Munro: Artist sees art as collective experience

In his travels to Cuba, he experienced the realities of communism. After researching liberation movements in the Philippines and India, he found himself intrigued by the Zapatistas, a movement he says isn't "anti-anything."

He moved to San Cristobal in 2009, fresh out of graduate school. He'd met Rollow, a fellow grad student, about six months after she was paralyzed with a spinal cord injury in an accident. She followed him to Mexico.

After Linda Cano, the Fresno Art Museum director, asked him to create a work for "Breakthrough," Duarte decided on a performance art piece. He and Rollow had been spending time in El Ambo Bajo, gaining the trust of the villagers. The artists decided to ask the villagers to bury them in a spontaneous ceremony.

Rollow crawled from her wheelchair to a clearing where the burial took place. Duarte came next. He let the villagers decide how to bury him and for how long. After about 15 minute of solemn silence, the villagers decided it was time to end the performance.

The challenge was how to translate that experience to a museum setting.

For Duarte, this is art that's meant to make you think -- and perhaps make you uncomfortable. He considers Rollow and himself as representing the "colonizers" in the context of the Zapatista movement. It gets more specific: The work reflects an unsustainable American system that relies too heavily on immigrant labor. "I wanted to show the body in resistance against architectural tensions as a reflection to a breaking point that society will have to soon confront," he says

Indeed, there's an unsettling quality to the museum installation. My first thoughts upon seeing the slab sticking out from the wall with the man in the hole were of confinement and inertia. I thought of "Happy Days," the existential play by Samuel Beckett in which a woman is buried in a mound of earth and stays that way throughout.

Fascinating, too, is the theme of unsustainability touched upon by Duarte. Just last week, The Bee ran an article on the shortage of farm laborers from Mexico, in part because so many sons and daughters of those laborers have decided to pursue other opportunities -- just as Duarte has done.

As he speaks, his voice never rises from its soft, even keel. But the passion is there. You can feel it.

"I was really thinking the segregation and the fear that exists between different immigrant cultures," he says of his work. "There's a lot of rich diversity here, but you don't really experience it much. I have a very strong sense of a segregated society in Fresno. I don't know if it was planned like that, or people just moved into their comfort zones."

Yes, it might shake people a little to consider such themes, he acknowledges. But then again, that's what his idea of art is all about.

"Art is something that's happening now, within the community, within society," he says. "It's not something that comes from an individual mind but something that moves through culture."

IF YOU GO

“Breakthrough,” through April 28, Fresno Art Museum, 2233 N. First St. fresnoartmuseum.org, (559) 441-4221. $5