Performance art: Coco Fusco, Nelly Richard, Lotty Rosenfeld and Francisco Casas
Fusco, Coco. (Ed.) Corpus Delecti: Performance Art of the Americas. Introduction and pp. 203- 222. New York: Routledge, 2000.
Fusco notes in the introduction that the body is the most suitable material for political performance in Latin America, as it is also the material and concrete site where political power is (violently) articulated. The body can be seen then as the 'stage' for the individual and the collective to come together, and the support for social reproduction and sexual domination. The performances compiled here by Fusco all construct particular versions of the body and address that violence inflicted upon the body politic. Fusco sees the problem in sustaining the existence of a sort of regional and national performance art, and the risk to equate art with a certain political project or one singular meaning (like in nationalist art), but many artists themselves are ever struggling not to become tokenized as representatives of a singular identity. It is also true however, that many artists too engage actively with their historical contexts so that we can see some common aspects across art practices in LA: they frequently infuse them with "social concerns", they address the state through the use of public space, and they use the body as the substrate, maybe precisely because the presence of the state in the public space has been primarily been in the form of violence over bodies —we must note though that the state has also often blurred the public/private divide through state terror and the invasion of the "private". Fusco emphasizes also the use of the ephemeral in experimental performance as a way to escape from the logic of capitalist value and exchange.
The third part of the book, entitled "Stepping toward an oppositional public sphere" includes includes an extract from Nelly Richard's Margins and Institutions followed by a one-page text by Lotty Rosenfeld and a short text by Francisco Casas on Las Yeguas del Apocalipsis. Richard talks about the actions of CADA and how they took a distance from art as subordinate to a (single, totalizing) ideological message; instead, their art actions were rather incomplete gestures that needed the interaction in daily life with the spectator to happen and acquire meaning. The harsh repression to whatever was perceived as a political discourse forced artists further to use ephemeral bodily gestures and to avoid the use of precoded images in their actions. [I would like to address the action Para No Morir de Hambre en el Arte in way more detail after I read Nelly Richard's full book, because so far I haven't found any mention on milk, which is used here as a signifier of poverty and hunger, also as gendered (mother's milk) and sexualized (leche being a synonymous for semen in Spanish)].
Richard looks at Leppe's work as well as Zurita's and Eltit's performances in Chile, and how they addressed —by different routes— the ideological the uses of the body. According to Richard, their work showed how different ideas and representations of what is normal and deviant are constantly inscribed upon the body, or as Leppe put it, the body understood as a tissue of quotations (209). Through the use of parody, mimesis and simulacrum, these artists made reference to the wounded and violated social body; pointed at the bodily excess that escapes and resists language; as well as challenged a transparent relation between the body and the self. The other common strategy of these artists is that they all manipulated and played with categories of sexual difference in their work (Zurita postulated that the subject was so fragmented that it never achieved a complete sexuation as female or male). Rosenfeld postulated her work as "exposing the operations of official power and the conflict zones in which bodies are submitted to margins and borders" and embracing fugitive identities and hybrid embodiments that transgress surveillance and capital. (219) Francisco Casas declares in his article that him and Pedro Lemebel reinvented their bodies as to become a female body through their performance, Las Yeguas, "to denounce the raped and homicidal fatherland" and insisted on bringing back the body upon which the violent crime was committed.
It's worth pointing out here that the photograph of the Yeguas that you've included is also indebted to a famous painting by Frida Kahlo. (There's also here a question of the double.)
ReplyDeleteIt might be worth asking, then, how much of this "body politics" is specific to either a) Latin America or b) Chile. Does the dictatorship merely accentuate characteristics of political power that can be found elsewhere in the region, or is there some specific Chilean twist?
Good call on the photograph of the Yeguas del Apocalipsis performing Frida Kahlo's "Las dos Fridas" Jon. I have to think about the double thing further though.
ReplyDeleteNow, is the articulation of political power on the body particular to Latin America or Chile? Not at all. Michel Foucault showed in Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality that Europe pioneered on this through the institutions of psychiatry, prisons, school and work in the 19th century. However, if we look at the ways that political power was exercised in the late 20th century in Latin America we have to admit that there are some specific features that accentuate the importance of the body. Throughout the region there was a planned, systematic use of violence over the bodies to reinforce certain power relations. I remember I use to hear that Latin America was the “playground” of the cold war big powers. Now, I would not agree with this anymore completely, as I know that there were many other internal factors that shaped the political scenarios of the second half of the century in the region. But violence over the bodies for sure was used to establish certain ideologies (liberalism, capitalism) and physically destroy others (communism, socialism, anarchism) that were at stake in the global scenario generated by the cold war. Moreover, in Chile, state violence has a history that goes beyond the cold war. Since its inception, the state used the army to repel anything perceived as social insurgency, from a point of view of an oligarchy, as indigenous, peasants, miners, union leaders and their families were brutally repressed on a regular basis way too often along Chilean history (See Salazar 1989).