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Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985, Pacific Standard Time Festival: Live Art LA/LA

2018; Penn State University Press; Volume: 3; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/jasiapacipopcult.3.1.0153

2380-7687

Sara Solaimani,

Latin American and Latino Studies

Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985 is a retrospective exhibition that was seven years in the making, co-curated by Andrea Giunta and Cecilia Fajardo-Hill.1 It opened in September 2017 at the UCLA Hammer Museum as part of the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time Festival: LA/LA programming and will travel in April to the Brooklyn Museum in New York and then to the Pinacoteca in São Paulo. Radical Women has received considerable attention from the press; Annie Buckley, Ben Davis, Paloma Checa-Gismero, and Christopher Knight all wrote reviews. Consisting of works by 120 Latin American and Chicana women artists from fourteen countries and regions, the exhibition is organized into nine overlapping conceptual themes: “Self-Portrait,” “Body Landscape,” “Performing the Body,” “Mapping the Body,” “Resistance and Fear,” “The Power of Words,” “Feminisms,” “Social Places,” and “The Erotic,” distributed throughout the Hammer’s first four galleries.Entering Gallery 1, I am checked at the door by a large black-and-white wall projection of Victoria Santa Cruz, activist and iconic figure of Afro Peruvian music and dance. Her powerful voice crescendos from a guttural space. Her perfectly round afro, tightly framed by gold earrings, hits the sharp corners of her collar. Between phrases, she claps her hands, marking a complex rhythm over the dull beats of a bass drum. In a line beside her, a group of young black performers returns Santa Cruz’s chants, mirroring her affect. In a declarative tone, she tells the story of her seven-year-old self—walking down the street, unaware of the sad truth behind onlookers’ shouts: Negra! Negra! Negra! Negra! The projection is a clip from Torgeir Wethal’s 1978 documentary Victoria, Black and Woman, a fitting welcome to an unapologetic and unprecedented feminist art historical revision. I turn away from the projection to see my own reflection in a full-length mirror flanked by two fierce-looking Chicanas from different generations in Judy Baca’s life-sized 1978 triptych, Las Tres Marías (The Three Marias). I snap a selfie, of course. I then take a moment with Yolanda Lopez’s famous 1978 Tableaux Vivant series in which she activates the figure of the Virgin of Guadalupe through her own embodiment and experimentation with different poses. Moving into the gallery, my gaze is returned by that of Patssi Valdez in a 2 × 3 ft black-and-white portrait by Harry Gamboa Jr., her collaborator in one of the first and most politically active Chicano art collectives of the 1970s, Asco. Giunta and Fajardo-Hill’s texts address some of the difficult decisions of how best to synthesize Chicana works of art into a larger Latin American framework. Their decision to confront the audience with the voices of strong black and Chicana women as an introduction to the rest of the work in the show should be read as a commitment to historical revision and intersectionality and a critique of feminisms that do not recognize the conditions and experiences of women of color.The space opens to the right, and from just beyond the entrance, I have a clear view of two adjacent rooms with projections and videos around Vera Chaves Barcellos’s photographic installation covering most of the floor. With film and video pieces by almost half of the artists, Radical Women is a dynamic experience that draws the viewer into their bodies, movements, feelings, and thoughts. These moving elements animate the photography, paintings, drawings, prints, sculptures, and installations hung beside them, and together they rescue a multiplicity out of a historical vacuum.2 The catalog’s detailed index makes it an invaluable teaching and reference tool for educators in the fields of art history, women’s studies, and many others.Most interesting was the conversation happening between the pieces in separate galleries or beyond walls. Venezuelan pop art sculptor Marisol’s neo-Dadaist sculpture Self-Portrait (1961–1962), a large rectangular block forming one “sitting body” with different (male and female) heads affixed at the top facing different directions and random extended legs, invited viewers to Chaves Barcellos’s photographic floor installation Epidermic Scapes (1977/1982), a checkerboard of magnified black-and-whites of weathered skin, on the other side of the wall. Although the aesthetic and media of each of these works is different, they both have a mysterious and reserved quality and together speak to society’s ways of compartmentalizing identity and conflating difference. Isabel Castro’s X Rated Bondage (1980), Mónica Mayer’s Lo normal (Quiero hacer el amor) (The normal [I want to make love]) (1978), Patssi Valdez’s Hot Pink (1980), and Cecilia Vicuña’s Nuevos diseños eroticos para muebles (New erotic designs for furniture) (1971) explore sex from the perspective of women’s desire and subvert the taboos assigned to their many different sexualities and fantasies. Reexamining women’s place in the home, voyeurism, and the space of the domestic are Brazilian painter Wanda Pimentel’s 1968 Envolvimento (Entanglement) series and Mexican collage artist Magali Lara’s Ventanas (Windows) (1977–1978). Pimentel’s work communicates the repression of voyeuristic desire, whereas Lara explores her own subjectivity through the feeling of looking into people’s homes while being out in the city, of simultaneously watching and being watched.Especially compelling to me was the protest art of Colombian women in the exhibition, particularly their responses to necropolitical projects in Latin America, including Colombian artists Nirma Zárate’s A nosotros (To us) and Una niña muere de inanición (A girl dies of starvation) (1971) and Sonia Gutiérrez’s 1976 serial prints of bound feet and hands such as Operación rastrillo (Search operation). I also liked Maria Evelia Marmolejo’s video performances in the Anónimo series (1981), Anónimo 1: homage to those disappeared and tortured in violent incidents and Anónimo 4: I question coming into a world where there are no benefits or peace for newborns in a society where eleven thousand children starve to death in Latin America every year (1984), which demonstrate the oppression and impoverishment of people in Colombia and across Latin America throughout the decades following heavy US intervention during the Eisenhower administration’s global “counterinsurgency” era.After having spent an entire afternoon at the Hammer moving through the collection of artworks and having studied the extensive 376-page catalog, I note that the exhibition’s thematic organizational logic feels somewhat forced, as though it has taken too many liberties in imposing itself onto the artworks. Although Giunta’s text on The Iconographic Turn: The Denormalization of Bodies and Sensibilities in the Work of Latin American Women Artists leaves no doubt about her insistence on the difference between feminist artists and artistic feminism,3 what this does not clarify is which piece, then, could be deemed “nonfeminist.” Which does not challenge the systemic control of women’s bodies or movement one way or another, either on a self-reflexive or collective level? The thematic categories by which the artworks are grouped in the exhibition (which did not carry over into the catalog) were likely created for two reasons: (a) to imagine an alternative to the traditional retrospective exhibition model and (b) to cater to a particular Los Angeles art institution and audience, echoing Checa-Gismero’s observations.4 These reservations begin to quell a bit as I make my way through the show, even more so after I read the catalog essays. Visually, the curatorial design makes sense—a conversation between the works that managed to escape a neatly contained and dry grouping by artist, region of “origin,” medium, or (worse) in chronological order.5Building on previous critiques and through my own practice of art historical translation, I must address the issues of language, accessibility, and inclusion in the Radical Women exhibition and catalog. Although the wall labels for the exhibition were translated into Spanish, the catalog only contains English text, with the exception of titles, original text-based artworks, and a Julia de Burgos poem. In a way, this sanitizes, erases, and neutralizes the political process of art historical translation and the original histories that were written in a Spanish or Portuguese colonial context. This is especially pertinent to the question of recognition and access in art documentation because many of the contributors and visitors are native Spanish speakers. Nine of the fourteen contributors—Rodrigo Alonso, Julia Antivillo Peña, Mónica Mayer, Maria Laura Rosa, Rosina Cazali, Andrea Giunta, Carmen Maria Jaramillo, Miguel A. Lopez, and Maria Angelina Melendi—contributed Spanish texts, which Jane Brodie translated into English. Furthermore, the lack of inclusivity is a historical problem in US exhibitions of Latin American art. Too often, the smallest, most impoverished (because of the most persistent presence of colonialism), or socialist countries such as El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Bolivia, and the Dominican Republic are left out of comprehensive exhibitions of Latino art. The historical context for Radical Women would have been greatly enriched by the stories of artists such as the Nicaraguan Union of Plastic Artists and printmaker María Gallo, Salvadorian founder of the country’s first art gallery Julia Díaz, internationally recognized Honduran landscape and portrait painter Teresita Fortín, Dominican political artist Elsa Núñez, and Bolivian Indigenista sculptor Marina Núñez del Prado. Although Giunta and Fajardo-Hill clearly made a very long and urgent stride toward wedging open this void in contemporary art history, choosing their contributing writers with utmost attention to inclusion, what stands out to me are the omissions from Central America and the Caribbean, although the catalog did mention some artists from specific countries not included in the exhibition. If anything, this is evidence of the need and the desire for this work to continue, despite the difficulty of documenting histories long ignored in an already-critical curatorial field. It was exciting to see critiques, reviews, and blogs highlighting the work of other important Latina artists besides those recognized in Radical Women pop up in the months following the exhibition’s opening, demonstrating the fruition of this potential catalysis.One of my favorite sections of Radical Women is the last section, “Social Places,” featuring works by twenty-nine artists, more than any of the other eight sections. Poli Marichal’s fictional experimental film Los espejismos de Mondragora Luna (Mondragora Luna’s phantoms), about a pregnant woman who searches for her identity as a mother and woman, and Ximena Cuevas’s Las tres muertes de Lupe (The three deaths of Lupe), based on the repeated suicide attempts of Mexican cabaret star Lupe Vélez, both use macabre humor as a device to critique the traditional melodrama in their respective countries. These works reclaim the position of the female protagonist, real or fictional, not only at the center of the narrative but also behind it.I exit Gallery 4 just as the museum closes, feeling at once nourished and overwhelmed by the great omission that Radical Women represented. Two reminders set in. First, that Afro-Latina female artists have been by far the most underrecognized by the art historical canon of the Americas, even though their contributions are among the most visually striking, critical and politically compelling, and highly committed to preservation of heritage and projects of social justice in their local communities. Radical Women took a step toward rectifying this disparity by recognizing some of their most noteworthy contributions to the artistic production and to rethinking local historiographies of the era in each of their countries’ respective avant-gardes. The second is a reminder of the feeling of impotence of being bound to the term Latina in my research and writing. This construction in which we are all stuck to a degree, the morphing category Latino, a “gift” from the French Crown to the Mestizo people, was meant to neutralize and depoliticize the genocidal legacy of the colonial machine. Pacific Standard Time’s ambitious Latin America and Latino Art in LA programming (LA/LA) is case in point of how art institutions historically adopt these same problematic identity markers and apply them to the classification and indexing of a robust diversity of practices under the simplified category of Latino. This is how these institutions remain spaces of exception and continue to perpetuate the homogenizing colonial model, as art was historically designed to do. In other words, the very etymology of the label Latina/o/x compromises the radicality of these artists’ practices.The thought-provoking works in Radical Women are only fragments of the great contribution by women of color in the Americas. For me, the value of their work resides in the residual power of their differences, their singular and collective experiences and practices of resilience and refusal in the most contested and homogenized region of the planet. To have brought together, documented, and made these important works—many by living artists—available to an audience that has little or no knowledge of the artists is certainly a noteworthy accomplishment of contemporary aesthetic education.In singular and collective ways, the radical women in this exhibition have contributed to deconstructing systems of oppression and occlusion from both the center and the periphery in their respective countries. If you’re in Brooklyn or São Paolo in the coming months, visit the exhibition and take the opportunity to see the world from their many different and critical perspectives.Sara Solaimani is a doctoral candidate in art history, theory, and criticism at the Department of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). She is currently investigating the relationship between the subaltern and the roots of performance art by Mexican and Chicana/o artists in the United States during the period between the era of the cultural wars beginning in the late 1960s and the North American Free Trade Agreement (1968–1994). In 2011, Solaimani graduated from the San Diego State University (SDSU) Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies with a master’s thesis on the deconstruction of the transborder space by Tijuanense artist Marcos Ramírez ERRE. She has published and presented several texts and has curated exhibitions on the relationship among politics, geopolitics, and art on the Tijuana–San Diego border. She teaches border arts writing, art history, and Chicana/o studies at UCSD, SDSU, and Mesa College.