Ban

Ana Mendieta, Rock Heart with Blood, still from Super 8, color, silent film, 1975

Like a person in an ancient pose, I lean in an L-shaped posture over the counter: flat back, rump displayed to any passer-by, blood dripping down the back of my thighs. They don’t see me. I clean the street until all that’s left is a ring of oily foam, the formal barrier of a bad snow. Are you sick and tired of running away?

Then lie down. 

         -Banhu Kapil, Ban en Banlieue

Bhanu Kapil’s Ban en Banlieue is a meditation on what has perished, flesh discarded and pressing heavy onto the ground, meat received by the earth that produces a mark, a stain. There is a separation, a loss, something which was born dead. A still-birth. Ban.

Ban is like Macabéa in Lispector’s Hour of the Star, a tragic woman whose narrative is infected by the throbbing of an exposed nerve, a girl who dances alone to the radio, who swallows paper to satiate her hunger for red beef. What is that paper? A book? Bibliophagy? (Bibliophagy: a disorder where a person compulsively eats books, compulsive eating of books, feelings of relief upon eating books, reduced anxiety brought on by eating books.)

For Kapil it is bibliomancy. Putting her finger down into Dictee. Finding Cha and Ban and Ana. The image of the drowned woman floats between the pages, down onto the street, onto the butcher block. The body of the girl, violated and left for dead in a New Delhi street “She lay on the ground for 40 minutes—twitching—making low sounds—then none at all—diminishing—before anyone called the police.”

Ana Mendieta, Untitled (Rape Scene), April 1973

From the court proceedings of the Theresa Cha rape and murder trial:

November 5th, 1982 At 7:15 p.m., Police Officer Brennan responded to a call for an investigation of a parking lot on Elizabeth Street, which is located about 10 or 15 minutes by car from the office building in which defendant worked. At the parking lot, the officer found the body of Mrs. Cha. Her pants and underwear were down around her knees, she had only one boot on and there was blood on the back of her head. Her wedding ring was missing as well as her purse and wallet, but her Timex wristwatch was still in place.

A shaft of her black hair, a dead piece more dead as it is carried away on the sole of a shoe. She is dismembered in the slowest possible way. Bit by bit. You can’t even notice it.

Bhanu Kapil, Performance for Ban at Pratt Institute, New York, April, 2013

To dream that one’s hair is falling out.
To dream that all one’s teeth are falling out.
To dream that one is being saved.
To dream that one is being nursed.
To dream that one is very dirty.
To dream that one is dissolving.
To dream that one is in mourning, as shown by the hair.
To dream that one is being beaten, beaten on the neck, up to the ears and around the face…

-From A List of Bad Dreams Chanted as a Cause & Cure for Missing Souls (Bidayuh, Sarawak) Technicians of the Sacred, edited by Jerome Rothenberg

Mother of Invention

Barbara T Smith, Pink, 1965-1966

Photo: Fredrik Nilsen, courtesy of The Box

In 1965, Barbara T. Smith was a housewife living in Pasadena with her husband and three children. Smith had the idea to make a make a lithographic print combining gravestone rubbings and flowers. In need of technical assistance, she approached the newly established Gemini G.E.L. print studio. Gemini rejected Smith’s inquiry, but she was not discouraged. She turned to the newest printing invention of the 20^th century, the Xerox machine. Smith leased a copier and set up shop in her dining room. Over the next year, she produced a prolific output of images that are presented in The Box’s current exhibit, Xerox: Barbara T. Smith 1965-1966.

In many of the pieces, Smith uses the form of the book to collect and contain a series of images. Not unlike the multiples produced by Fluxus artists, Smith’s Xerox works speak of a blurring between the intimacies of art and life. Her work reflects imagery drawn from domestic life including flowers, food-stuff, undergarments, her children, and her own nubile body. Even within the history of Feminist art, it is rare to find examples of art from a mother’s perspective. One notable exception, Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document is clinical and distant in contrast to Smith’s more tender and fleshy renderings. Smith’s works have a warmth and accessibility, like scrapbooks that contain and document moments in time.

Barbara T Smith, Katie, 1965-1966

Photo: Fredrik Nilsen, courtesy of The Box

In a text that accompanies the exhibit, Smith states, “My overall interest had to do with light, identity, the erotic body and the passage of time.” Issues of time, body, and identity can be linked to Smith’s later performance works and in some ways the Xerox pieces are performative works themselves. Smith pressed her body onto the glass of the machine, capturing the imprint of her flesh. Like Ana Mendieta’s Glass on Body, the gesture is a performance for the camera, or the machine. The erotic tone of the work comes through the mortal weight of the body pressing against the boundaries of the transparent “mirror”, as female flesh is revealed to be potentially boundless and terrifying.

Obvious to me, just bursting with my need and desire to “come out” as a full active erotic being, was to put my face and body onto the machine and print it. My sexual drive was at a fever pitch in 1966 (my mid 30’s). I was totally devoted to the idea of doing as art and art as action in life. This is why I liked the books so much for you had to hold them and do something with them to perceive them.

Barbara T. Smith, Coffins Installation View, 2013 

Photo: Fredrik Nilsen, courtesy of The Box

Smith calls her book works “coffins”, as they hold a “reality of a fixed location in time and in space”. The works contain a kind of body knowledge, haptic experience that we can all conjure from our own memories. We understand the sensation of the body on glass, the warmth of paper lifted from a copy machine, the feel of pages as they are collated into the form of a book which holds and can be held. In a comment about her book Pink Rose (two) Smith says, "A life that becomes a relic. Something like the Shroud of Turin, the Xerox becomes a mark that it was actually there. The question of the actual. A sort of sickening carnal nostalgia." Through the humble process of the copy machine, Smith found a way to capture layers of the sublime through images that evoke memory, loss, and the fleeting nature of time.

Barbara T. Smith,  Installation View, 2013 

Photo: Fredrik Nilsen, courtesy of The Box

Xerox: Barbara T. Smith 1965-1966 is on view at The Box February 16 through March 23, 2013.

Regina José Galindo: Vulnerable

An imposing man violently grasps a petite woman. He holds her by the back of her hair and unleashes a series of threats. He tells her she is helpless, powerless, that he could take off her clothes and attack her, torture her if he wanted. She remains mute and immobile, as the man takes a needle and pushes into the delicate skin of her face.

While the above may sound like the recollection of an assault, it is a description of the video documentation of Guatemalan artist Regina José Galindo’s 2009 performance Games of Power currently on view at the Museum of Latin American Art. In this performance, Galindo is hypnotized by an overbearing man who repeatedly humiliates and threatens her. At one point he pushes her to the ground and makes her drag her body along the floor in pursuit of the water he keeps just out of reach. It is painful to watch the the obvious imbalance of power and the heedless exploitation of Galindo’s vulnerable state. 

The manipulation of women under the influence of hypnotism is nothing new and was a frequent folly among the doctors who treated hysteric patients in the late nineteenth century. In her book Medical Muses Asti Hustvedt describes multiple instances of physicians who instructed their anesthetized patients to enact humiliating, erotic, and sometimes criminal actions. These women’s bodies became the site of violence at the hands of the men who were entrusted with their care.

Himenoplastia, still from video document, 2004

The distressing notion that the doctor may harm instead of heal is present in Galindo’s horrific video Himenoplastia (this work is not included in the MOLAA show). The work presents graphic up-close documentation of the artist’s botched hymen reconstruction surgery. In a 2006 interview with BOMB, Galindo discusses the cultural and political significance of the operation:

The majority of the patients want to regain their intactness for their wedding. They do it to gain a certain social status. In other cases, children and adolescent victims of sex trafficking are operated on so that they will fetch a better price. It is preferable to buy a virgin girl not only because of her virginity but also because it is considered better protection against STDs.

Galindo places her own flesh under the surgeon’s knife to suffer a literal and metaphoric violation of the body, not unlike the invasive performances of Orlan.

The endangerment of Galindo’s body is a constant theme through out the exhibit currently on view in MOLAA’s Project Room. The centerpiece of the show is the new work Third World. Galindo performed the work for the exhibition opening and a video remains along side the plywood platform where the work was enacted. In this performance, Galindo stood still, facing forward on the stage as a workman hand-sawed through the floor around her. Like witnesses to a perverse disappearing act, the audience waits and watches until the floor releases and Galindo drops beneath the stage.

Images from performance Third World, 2012

The audience is even more directly implicated in Breaking the Ice, performed in Norway in 2009. In a reversal of Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece, Galindo sits naked in an extremely cold room with clothes laid out on the floor in front of her. She waits in the frigid space, surrounded by viewers who are bundled up in heavy parkas and woolen layers. At least fifteen minutes go by before a woman steps up to wrap Galindo’s neck and body in a long knitted scarf. Viewers slowly move forward to dress the artist in socks, a hat, panties, a bra, and gloves. Next, a man emerges from the audience and strips Galindo down to socks and panties, leaving her like a model in one of those salacious American Apparel ads. At this point two women come forward and purposefully clothe Galindo, like mothers dressing a helpless child.

Breaking the Ice, still from video document, 2008

While Galindo’s work is a reaction to conditions in her homeland, the work speaks to the universal dangers of the abuse of power, especially in concern to women. A single wall of the exhibit lines up three performances which all suggest a distinct threat to female agency. The first, We don't lose Anything by being born (2000) shows Galindo’s naked body encased in a plastic bag lying in a field of trash at the city dump like a discarded fetus. On the next monitor she sits silently in the cold room, waiting for someone to offer her warmth and comfort. In the final image Galindo’s aggressor throws her to the ground and leaves her face down, abandoned like a sullied victim after a sexual assault. Galindo is a fearless artist who uses her own flesh to paint disturbing images of the violence that threaten women in Guatemala and all over the globe.

We don't lose Anything by being born, still from video document, 2000

Again from the 2006 BOMB interview:

There are many theories for why so many women are killed in Guatemala. Not all deaths originate from the same direct causes, but all murders are committed under the same premise: that it is done, it is cleaned up, and nothing happens, nothing occurs, nobody says a thing. A dead woman means nothing, a hundred dead women mean nothing, three hundred dead women mean nothing. The difference between Ciudad Juárez and Guatemala is that in Guatemala women are not only killed, but first they are subjected to horrible forms of torture, cut into little pieces and decapitated. I saw the hacked-up legs of a woman near my home one day, and nobody paid any attention to them at all.

 I cannot separate myself from what happens. It scares me, it enrages me, it hurts me, it depresses me. When I do what I do, I don’t try to approach my own pain as a means of seeing myself and curing myself from that vantage; in every action I try to channel my own pain, my own energy, to transform it into something more collective.

Regina José Galindo: Vulnerable is on view at the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach until September 30, 2012

Sweating Blood

Ana Mendieta, Sweating Blood, Super-8 color, 1973

...it is not a matter of the text remembering the body; it is rather the body that doubles itself in the text--it makes the ink bleed, in-corp-orates words. Moreover, the flowing that occurs here does not move in one direction, neither from the body to language nor from language to the body. Rather words and blood move across the seam that cuts origin from destination, inside from outside, literal from metaphoric, life from death, oblivion from memory; they move back and forth across the body's boundary. They go in; they go out. They tear and wound. They slip and run. It is in that seam and what plays across it, and not in the archive and what it saves, that the body is remembered.

--Jane Blocker, What the Body Cost

The name of this blog is borrowed from a 1973 work by Ana Mendieta. In the work, Mendieta sits silently as blood from a large cow's heart drips slowly over the surface of her face. The blood marks and becomes the language of the work as Mendieta's mouth remains mute. She is inside ritual and we bear witness to her solemn and sacred action. Body based performance evokes a powerful link to primal and primitive body knowledge. With this blog, I hope to address works that engage the body, language, and ritual. After years of bemoaning the lack of critical inquiry in contemporary art, I'm finally taking the leap to bring my voice to the subject. More soon...