Performative Bodies and Artists/Spectators: The Case of Radical Latina and Latin American Women Artists in Exhibition
Cecilia Fajardo-Hill
My body
zen-ses you
Cecilia Vicuña, March 19711
In the fall of 2017, the exhibition Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985 premiered at the Hammer Museum. Organized under the Getty initiative, Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, the exhibition also traveled to the Brooklyn Museum in April of that year and to Pinacoteca in Sao Paulo in 2018.2 Two-thirds of the 126 artists in the exhibition dealt with performance or body art in one form or another. The central thesis of the exhibition was that during the period between 1960 and 1987, Latin American and Latina women had contributed some of the most powerful foundations of experimental languages for contemporary art, by placing the body at the center of their art. As co-curators—Andrea Giunta and myself—we conceptualized this body as a “Political Body,” a radical, expansive, conceptual, contingent, and specific body, which could, on the one hand, resist and question the widespread violence of the period (both political and toward women, as well as the established political, social, and artistic structures), while on the other hand, situate, imagine, and experience an embodied present and future.
In order to discern how performance by radical women may be understood historically during the 1960s and 1970s, it is important to know that in Latin America, with the exception of Mexico, artists during this period did not define themselves as feminist artists, even if, in retrospect, their work may be seen as functioning this way, and secondly, that many artists did not use the term “performance” to describe their body art practices. Instead, artists used terms such as acción plástica (plastic action), arte acción (action art), arte corporal (body art), acción colectiva (collective act), arte no objetual (non-object-based art), and arte vivo (live art). The reasons for rejecting the English terminology and the feminist label were rooted in the left-leaning and anti-colonial position toward Eurocentric culture (seen as imperialist and bourgeois), as well as because the term “performance” did not circumscribe to their specific forms of body art. One of the arguments of this text is that the political body in performance is rebellious to any institutionalization, and thus, at times, subverts established norms of performance and feminism. Nevertheless, the work by radical women is often read as feminist, and their body art is described as performance; therefore, we need to be cautious in understanding that both terms carry different nuances in their original historical and geographical context of production and reception3. In this chapter, we will thus address the concept of the political body in performance as it relates to radical women artists in Latin America and Latina artists between 1960 and 1985, and how this political body engenders a spatial performativity, an embodied experience for the spectator, and also, a form of performative curating.
Transfeminist performance artist and scholar Julia Antivilio (Chile, b. 1974) argues from a feminist perspective that the 1970s feminist premise, “the personal is political,” was transformed by Latin American feminist artists into “the body is political,” because it articulates their experiences visually and viscerally, placing the body literally in a political position (Antivilio 2015: 40). She writes: “the feminist artists have inscribed on their bodies the textual performativity of their discourses. [. . .] Body art offers the possibility that the actual body of the artists in action, erase or reverse the frontiers of presentation and representation, questioning the definitions, the uses and the stigmas that the gender system has imposed on the body.” Performance is therefore “a political act done by the body” (Antivilio 2015: 40).4 The political body, described as feminist or not, is an investigative and epistemological space of resistance to violence, marginalization, and patriarchalism. It is a body that reconceptualizes and reimagines the female body, its role and possibilities. As performance scholar Amelia Jones aptly explains: “body art does not strive toward a utopian redemption, but rather, places the body/self within the realm of the aesthetic as a political dom ain (articulated through the aestheticization of the particularized body/self, itself embedded in the social) and so unveils the hidden body that secured the authority of modernism” (Jones 1998: 13–14). The political body in performance by radical women constitutes a political and aesthetic ground for emancipation against the structures of modernity—including dictatorship and oppressive governments—that controlled and violated their body.
Artist Mónica Mayer, in her book Rosa Chillante: Mujeres y Performance en México, describes her need to speak in the first person while writing her publication. Given the absence of documentation, her book recounts the performances she experimented and saw, as well as relaying intimate conversations. In other words, her book conveys her subjective perspective. Importantly, for Mayer, performance is an art in the first person. She writes: “As the main support of action art is the body of the artist, it always has something autobiographical. Let’s not forget that performance does not pretend to represent reality, but to intervene in it with actions. In general, performance is an art in the first person and it is logical to analyze it from an analogous structure” (Mayer 2004: 6).5
It is from this position of a necessary and potential involvement in the first person that the performativity of Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985 proposed a shared and transformative experience for the public. The first person, in past, present, or future tense, of all involved, was the catalyst for the potentiality of an embodied emphatic experience, one that, though historical in nature, was actualized and relevant in the present. It is appropriate (relevant) to ask the question: How does the personal, autobiographical perspective articulated by Mayer, both by performance artists and herself as an author, imply a summoning for an intimate involvement on the side of the spectator? The response to this question is manifold but concentrates on two issues: First, resistance to institutionalization and second, the actualization of the past in the present. One key point is that their radical body art transcends and counteracts any institutionalization of their body and therefore of performance art, especially in contrast to today’s tendency to spectacularize performance. Their work offers the possibility of a personal and emotional experience beyond a learned institutionalized response to art. Many of these artists’ performances were born in contexts and with an urgency unbound by institutionality—political, social, or artistic. If the political body of radical women has the potentiality to engage and situate us in the present, it is because their creative exercises of liberation, resistance, and recontextualization of the body were born from a contingent experience of life, the same that many of us face day to day in a patriarchal society that continues to categorize and oppress us as gendered, social, and racialized beings.
In her book Hold it Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art, feminist writer, curator, and scholar Jennifer Doyle urges that “We need to allow ourselves to be moved” (2013: xvii). Doyle proposes an expanded conversation about difficulty, emotion, and identity in controversial artworks, “and how emotion circulates in and around art in flows that are directed by histories that are simultaneously personal and political” (xvii).6 The aesthetic impulse of the radical women in our exhibit did not respond to a binary or institutional concept of art or the body. After all, most had been excluded by the art institution, and their body had been subjected to violence and marginalization. A meaningful example is Peruvian Victoria Santa Cruz’ Me gritaron negra (“They shouted black at me,” 1978), a choreographed declarative piece in the first person that recounts her struggles with racism and discrimination to later embrace and affirm her blackness. The piece concludes with the artist forcefully uttering the words “¿Y qué? Soy negra!” (“So what? I am black!”) while dancing in collectivity to the rhythm of clapping hands, affirming both her personal emancipation and black culture. Until recently, this work by Santa Cruz was not considered in the context of contemporary art, or performance. Similarly, Yolanda López’s series Tableaux Vivant (1978), showing the artist with running attire and sneakers (she was a committed runner for many years) and paintbrushes in hand posing as the Virgin of Guadalupe. These photographic images were displayed by projecting them on a wall, while the public responded with insults and throwing things at her. This series pokes fun both at the stereotype of the artist as painter and at the sanctified image of the Virgin of Guadalupe as a religious and cultural symbol for Chicano people. López’s work was rejected both by her community for disrespecting one of their most important symbols and also by the wider arts community that equated her images with the very symbol of the Virgin of Guadalupe in a restrictive and stereotypical way, thereby discarding it as a radical form of photo performance.
Their body was—and continues to be—a site of political denunciation, signification, resistance, and poetics. Their art is profoundly unselfconscious and personal, offering the spectator the possibility of both self-identification and affirmation beyond the trappings of the art institution. Ultimately, it is about the body as the expansive and imaginative mediator of experience, and the exhibition the shared ground for an embodied experience of art and life that becomes a vital form of empowerment and a dialogical space for exchange.
Globally, we live in a time of reversal of human rights7 (for women, migrants, people of color, and transgender and queer people), when it is difficult to face reality, find sense, and act against the injustices and political and social turmoil that assail us every day. The body in performa nce may be the most direct and powerful form of agency in contemporary art, one to which the public may respond, be moved, interpellated, allowed to become vulnerable, and make it possible to have agency with the real world. Doyle analyzes how overtly political and transgressive work by queer, feminist, anti-racist, and migrant artists is either rejected or neutralized by declaring that “it’s only art” (2013: xvi). The affirmative acknowledgment of a difficult work as “Art” implies that it cannot transcend the boundaries of art institutionality, limiting the possibility for the body in performance to activate life and the human beyond a framed experience. Because of the urgent, undiluted, political, and unselfconscious nature of their performative work, many radical women artists were not even acknowledged as artists, their work was not seen as Art with a capital “A,” or participated in a particular historical moment either inside or outside the art world to be then marginalized and erased from historical accounts. Artists such as Luz Donoso (Chile), Rosa Navarro (Colombia), Celeida Tostes (Brazil), and Sylvia Salazar Simpson (US) are examples of artists who have been recuperated in recent times. They were either censored, marginalized, trivialized, or silenced. It is for this reason that presenting their work thirty-five or forty years later, given their unselfconscious attitude, intrinsic political urgency, and experimental aesthetics, their radicality may finally be revealed and understood in the present.8 Radical Women was an attempt at introducing the performance and body practices of Latina and Latin American artists in the canonical accounts both of the history of performance and of the history of contemporary art. In the United States, for example, the resistance to Chicana’s performance is rooted in class and race issues, as well as notions of “good taste.” For example, Patssi Valdez’ photograph Limitations beyond My Control (1975), showing an image of a glamorous Patssi against a wall, harassed by a man, speaks both of the constant police harassment she was subjected to as a Chicana in East Los Angeles, and also about her deconstruction of the stereotypical notion of Chicana as an unsophisticated maid on the other (Figure 3.11.1). For a white feminist, or the art world for that matter, Valdez’ race and class dilemmas, both determined by stifling stereotypes and social restrictions, was not a “good” or understandable subject for art.
FIGURE 3.11.1 Patssi Valdez, Limitations beyond My Control, 1975. Courtesy of the artist and the Hammer Museum.
Today, within the notion of the Global South, decolonial exercises of expansion of canonical narratives of art that exclude Latina and Chicana performance artists for example, are both urgent and necessary. Curating their work in Radical Women was an exercise in specificity as well as a dialogue with the broader international performance practices during the 1960s and 1970s, as well as the staging of a collective political body for an embodied empathy.
Cecilia Vicuña’s body of work is a key example to illustrate this point (Figure 3.11.2). Vicuña, a poet and multidisciplinary artist from Chile born in 1948, pioneered a unique form of performative erotic poetry and performance actions in the 1960s, which included site-specific ephemeral sculpture in landscape such as the Precarios,9 from 1966 to the present. In her introduction to the 2013 edition of Cecilia Vicuña’s book of poems El Zen Surado, 1965–1972, contemporary Latin American literature and culture scholar Juliet Lynd explains how the poems in this book were not understood in the early 1970s given their erotic nature, and were either dismissed or censored. Celebrating sensuality, sexual pleasure, and the female body was at the time not considered a political gesture, particularly in the context of the revolutionary government of Salvador Allende (1970–3),10 to which Vicuña was profoundly committed. For Vicuña, her erotic poetry was part of the political revolution. She often wrote naked with open legs, letting the rays of the sun penetrate her body. Writing her poetry or creating her Precarios was an expression of both a feminine, ancestral (indigenous), and political form of art that was embedded in life and the female body. This may be further illustrated in her New Erotic Designs for Furniture (1972); to position the naked body for the embodied enjoyment of erotic poetry. Conventionally, furniture determines a normative behavior, instead here the artist proposes a performative experience of her erotic poems. By directing the reader both to get naked and to free the body in a sensual position, she would expand a poetic experience into an embodied experience. Similarly to Vicuña, Brazilian artist Teresinha Soares defined her artistic practice as “an erotic art of contestation.” She conceived Eurotica (1970), an album of twenty-five drawings printed on warm light- and dark-colored paper exploring sexuality beyond any social taboos. The artist has explained that “Eu” refers to the self/first person and “Erótica” to the erotic, meaning “eroticism in me” (Soares in Gotti 2015a: 72).11 For this album, Soares printed a short poem that celebrates female beauty through her sexuality: “I see beauty in sex. I discover sex within me. I’m beautiful, I live and love Love”12 (1970, in Gotti 2015a). The artist explained that the way this portfolio of prints was to be displayed was on the floor on a bed of red cushions in the shape of a heart, forcing the spectator to bend and lower the body and enter a complicit and sensual enjoyment of the poems. This work is not a performance per se, but it was conceived in the context of the artist’s performative practice, and for this reason it encompasses an embodied experience for the spectator. Expanding on the idea of the political role of sexuality in radical performance by women is Ana Mendieta’s Rape Scene (1973), which the artist created in her apartment in Iowa City. Mendieta, originally from Cuba, conceived this piece while she was a student at the University of Iowa in response to the brutal rape and murder of Sara Ann Otten that same year. For Rape Scene, Mendieta recreated the murder scene as described by the press and surprised her fellow students when they came to visit her apartment by finding her naked, tied, and bent over a table with blood dripping from her body and on the floor in a scene of disarray. As stated, Mendieta created this work while still a student and in the containment of her own dorm room. Images of Mendieta’s Rape Scene are to this day some of the most enduring and haunting in conveying the horrors of sexual violence. This work was created out of a profound sense of urgency on the part of the artist, and outside of the confines of the art institution, and as such it embodies the full power of the brutality of real violence.
FIGURE 3.11.2 Cecilia Vicuña, El Zen Surado, 1960s–2013, collage. Photography by Claudio Bertoni. Courtesy of the artist.
If it is accepted to think of photo performance as an important form of body art, particularly of works from the 1960s and 1970s, what happens when what we encounter is a bowl with bloodied tampons in lieu of the body? This is the case of Sophie Rivera’s Rouge and noir (Red and Black) (1977–8), a series of photographs that function as personal portraits by depicting and celebrating the most intimate and abject of bodily fluids: menstrual blood. These are images seen from afar resemble large abstracted oval shapes in pink hues, but when observed closely surprise us for their baseness, which confronts our own taboos regarding the female body. This work is not only performative in nature—it documents an action—but it also promotes an embodied experience that highlights a key aspect of femininity that concerns all of us: since menstrual blood makes our very existence possible. Although Rivera is mostly recognized for her series of portraits of Nuyoricans (1976), particularly since the Smithsonian purchased some important works from this series, much of her work still remains in obscurity, such as her intimate and unconventional portraits of her naked husband every Valentine’s Day. The exclusion of Rivera’s more radical work is because of art institution’s tendency to invisibilize “difficult” art, particularly involving the emotional or sexualized body. One of the important reasons why a larger body of Rivera’s work has remained invisible, or has made it difficult and at times impossible for artists such as Maria Evelia Marmolejo, Carolee Schneeman, Vaginal Davis, or Ron Athey to be exhibited, is because of the existing societal and art institutional taboos toward unbound sexualities that are truly personal and intimate, defying the still largely normative notion of the neutral heteronormative, disinterested, modernist body. The performative notion of the political body is both uncensored and unrestricted, therefore bypassing, in the case of Rivera, both the absence of her body and in lieu celebrating her menstrual blood as an affirming performative gesture.
The embodied, creative, and political resistance and urgency of such radical women’s performances make them irreducible to a defined and bounded institutionalized experience of art. Doyle explains that when we experience emotion through art in a museum or gallery setting, we are nevertheless taught/trained to remain cool and controlled, a result of Western historical and social conditioning of aesthetic experience and notions of taste. She writes: “Galleries, museums and magazines sell this marriage of the impenetrable and the unmovable as Art, as if those of us who go to galleries and museums (or become art historians) are doing so in order to be relieved of the burdens of an emotional life” (Doyle 2013: 4). The author asks why it is so much more difficult in contemporary art to present challenging, political issues (feminism, race, gender, violence, etc.) related to a reality that is problematic, than for example in literature and in cinema.13 The limits between art, politics, and the body continue to be predetermined by a set of codes that exclude certain artistic practices, chiefly forms of performance and body art.14 Many radical women—including African American women in the United States and women from countries with a colonial history in Asia and Africa—were not only marginalized in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, but were erased from art history. Our intent to recover and visibilize the work of Latinas and Latin American women artists in the twenty-first century was for several years an extremely difficult task ridden with opposition and rejection from colleagues and institutions. It wasn’t until the Hammer Museum an d the Getty Foundation—both established institutions—took on the project, that we were able to legitimize the validity of this project and make it happen. It is a paradox that ultimately radical and marginalized art such as the one included in the Radical Women exhibition needed the validation of mainstream institutions to be appreciated both in their countries of origin and abroad and to become a tangible opportunity for new scholarship, collecting, and further exhibition.
The project began with controversy. The initial venue for Radical Women canceled the exhibit and fired me. At the heart of the cancellation was Colombian artist Maria Evelia Marmolejo’s 11 de marzo (1981),15 a performance involving menstrual blood (Figure 3.11.3). The artist had suffered heavy menstruation from a young age and had endured the ridiculing of her brothers and also humiliating public staining of her clothes. 11 de marzo was a performance ritual to exorcize menstruation of its taboos, and to celebrate a Chocó indigenous myth of creation maintaining that men were born out of mixing mud and menstrual blood, reverting the negative associations in menstruation as well as countering Christian patriarchal notions of women’s inferiority and dependency. For this performance, Marmolejo walked on rows of white paper lining the floor while dripping menstrual blood, as well as rubbing her pubis against the walls to leave bloodied pubic hair imprints. There is no bodily fluid as stigmatized as menstrual blood and 11 de marzo was a clear demonstration that the art of radical women was not only unpalatable, but also unworthy of institutional support.
FIGURE 3.11.3 Maria Evelia Marmolejo, 11 de marzo, 1981. Courtesy of the artist.
If the first argument for the embodied experience, in the first person, of radical women’s political body art is its capacity to resist and investigate reality beyond institutionality, a second case needs to be made for the powerful resonance that we find in this work in the present, for the ways the artists confronted, fought, and resisted with their bodies, patriarchalism, violence, political oppression, and social injustice between the 1960s and 1980s. On the one hand, we have history and how it repeats itself and on the other, how unresolved its traumas are. During this period, several countries in Latin America were under dictatorship or civil war, and in the United States the civil rights movement focused on fighting against human rights abuses and racial discrimination.16 Radical Women opened after the inauguration into office of Donald Trump, a proud misogynist, womanizer, and racist president, an event that is reversing many of the civil rights gained in this country over many decades of struggles. In Latin America, democracies gone wrong such as Venezuela, the rise of nationalism and the right in countries such as Brazil, and the humanitarian crisis in several countries in Central America and the Caribbean as a result of natural disasters such as hurricanes in Puerto Rico, speak of a profound social and political crisis in the continent. We are witnesses and participants not only of our reality in the present tense, but also of the repository of the histories before us, of our families’, countries’, and colonial past. Radical Women in this sense was a catalyst for experiencing multiple temporalities in the present. This exhibition was viewed by half a million visitors between the three venues in Los Angeles, New York, and Sao Paulo, and the overwhelming feedback we received was that it was experienced as transformative embodied participation of the past collapsing in the present; as a collective inclusive political body that is affirmative, hopeful, resourceful, imaginative, and insubordinate. As curators, we embodied the performativity of the artists’ works as a performativity of curating, and in turn the exhibition proposed a performativity of the public’s participation.
French philosopher Henri Bergson’s concept of duration, where he proposes that we exist in a continuum with no beginning or end, changing continually, is relevant in thinking of the embodied experience of Radical Women’s body art ([1907] 1911: n.p.).17 The past is actualized constantly as every new experience is accumulated, making them both the same and different. In this way there is no repetition but duration, a past that constantly informs the present and vice versa. In thinking about trauma and neurosis—the colonial past and our personal histories of pain—revisiting and embodying the traumatic past is an opportunity to revise, to understand, to come to terms with, and to heal the painful past and to actualize it meaningfully in the present. When we observe C hilean artist Gloria Camiruaga’s video Popsicles (1982), where the artist’s young daughters appear licking popsicles while the Hail Mary is playing in the background until toy soldiers emerge from the popsicles, we as mothers and daughters and women experience the fragility of the female body as the power of the military and the church, still today, determines the roles of women and their oppression. When we are faced with Anna Maria Maiolino’s photographs from the series Fotopoemaçao (Photo poem action) (1973–2017)—produced during Brazil’s dictatorship—where the artist points a pair of scissors toward her eyes (X, 1974) or threatens to cut her tongue or her nose (É o que sobra [What is left over], 1974), we are reminded of how much we are still silenced today, and how much we still do not know about our mothers or sisters, given the level of repression that women have endured and continue to endure all over the world. When we encounter the photographs from Graciela Carnevale’s Acción de encierro (Lock-up Action) (1968), a performance that took place during the Ciclo de Arte Experimental in Rosario, Argentina, we are reminded of the conditioned and surveilled existence that we experience still today. For the original performance, the artist invited the public to an opening, locked them up, and left them to find a way out. A passerby who broke the glass door by throwing a stone finally liberated them. By subjecting the public to a real situation of oppression and forcing passersby to participate, Carnevale hoped to instill a consciousness of the day-to-day violence Argentinians endured during the Onganía dictatorship (1966–70). Camiruaga’s, Maiolino’s, and Carnevale’s are only some of the works that exemplify how performance in Radical Women embodied an opportunity to experience, reenact, heal, or simply identify as women and humans through trauma in the present. Along with my co-curator, Andrea Giunta, we experienced and received feedback from a wide public, ranging from young Latina artists, old Jewish women who had been affected by the Holocaust, to men of all backgrounds, who responded emotionally and with empathy to the exhibition.
It was my personal urgency that the show not subscribe to a clinical white cube historical account. The works in Radical Women demanded to be museographed in a dialoguing structure, to be experienced as a large body that was emerging en masse after being historically repressed and excluded—and not with the purpose of solely highlighting individual voices. The exhibition avoided establishing hierarchies—some artists such as Lygia Clark or Marta Minujín, for example, were much more recognized than others who were completely unknown, and some countries have been historically more visible than others in art historical accounts of performance art.
At the Hammer Museum, where the show was carefully museographed over the course of many months,18 the thematic structure of the show was woven into the space to create an embodied experience that had an emotional tempo that was performative in nature. The public entered through the theme of self-portrait (metaphorically the head) where they were confronted with a declarative moment, to move through the expansive poetics of the body in landscape, and slowly experience the body in performance, the mapping and the reconceptualization of the body. A more emotionally intense zone was titled “Repression and Fear.” Once the spectator moved through this area, which displayed works in response to violence and oppression, they then slowly encountered humor, empathy, and collectivity in “Feminisms” and “Social Places,” eventually ending in the section titled “Erotic.” The exhibition concluded with the affirmative power of female sexuality. Metaphorically, the structure of the exhibition can be seen as a female body, and the experience of traveling through the show as entering through the head and coming out of the vagina, a sort of rebirth. The political body is embodied in each work, and as a totality it becomes a monumental body of work both radically experimental and emotionally transformative. Liliana Porter, an Argentine artist featured in the show, and artist Ana Tiscornia, from Uruguay, described the exhibition as “a grand chorus and a great forum” (Artists’ personal comment, September 2017).
The aesthetic, conceptual, political, and experiential is embodied, performed, lived, unselfconsciously, while being in the first person. Through the experience of the political body, the first person in us may be liberated from the patriarchal gaze and institutional authority. Given the dialogical and noninstitutional nature of the political body, the experience of radical bodies in performance may awaken the emancipation and decolonization of our own bodies in the present. The spectator’s body ultimately becomes the site of emancipation.
NOTES
1. Translated by the author. Original poem reads:
Mi cuerpo es
zen-tir-te
Marzo 1971
Spanish reprinted from El Zen Surado, 1965–1972 by Cecilia Vicuña (Santiago de Chile: Catalonia, 2013), p. 147. Copyright by the author, and by Catalonia Ltd, 2013. English translation previously unpublished. Permission granted by the author.
2. The exhibition Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985 was organized by the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, under the Getty initiative Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA and inaugurated at the Hammer Museum in the fall of 2017, traveled to The Brooklyn Museum, New York, in April, and in August 2018 at Pinacoteca, Sao Paulo. For a full list of artists and documentary information on the exhibition, see the exhibition catalog (Fajardo-Hill and Giunta 2017) or visit the expanded digital archive at https://hammer.ucla.edu.
3. It is important to acknowledge the pioneering work in recognizing the role of women artists in the history of performance by scholars and authors such as Amelia Jones, Lucy Lippard, Moira Roth, Peggy Pelan, Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Rebecca Schneider, Kristine Stiles, and Lea Vergine. Nevertheless, with the exception of Ana Mendieta, and more recently Lygia Clark, Latin American and Latina artists have been largely absent from their studies. Some of the key authors on Latin/a American performance are Deborah Cullen, Coco Fusco, Mónica Mayer, Nelly Richard, and Diana Taylor.
4. Personal translation. Original quote reads: “La premisa lo personal es político, propia del feminismo de los setenta fue transformada por las artes visuales feministas en ‘el cuerpo es político,’ pues articulan las visualidades de sus experiencias poniendo literalmente el cuerpo en una posición política . . . Las artistas feministas han inscrito sobre sus cuerpos la textualidad performativa de sus discursos. . . . El arte del cuerpo da la posibilidad para que el cuerpo propio de las artistas o los artistas en acción, corre o desdiga las fronteras de la presentación y la representación, cuestionando las definiciones, los usos y los estigmas que el sistema de género ha impuesto al cuerpo. . . . el performance es ‘un acto político hecho por el cuerpo’.”
5. Personal translation. Original text reads: “Como el principal soporte del arte acción es el cuerpo de la artista siempre tiene algo de autobiográfico. No olvidemos que el performance no pretende representar la realidad, sino intervenirla a partir de acciones. En general, el performance es un arte en primera persona y resulta lógico analizarlo a partir de una estructura análoga.”
6. Doyle’s book focuses on the work of artists such as Ron Athey, Aliza Shvarts, Franko B, Nao Bustamante, James Luna, Carrie Mae Weems, and David Wojnarowicz.
7. With Donald Trump’s presidency, we have seen the reversal of important civil rights in the United States, such as forbidding the participation of transgender people in the army, attempts to close down Planned Parenthood and to ban abortion, as well as immigration laws against Mexicans, Central Americans, and people from the Middle East. Femicide in countries such as Brazil and Mexico is on the rise. See Federici (2018) on globalized institutional violence against women today.
8. In this text, I’m referring to Latina and Latin American performance artists and not to the wider context of radical performance by women internationally, such as Eleanor Antin, Elsa Hildegard Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven, Claude Cahun, Niki de Saint Phalle, Valie Export, Emmy Henning, Shigeko Kubota, Yoko Ono, Mierle Ukeles, Carolee Schneemann, Hannah Wilke, and Martha Wilson. Particularly since the 1990s, many of these artists have been presented in exhibitions and scholarly publications have explored their contribution.
9. “One day in January 1966, I was at the Con cón Beach when I felt that the sea sensed [CF1] me as I did her. I fell to the ground in awe of the realization. I picked up a stick and planted it on the earth as a form of writing so that she, the sea, could see that I saw. The high tide would erase this writing, completing it. This way my Arte Precario (precarious art) was born. I made signs in the sand and gathered sticks and stones, feathers and bones, plastic and metal, building a small ‘city’ to be erased by the waves. As if they were the remains of an ancient civilization, or the beginning of a new one, capable of hearing the sea and the consciousness of all living things.” Personal correspondence with the artist, August 14, 2018.
10. Allende’s presidency ended abruptly with his US-backed assassination and the installation of the Pinochet dictatorship from 1973 to 1990, which led to Vicuña’s exile.
11. Soares also stated: “free sexual exercise demands social and political freedom.”
12. The original version reads: “Vejo beleza no Sexo. Descubro o sexo em Mim. Sou bela, vivo e amo o Amor.” The first lines of the second page long poem reads: “Don’t be mediocre, don’t be modest, penetrate my venter.” The original poem reads: “Não seja mediocre, nem seja modesto, penetre no meu ventre.”
13. The art institution, the history of good taste and canonicity, even in contemporary art, are still profoundly shaped by a complex ambiguity in regard to the potential transgressiveness of art. It is the case that still today, art by feminists, queer, and artists of color, dealing with identity, politics, and gender, is considered irrelevant as a form of art.
14. Art enters an institution and academic and critical discourse when it is possible to somehow naturalize its radicality. Critics are often part of a system that defends the status quo, and their defense of patriarchal notions of good taste and quality often dismiss overtly controversial and political work as bad art, panfletarian, propaganda. The same goes for institutions that feel ill at ease with truly political and “unpopular” art, often closing their doors on “difficult art.”
15. Artist title description: March 11—ritual in honor of menstruation, worthy of every woman as precursor to the origin of life. This performance took place at the now defunct Galería Santa Fe in Bogotá, Colombia.
16. Argentina (1976–83), Brazil (1964–85), Chile (1973–90), Paraguay (1954–89), Peru (1968–80), Uruguay (1973–85), and Venezuela (1948–58); or civil war: Colombia (1964–2016) and Guatemala (1960–96). In the United States, this is the time of the civil rights movement (1950s–1970s), particularly the fight for the rights of women, African Americans, and Latino people who were subjected to brutal discrimination and violence. Though we could not challenge that the United States was a democracy during this period of time, the civil rights of many people, such as African Americans and Latinos, were denied. In 1964, after decades of segregation, the US government passed the Civil Rights Act prohibiting discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, only in theory ending segregation. A powerful example of abuse of human rights in the United States was the practice of nonconsensual sterilization of Latina women that ended with the 1975 moratorium. In Puerto Rico between 1937 and 1960, sterilization endorsed by the United States in order to exercise control over population growth, left more than one-third of Puerto Rican women sterilized. Also, we cannot ignore that between 1947 and 1991 during the Cold War, the United States waged proxy wars in Latin America, supported coup d’états, civil wars, and right-wing dictatorships, and led covert operations such as Operation Condor intended to undermine any left-wing tendencies in the region.
17. Bergson writes: “Nevertheless the vision I now have of it differs from that which I have just had, even if only because the one is an instant older than the other. My memory is there, which conveys something of the past into the present. My mental state, as it advances on the road of time, is continually swelling with the duration which it accumulates.”
18. The Hammer Museum hired Sebastian Clough, director of exhibitions at the Fowler Museum, to design the museography of “Radical Women” in dialogue with the curators, Andrea Giunta and myself, and the Hammer’s chief curator Connie Butler and curatorial fellow Marcela Guerrero.
References
Antivilio, Julia (2015). Entre lo sagrado y lo profano se tejen rebeldías: Arte feminista latinoamericano, Serie Feminismos Nuestroamericanos. Bogota: Ediciones desde abajo.
Bergson, Henri ([1907] 1911). Creative Evolution, translated by Arthur Mitchell . Project Gutenberg EBook [EBook #26163].
Doyle, Jennifer (2013). Hold it Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press.
Fajardo-Hill, Cecilia and Andrea Giunta (eds) (2017). Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985. Los Angeles and Munich: Hammer Museum and DelMonico, Prestel.
Federici, Silvia (2018). Witches, Witch-Hunting and Women. Oakland, CA: PM Press.
Gotti, Sofia (2015a). A Pantagruelian Pop: Teresinha Soares’s “Erotic Art of Contestation.” Tate Papers no. 24, Global Pop. Available at: http://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/24/a-pantagruelian-pop-teresinha-soares-erotic-art-of-contestation.
Gotti, Sofia (2015b). “Eroticism, Humour and Graves: A Conversation with Teresinha Soares,” n. paradoxa: International Feminist Art Journal 36 (July): 67–73. Available at: https://www.ktpress.co.uk/nparadoxa-volume-details.asp?volumeid=36
Jones, Amelia (1998). Body Art/Performing the Subject. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Mayer, Mónica. (2004). Rosa Chillante: Mujeres y Performance en México. Mexico City: Producción Editorial Ana Victoria Jiménez.
Vicuña, Cecilia (2013). El Zen Surado, 1965–1972. Santiago de Chile: Catalonia.