Rambo, 2001, video 17 minutes. Courtesy of the artist.
Rambo, 2001, video 17 minutes. Courtesy of the artist.
Rambo, 2001, video 17 minutes. Courtesy of the artist.
Artemio Narro has referred to himself as the “Rolls Royce” of contemporary Mexican art. A founding member of the alternative art space La Panadería, Narro is part of a generation of Mexican artists who rose to prominence in the mid-1990s with conceptually razor-sharp yet lighthearted experiments in video, installation, and performance.
His 2001 cut of the Hollywood blockbuster Rambo is a legendary work of this period. Applying a disarmingly simple technique, Narro re-edited the film to remove all depictions of violence, painting an entirely different picture of the reluctant super-soldier played by Sylvester Stallone. In the original movie, the hero’s exquisite military training makes him a human weapon, but his trauma from war fills him with resentment and guilt. Narro’s edit leaves an extremely short and discontinuous film depicting Rambo only at moments in between conflict, where he might reflect for a moment, or hesitate, dress his wounds or climb through the forest with no apparent purpose, like a child exploring. Methodically precise and bizarrely funny, the work reflects other Narro re-edits, including his transformation of Disney’s Bambi. He removed all traces of trauma, death, abandonment, and fire from all the videocassettes of the animated film he could find in Mexico City before returning the edited tapes to circulation.
More broadly, Narro’s approach to recorded and mass-produced media forces an unexpected reflection on the political, comic, and sometimes spiritual relations between what is seen and what isn’t, between what is delivered automatically to our senses and what is deliberately withdrawn from visibility.
