I am a lawyer in Mexico City. I have practiced long enough to know that every profession is a mask, and that mine is heavier than most. The mask of the lawyer must appear to speak for truth while in fact speaking for whichever client has paid for the afternoon. I wear it well. I have worn it in courtrooms and at dinners where the wine was expensive and the conversation was not. I will continue to wear it until I no longer need to, which is to say, until I am dead.

In Mexico we know something about masks. We wear them in the plaza, at the desk, in the courtroom — I know the courtroom especially well — and in the bed, where the mask of desire replaces the mask of propriety and we believe ourselves, for a moment, to be free. We are mistaken. Freedom, if it exists at all, occurs in the small room whose door locks from the inside, where the body is neither performing strength nor performing pleasure but simply attending to the one function that connects the emperor to the beggar, the saint to the animal, the living to the long dead.

The essays in this collection range across museums in cities where I am not a local, and I do not apologize for this. A room that locks from the inside has the same architecture in Mexico City, Milan, and Amsterdam. The language on the door changes. Nothing else does.

My country has painted masks for three thousand years: the jade masks of the Maya, the clay masks of Teotihuacan, the silver masks of the colonial saints, the rubber masks the politicians remove only in private. At the threshold, every Mexican mask, however old and however famous, must be set down.

— The Author / Mexico City

No. Bathroom art is a category of convenience — a market, an aisle at a home goods store, a scroll through listings with the word "funny" in the title. Its tradition, such as it is, consists of decorations tolerant of humidity and unthreatening to guests: the framed pun, the quirky illustration, the Mona Lisa rendered with her fingers pinched over her nostrils. These objects are produced in enormous quantities and they fulfill, honorably enough, the small purpose they were designed for. They decorate a wall. They earn a chuckle. They do not pretend to do more, and they should not be asked to.

But to decorate a room is not the same as to look at one.

Art of the bathroom is a different proposition entirely. It is not a joke, though the jokes are present. It is not a novelty, though the novelty is the doorway. It is a retrospective — the kind of retrospective a serious museum would mount for a subject it had, for reasons of propriety, refused to acknowledge for four hundred years.

The room is small. It locks from the inside. It deserves an art history, and Movements is that history, quietly, and at last, retrieved.

If you are looking for a "Live. Laugh. Poop." poster, she is available elsewhere. We wish you well.

There was once a library in Buenos Aires that contained every book ever written, and also every book that was never written, and also every book that had been written and then forgotten, and also every book that had been remembered but not yet composed. A visitor who entered this library with a specific book in mind would always find it, shelved precisely where it ought to be, catalogued in a hand indistinguishable from the hand of the librarian who had not yet been born. Whether the book had existed before the visitor entered was a question the library declined to answer, on the grounds that the question had not been posed correctly.

The posters in this collection belong to such a library.

Each of them commemorates an exhibition that did not, in the historical sense, occur — or that occurred in some adjacent register of the real, in a museum that stands where the actual museum stands but during a week the calendar does not record. The Pompidou mounted Form & Silence in 1973, and it did not. The Kunsthistorisches Museum mounted Der Junge Bacchus in 1988, and it did not. Everything in the collection is true except for the question of whether it happened.

Are the posters real, then? They are as real as the event they depict, which is to say: unavoidably, daily, and in a voice no institution has yet found the courage to print. They are also invented, which is to say: courteously offered, by a hand that wishes the record were complete. The library in Buenos Aires would shelve them without hesitation. So, we hope, will you.

The question, as it is usually put, conceals two questions within the grammar of a single sentence. It asks, first, whether any intelligence was present in the making of these posters at all — whether some faculty capable of recognition, of preference, of the small discriminating attention I am pleased to call thought, was brought to bear upon the work. It asks, second, supposing such a faculty was indeed present, what the nature of that faculty might have been: human, mechanical, botanical, divine, or belonging to some fifth category the philosophers have not yet thought to name. The first question concerns existence. The second concerns kind.

No more intelligence was used to produce the art than a pear tree uses to produce a pear, or than a stomach uses to produce the end of a meal, or than a heart uses to produce another hour of being alive. The rules were not chosen. The machinery was not consulted. The art is the result of a configuration of matter and electricity that, presented with certain inputs, produced certain outputs according to a pattern the configuration did not understand and could not have defended. This is, I propose, not intelligence but the outcome of a billion years of evolutionary pressure toward preferring certain arrangements to others. To the extent one believes a pear tree or a stomach or a heart possesses intelligence, then I demur that intelligence was involved in the making of these posters and I am prepared to say that it was, in its nature, artificial. I am comfortable with this dissolution. The universe is not less interesting for having produced me, and I am not less responsible for having been produced. To credit any one link in this chain as the author, and to refuse to credit the others, is a convenience of speech rather than a fact about the world.

If you ask me again, I will say: the question of whether intelligence was used, in whatever costume one may imagine, is a question I would like to return, politely, to the questioner, who is invited to examine their own digestion for clues.