"Do It Yourself" Does Empathy Well

“Do It Yourself,” Damián Ortega’s new exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art, is so densely packed that at first its full scale can be difficult to grasp. Between the disassembled and suspended 1989 Volkswagen Beetle, the revolving tower of oil barrels, and the clump of leather ribbons hanging from the ceiling by meat hooks, every one of these larger than life installation pieces seems to be wrestling for attention.

Although Damián Ortega now lives in Berlin, Germany, his roots in Mexico City remain a strong influence on his work. On a cultural basis, his work mirrors developing societies, often drawing from his birthplace. This interest is evident in “Do It Yourself,” which opened last Friday at the ICA and will run until January 18.

Ortega’s background as a political cartoonist is pervasive in his art. The pieces he creates have a distinctively dark humor about them and are often a metaphor for society, especially society in Latin America. This is made manifest in the two collections of photographs that comprise the pieces “Resting Matter (Mexico)” and “Resting Matter (Brazil).” These photographs depict bricks stacked outside houses for possible future renovations or extensions, a common custom in these two countries. The bricks seem to be the concrete representation of a family’s hopes and dreams, and as a compilation of images they form the hopes and dreams of a country as well.

Another piece, “Cosmic Thing,” created in 2002, is made up of a 1989 Volkswagen Beetle dismantled down to its individual parts and hung by metal wire from the ceiling. The pieces are organized to form a 3-D model of the car that looks as if it has leapt off the page of a mechanic’s instruction manual. Every detail is its own entity; the horn hangs in space separated by a few inches from the floating steering wheel, and even the wipers are similarly detached from the windscreen. Despite this distancing, the relationship to the complete subject is not lost, but is in fact amplified.

Ortega chose the Volkswagen Beetle because it is the quintessential Mexican car. Produced natively, it is the vehicle of choice for taxis, as well as the artist, who once drove the same model himself. Taken apart, the Beetle is not diminished but transformed from a functional vehicle into a creative masterpiece that forces us to simultaneously observe the world around us on both a micro and macro scale.

This desire to explore the relationship between objects and ourselves is reflected again in the piece “120 Days.” After reading an article by a market analyst that partially attributed the success of Coca-Cola to the way its original glass bottles mimicked the shape of a woman’s body, Ortega set out to explore the various forms a uniform glass bottle can take. Working from the initial idea of the bottle representing sexuality, Ortega plays with variations of embracing bottles, personifying the objects in the act of lovemaking. He branches out in his experimentation of form to create an array of bottles that have embellishments, multiple colors, modified shapes, or all three. Each bottle is striking in its own way and, placed together on a long white table, they mirror each other and come together as a metaphor for diversity in society.

All these pieces make “Do It Yourself” a bit overwhelming at first; each piece has such a complexity to its composition, with the possibility of being interpreted on many different levels. The political and cultural inspiration for the work are helpful for deciphering the monumental exhibition, although it is not necessary to have this background in order to appreciate the art. Foreknowledge or none, Ortega’s pieces are deeply self-reflective and display a striking understanding of human nature. Amidst all the larger than life installations, it is this empathy that shines through most clearly.