of aesthetic and political intervention involving systematic acts
of generosity purportedly fulfilling urgent demands from the public. According to the corporation's motto, MVC
works "for a human interface."
Further mocking the structure of a private corporation, Cuevas rented an office on the 14th floor of the tallest
skyscraper in Mexico City. From this local 1950s modernist icon, Cuevas designed a website that is part of the
"irational.org" group, which also has contributors in England and Spain, (33) and set out to establish a whole
range of products and services to be given away for free on request and with no obligation to reciprocate.
MVC's catalogue is a small compilation of contemporary dreams and antidotes to frustration. Cuevas leaves
random "magic" seeds (very much in the tradition of Ben Vautier's unlabelled cans of "mystery food") next to
ATMs, suggesting to the customer an agrarian turn to make money. She has tested people's reaction to
unexplained gifts by giving away subway tickets at rush hour in the Mexico City underground, saving travelers
the long morning queues. On occasion she has discreetly volunteered to clean public buildings (including
subway stations), to write letters for the illiterate, or to support small campaigns through disinterested
voluntary work. Some of MVC's products reflect the fears of the population, for instance providing tear gas for
personal protection, or promising to provide security services to the population by applying (so far
unsuccessfully) to join the police corporations in Mexico. Other products are more related to wishful thinking
in general: MVC does not distribute money as such, but it can provide the customer with lottery tickets.
Cuevas has made galleries such as Chantal Croussel in Paris extend letters of recommendation to people
who might need them to apply for a job. Finally, there are those services which, despite seeming rather
simple and cheap parasites of public or private services, entail quasicriminal activity: MVC distributes
prestamped envelopes, accepting full responsibility for their contents. Cuevas produces customized, trompe
l'oeil bar code stickers (or "trompe l'scanner" as the artist says) to reduce prices of articles in the
supermarket. So far the most successful and iconic of the MVC projects has involved the issuance of student
ID cards that allow one to get the international student identity card and apply for discounts.
An experience like MVC might be analyzed in several ways, from discussing its importance in terms of the gift
economy and the anticapitalist hopes postmodernity attributed to symbolic exchange, to an analysis of the
construction of corporative identity. This singlewoman charitable company somehow plays a double role: on
the one hand, it provides a service, based on goodwill, that momentarily brings aid or relief, or at least seems
to provide it. But as any anthropologist would understand, this form of micropotlach also implies an
acquisition of prestige, power and rank that mocks a structure of clientelism. (34) Mejor Vida Corp. evidently
copies the contemporary structure of the transnational corporation, but radically inverting its economic
rationale. The office, web page, distribution, packaging, and public relations of the corporation have so far
been entirely performed by Cuevas alone, who is increasingly forced to perform eight to ten hours of work a
day in order to keep demand more or less under control. Part of the conceptual structure of the project is, in
fact, to deal with the necessary bureaucratization and productivity crisis of the corporation. Since MVC can't
by definition grow, its success is at the same time its decadence. The more customers the company draws,
the more likely it will be to end up leaving them unsatisfied and, eventually, even close down. Working on the
basis of one person's budget, donations from members of the public, or institutions that might want to
endorse it, MVC's economies are always leading to builtin bankruptcy. Anti capitalist in spirit, the corporation
is a test tube in which to examine the plausibility of non capitalist interpersonal relationships. For the artist, a
certain exchange is involved in the whole of MVC's operations: she spends money and time fulfilling people's
needs, but her "customers" "pay" her back with the questions and commentary. (35)
In part, MVC suggests an active critique of the current Left, the paucity
of its discourse and its inability to transform people's lives. MVC
substitutes for a missing form of activism: it directly participated in the
antiWTO demonstrations in Mexico City on June 18, 1999, and
through the creation of a website about the Playa del Carmen beach
has tried to develop an awareness among travelers of the ecological
and social consequences of the expansion of tourism to the third world.
More recently, MVC has launched two witty antiadvertising campaigns focused on the invisibility of poverty.
One parodies the Mexican lottery "Melate" ads to publicize the fact that 40 million Mexicans live under the
poverty line, and the second, based on the advertisement for the year 2000 census, explains that homeless
people "do not count" in national statistics.
Cuevas herself frequently insists that MVC has no ideological leanings, and that its activities, despite being
focused on issues of equality and freedom, are set apart not only from political parties, but also from left or
rightwing traditions. This postpolitical status is in part a result of its corporative identity, but is also related to
the fact that MVC actions do not question political parties or call for social mobilization. In a way, MVC adopts
an administrative attitude toward its work. The causes MVC endorses are too generally recognized to suggest
any particular political affiliation. Nonetheless it is clear that the corporation's refusal of monetary
relationships and profit does in fact entail a postleftist preoccupation. MVC's radicalism consists of testing
noncapitalist forms of human interaction rather than becoming the mouthpiece of established ideologies.
Sierra's, Alÿs's and Cuevas's strategies of interference with the social body are paradigmatic of the way new
political forms are emerging in the hotspots of the globalized margins. The obsolescence of the old fashioned
concept of politically affiliated art opens new aesthetic possibilities of repolitization, now in terms of an active
form of social speculation. Nonetheless, MVC's profile as an economy of promises also suggests the
mourning for a local political history. This company of monetary losses and critical gadgets seems quite
logical in a context like Mexico, not only because of the immense need that poverty and underdevelopment
imply, but also because of the ideological importance that apparent generous gestures has for the image of
the state. This is a country where, among other things, constitutional law includes the promise of good health,
and where presidential tours are awaited with the same sense of expectation that children attribute to the
visits of Santa. The Mexican state was characterized by a combination of the arbitrariness of its services, the
routine exercise of politically motivated charity and its paternalistic halo of miraclemaking. When global
capitalism and the advance of electoral democracy is about to erase the last remnants of the old paternalistic
state, MVC somehow has built a dialectical image of it. This is a corporation that recuperates the hopes of a
population that has been equally betrayed by the promises of the former social structure of political clientelism
and the untenable dreams of worldclass development. Despite its mocking of corporate culture, and the
radical and anarchist leanings of its creator, one can credit MVC with having replicated the unconscious
structure of this fake version of the welfare state. Cuevas's work, in that sense, is a timely counter monument
for a cunning postrevolutionary populist regime that seems on the way to vanishing entirely, eroded by the
democratic struggles of its population and the unstoppable advance of global capitalism.
33 http://www.irational.org/mvc.
34 "To give is to show one's superiority, to be more, to be higher in rank, magister. To accept without giving in
return, or without giving more back, is to become client and servant..." Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The form and
reason for exchange in archaic societies, trans. W.D. Hals, New York and London, W. W. Norton, 1990, p. 74.
35 This was the economic rationale of the project that Cuevas herself described during a lecture at the Museo
Tamayo on Tuesday, July 11, 2000.
Cuauhtémoc Medina is an art critic, curator and art historian in Mexico City, where he cocurated Five
Continents and One City