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This could be the most difficult review that I shall ever write—not because the art is all that hard to explain, but because it is so painful to try. To describe a performance by Carlos Martiel is to relive the terror, disgust, and shame that he hopes to produce. I can only imagine the pain for him, at El Museo del Barrio.

Not that he is present in performance at a survey of twenty years of work apart from photographs, occasional video on small screens, and titles that are painful enough in themselves through September 1. It is still his “Cuerpo,” or body. Is it good or bad if he causes you to turn away?

Martiel is, somehow, still going in a line of performance art that includes Chris Burden, who dragged himself across broken glass, and Pope.L, who crawled the twenty-two miles of Broadway in New York. Not for nothing did ExitArt, the former nonprofit, call a group show “Endurance.” Still, their work can come across as a stunt, and Martiel is all the more vulnerable at thirty-five in remaining stock still. In that he is an heir to Yoko Ono, with Cut Piece, but the scissors that cut away her clothing never touch her for all their threat. He may be closer yet to Marina Abramovic, impassive and unmoving on a gallery shelf. Her work, though, is one long ego trip, while he harps on, let us say, serious matters.

Born in Havana, Martiel may come closest of all to another Cuban artist, Juan Francisco Elso—and I work this together with my earlier report on him as a longer review and my latest upload. A retrospective of Elso at the museum last year gave pride of place to Por América, a man in wood pierced by arrowheads many times over, like Saint Sebastian. And still the sculpture, modeled after José Martí, the Cuban revolutionary, wields a machete. His near namesake, too, fights back, but with his body on the line. Martiel has no time for epic heroes, the first Christian martyr, or fine art. He is a gay Cuban American in the real world, now.

I have put off saying more as long as I could. This is his body and his show, although Por América could make a fine alternative title. In its very first work, not arrows but a flagpole pierces his skin, leaving the Stars and Stripes to drape from his chest. He has become a human flagpole, the very symbol of America, but an America that will never acknowledge him. Another flag hangs from above, with the red and blue turned to black and the white stained with blood. Let the blood be on your hands.

At the very least, it is all over his feet. They appear coarse and discolored in another performance. Blood is fresher still in another photo, where he holds a creature to his chest like a child or a pet. He might comforting it or taking comfort from it, but the seeming animal is only a loose collection of vital organs. It could make anyone who stares too long a vegetarian. What, though, does it say about gender, America, or him?

That can be a problem. Martiel can seem a one-note artist, and the note can ring all too clearly or hardly at all. He can also turn you away.That can be a strength, too, and critics must have brought the same complaints to Burden long ago. Martiel addresses Cuba’s repressive state honestly as well. He pins three of its medals directly to his chest—medals awarded to his father before him.

Still, it can fail. At his best, performance engages the viewer, daring one to turn away. He stands on a block in the Guggenheim’s rotunda, hands cuffed behind his back, like a slave at auction. He asks only for recognition, as a step toward freedom. In the show’s title work, he relies on others to save his life, with his neck in a noose as in a lynching waiting for him to fall. It is safe to say that enough people came through.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

Amalia Mesa-Bains has been collecting fragments of a life for decades now, and the lives in her art go back deeper still. “Archaeology of Memory” is at once a career retrospective, a family history, and a great tradition. These are both personal and collective memories, and at age eighty she is still digging.

The concluding work at El Museo del Barrio, through August 11, is no more than a circle of chairs, laden with shiny fragments. It is her Circle of Ancestors, but she leaves it to you to imagine them as people. The tchotchkes would make for uncomfortable seating for anyone. The circle facing inward, toward candles on the floor, could assert her place or exclude her—just as, she implies, the art scene and the United States have turned their backs on Mexican American women like her. She claims the memories as hers all the same. For so obsessive a collector, the claim will always be a work in progress.

Mesa-Bains lived and worked through the heyday of the “Pictures generation” and critical theory, and her show’s title plays on The Archaeology of Knowledge, by Michel Foucault. He sees knowledge itself as a means of dominance, but does she? Well, yes and no. El Museo del Barrio sticks to work from the last thirty years, much of it from the 1990s, including the four “chapters” of Venus Envy brought at last together. It is by no means satisfied with penis envy, but by no means triumphant. This is the territory of Queen of the Waters, Mother of the Land of the Dead.

The chapters start with First Holy Communion, Moments Before the End, and surely, some might say, the Catholic church is as repressive an institution as any. A life-size doll lies beneath its blanket as if dead. Maybe so, but display cases contain flower petals, family snapshots, lace dresses, and white curtains along with saints. The installation also has a dressing-room table, for more of a girl’s or a woman’s world. Later a “great green monster,” the proverbial earth mother reduced to wallowing in earth, has a hand-held mirror, too. For Mesa-Bains, parodies and protests are never easy to distinguish from models and memories.

The next chapter comes to a proper library, a fine-wood table laden with the Bible, a skull, a compass, and a globe. It belongs to Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, a seventeenth-century scholar, proto-feminist, and nun. It is just one of the chapter’s “enclosures,” including a harem along with A Virgin’s Garden, adapted from illuminated manuscripts. Apparently the artist can claim the Enlightenment and the Renaissance as her own, too. The final chapter, The Road to Paris and Its Aftermath, has a large photo of the Arc de Triomphe draped in electric colors. Mesa-Bains can claim the city of the Mona Lisa, Gertrude Stein, and Modernism as well.

Just a year ago at the museum, her sphere seemed more modest. She was at the center of a show of “Domesticanx” and domesticity, including younger artists (and I leave a proper report to my review then). Even now, she conceives of her installations as altares, or home altars, and ofrendas, or domestic offerings to the dead. Yet her claims here cover a lot of ground, and so do her memories. The solo exhibition could serve as a model for other museums, returning to one exhibition to add context and depth. It need not leave the past behind.

Mesa-Bains still treats personal and collective memories as one thing. As a guard said when I asked where to begin, anywhere, because it is all “a thing,” and he was right. The remaining chapter centers on codices, or ancient manuscripts, and botanical texts from the past, both overlaid with snapshots and paints. It does so, she says, because she loves them, but they have a personal meaning as well. She worked on them while recovering from a near-fatal accident. Her faith in herbal healing is sentimental as can be, like so much of her art, but the pipettes and vials are evocative all the same.

As another title has it, these are Private Landscapes and Public Territories. One last work could never be hers along. It turns to the border with Mexico for What the River Gave Me. Growing up in California as the child of illegal immigrants, she could not have known it as an obstacle or seen it shine, but no matter. The water becomes half globes of blown glass, set on a bed of shattered glass between banks of vaguely humanoid brown earth. Let it shine.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.