LACMA

animated the circuit of exchange within art's economy: producing, selling/giving, receiving, and collecting. In this case, the transactions surprisingly benefited all parties. More poignantly, the dynamics of I ♥ CUBA linked Diaz's interests in social activism and cultural tourism; as he recounts, "the locals…practice[ed] free enterprise within a communist state and creat[ed] a temporary but welcomed means of generating income." Diaz's most recent series, Miracle Cans (2007–8), explores the ethic of intracommunity support. He constructed five metal sculptures, each based on the concept of "donation cans," which can be found in working-class Mexican American communities as a form of seeking public assistance. Typically, the donations placed in the small cans help defray the cost of various needs, such as travel, funerals, and beauty pageants. Diaz's portable Miracle Cans stand four to five feet high and are collaged with various materials, such as enlarged photo- graphs and handwritten texts. Mixing socially conscious public interventions, neo-pop sculptures, and rasquachismo (a working-class aesthetic of reconfiguring dominant cultural forms and norms for pleasure and/or resistance), these hyperbolic gestures serve as an unambiguous reminder of the importance of caring for another. Yet Diaz's work is never heavy-handed. As viewers read the texts, they encounter absurdity, tragedy, and, as he notes, "a sense of bittersweet humor and rural southern Texas flair." —MARIO ONTIVEROS From gallons of milk poured over Mexican floor tiles to handpainted cardboard signs distributed on Fifth Avenue, the range of Alejandro Diaz's formal and conceptual approaches, along with their temporality, lures viewers into examining the aesthetic textures of everyday life, its social and political history, and the economy of art. They also enact the concept of mestizaje—the mixing and fusing of cultural forms, styles, and processes. For instance, Edelweiss (1988) involved the process of spilling milk onto tiled floor, which had to be mopped up and repoured daily. The work's title is recognizable as a song from The Sound of Music, yet Diaz borrowed it to reference not the musical or World War II, but the experience of his family relocating to the United States in 1910. His great-aunt, he recalls, "compared fleeing Mexico as a young girl during the [Mexican] revolution to the movie . . .when the Von Trapp family flees Austria." The spilt milk "evokes situational haste—the spilling of things, [the] accidents that occur when leaving things and places behind in a hurry." Art historically, it also refers to abstract expressionist painting, but here combined with the decorative patterns of the Mexican tiles, making Edelweiss a hybrid of two traditions. In recent work, Diaz turned to performance as a vehicle for making art more accessible. In 2003, he began Breakfast Tacos at Tiffany's, in which he stood out front of the Tiffany & Co. store on Fifth Avenue in New York, creating, selling, and giving away his work to those passing on the street. (Similar performances took place elsewhere in the city.) The work's physical manifestations took the form of handpainted cardboard signs replete with whimsical, often oblique, bitingly humorous statements about social relations and commodity culture: "Make Tacos Not War" and "In the Future Everyone will be famous for $15.00." Setting up a commercial exhibition/viewing space on Fifth Avenue playfully and politically highlights the tensions between the position of art as a commodity, art as a form of social interaction and communication, and art as gift. Of course, art as social exchange can be repurposed. For Diaz's public project for the Eighth Havana Biennial in 2003, he produced two thousand souvenir items— pens, postcards, tote bags, and beach balls, each adorned with the slogan I ♥ CUBA. Given to the local Cuban community of old Havana, the items were subsequently and unexpectedly sold as souvenirs to the arriving biennial attendees. The souvenirs 136 ALEJANDRO DIAZ

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