Curated by Michel Blanscubé, Historias de A. consists of works by eleven artists culled from the Jumex collection and exhibited in the colonial structure of the Museo Amparo in the city of Puebla. Citing a dizzying amount of sources and references, the exhibition feels like it was pulled together from various spastic whims. Historias de A. receives its namesake from the grim love song “Les Histoires d’A” by the 1980s French rock band Les Rita Mitsouko, which recycles the same story of love always ending in loss. However, the exhibition’s references to John Dewey, Jean de la Fontaine and the novel I Am a Cat by Natsume Soseki—as well as the slightest of references to a Baudelairian sensibility—lead to a scattered curatorial premise. Compounded by Blanscubé’s avowed penchant for and interest in “storytelling,” which adds yet another dialogue, the entire exhibition goes in too many separate directions. According to Blanscubé’s curatorial statement, Historias de A. is about the stories of Animals, of Art, and/or of Artists converging into a predator-and-prey cycle that repeats endlessly; in other words, it’s as simple as the stories of animals generally ending as badly as the stories of love.

All that being said, the physical exhibition could not hold its own from this confusing conundrum of rhetoric and sources. Instead of exploring how artists tell narratives using animals, plain and simple, the exhibition offers a dizzying array of source materials, most of which only tangentially reflect on the artworks that should be the exhibition’s focus.

Still, the work comprising the exhibition is incredibly strong, and viewers can still have a valid and compelling experience. Composed of mixed media, site-specific work and video installations by both emerging and established artists, the exhibition gives each artist their own room in a vignette-style arrangement. The lack of transition between galleries is often jarring, particularly without proper lighting or didactic materials as guides. Additionally, the museum blasts the sound on the videos at high volume and creates a sonic bleeding effect between galleries.

The stand-out piece within the exhibition is Marcos Castro’s Ouroboro (2009), an installation consisting of five ink and watercolor drawings which then appear in a simple stop animation video. The video appears large scale, next to a smaller projection of the same video. The video animation shows a tranquil deer prancing through a forest rendered in black and white. The deer encounters a wolf, which promptly pounces on the deer and eats it whole. The wolf proceeds to run along the same path as the deer, in the same forest, until it stops suddenly and collapses on the ground, at almost the exact moment that a deer tears through the wolf’s skin, proceeding to prance forward as it did before. The video is a continuous fourteen-minute loop of the deer/wolf cycle as the two animals eat and tear through one another. With his reference to the Greek Ouroboros—a mythical serpent or dragon eating its own tail—Castro’s Ouroboro is perhaps the most effective at representing Blanscubé’s curatorial reliance on textual sources and poetic metaphor.

From Ouroboro the viewer walks into a hallway and encounters Untitled (Rat and Bear, Sleeping) (2008/2009) by Peter Fischli and David Weiss. The installation of a stuffed panda bear and sewer rat lies apathetically on the floor as if an afterthought. One has to do a double-take to see that the stuffed animals are animated, their chests moving subtly and quietly. They are presumably sleeping deeply, and appearing immediately after Ouroboro their slumber implies death even as each continues to ‘breathe’ in sleeping. The sculptures are extracted from films produced by the artist duo in the 1980s in which Rat and Bear are two protagonists and friends that engage in a series of shenanigans and get-rich-quick schemes, and are generally unsuccessful due to their own human-like vices. Nearly thirty years later Rat and Bear appear completely removed from their original context. Within the exhibition’s curatorial framework they function as a conventional sculpture devoid of any statement in particular. Yet both Rat and Bear and Ouroboro serve as the strongest works in the exhibition. In dialogue with one another, each work evokes narratives of the animal world’s life cycles that Blanscubé attempts to explore. But within the exhibition’s welter of sources and curatorial frameworks, this isn’t a reading easy to come by.

Historias de A. proves to be a difficult exhibition for many reasons, as the convoluted curatorial agenda asks viewers to decipher how each work relates to the others on a deeper conceptual level. It reminds of a jigsaw puzzle, but one with twenty different sources. Thankfully, the exhibition is saved by a handful of beautiful and poetic moments, and many can appreciate the show as a series of well-conceived works by extremely talented artists.

Historias de A. will be on view at the Museo Amparo until September 26th, 2011.  More information can be found on the museum's website:  http://www.museoamparo.com/