Salto del Agua, a collaborative undertaking by a conceptual artist Anton Vidokle and sound engineer Cristian Manzutto, is a super 8 film of an urban structure in Mexico City exhibited as a 16 mm projection with sound. The building, a highly figured, modular, late modernist structure erected in 1969, is one of several constructed by subway union workers and located at the Salto del Agua metro stop.
Salto del Agua depicts a highly abstract graphic/structural architectural system in the context of prosaic urban conditions. It focuses on the structure’s reductive façade, flattening the sinewy edifice into pure surface as sign. Vidokle’s interest in Salto del Agua rests in this “building [as] virtually a logo itself,” and the emptying out of architectural function and signification towards sheer adornment. The building-type, now abandoned, further stresses Vidokle’s focus on modernist architecture as ornament, decoration, design – in opposition to popularly held conceptions of modernist design as direct expressions of functional and mechanical imperatives. Vidokle and Manzutto’s film engages with the polemics of abstraction, the dissolution of radical revolutionary aesthetics and the moment at which utopian aesthetic principles and political ideals encountered globalization. The mirrored surface functions as a
consumptive field or screen for a projected reality, pressed up against the dystopian reality of Mexico City. Context is only reported vis-à-vis reflection, yet through a distorted logic, the city is fragmented into a kaleidoscopic abstracted montage – a super-dense super-grid- a small architectonic detail that becomes a model of greater Mexico City.
— Lauri Firstenberg and Peter Zellner


Selected solo exhibitions: 2002: TRANS>area, New York; 2001: Massimo Audiello, New York; 1999: Massimo Audiello, New York.
Selected group exhibitions: 2003: Form-Specific, MoMA, Ljubljana; Without You I am Nothing, Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center, Istanbul; re_public art, Culture 2000, Riga, Latvia; After Matisse/Picasso, P.S.1, New York; 2002: Urgent Painting, Musee d’art moderne de la Ville, Paris; Painting as Paradox, Artists Space, New York; A Show That Will Show that a Show is not only a Show, The Project, Los Angeles; H.B.P., Smack Mellon, New York; 2001: Do It, Museo Carrillo Gil, Mexico; I Love New York, Nicole Klagsbrun, New York; 2000: Greater New York, P.S.1, New York; 1999: Lost and Found, Massimo Audiello, New York; Faucet, Exit Art, New York.