In Search of the Miraculous Exhibition Catalogue

IN SEARCH
OF THE
MIRACULOUS
IN SEARCH
OF THE
MIRACULOUS
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the
following people for all
of their support, hard
work and advice over the
course of this exhibition:
Jessica Kenny,
Dr. Joanne Harwood,
Emma Berry,
Ginny Sowman,
Ann Marie Boyle,
James Barnard,
Fred Robinson,
Heather Leathley,
Monica Illsley,
Pasco-Q Kevlin,
Jill Constantine and
Andy Craig at the Arts
Council Collection,
Dawn Giles at Arts
Council England,
Jorge Macchi,
Brígida Baltar,
Ofelia Rodríguez,
Yolanda López,
Zineb Sedira,
Daniel Roesler and Teresa
Halfin at Galeria Nara Roesler,
everyone at UECLAA,
Palladian Press,
Dean Pavitt at Loup Design
and finally my friends
and family.
Sarah Demelo
IN SEARCH
OF THE
MIRACULOUS
Curator: Sarah Demelo
<
Mark Wallinger
Angel, 1997
>
Gilbert & George
A Portrait of the Artists as Young Men, 1972
>>
Brígida Baltar
A Coleta do Orvalho (Collecting Dew), 2001
Sarah Demelo
Curator
IN SEARCH
OF THE
MIRACULOUS
Mark Boulos
The Gates of Damascus, 2005
1 Jacques Barzun The Use
and Abuse of Art. Princeton:
Princeton UP, 1975. p. 26 and
Donald Kuspit. The Critical
History of 20th Century Art.
published serially in artnet
magazine and online at
www artnet.com/magazine/
authors/kuspit1.asp
2 Here Boltanski refers to the
1987 sale of van Gogh’s Vase
with Fifteen Sunflowers from
1888 to the Yasuda Insurance
Company. Alain Fleischer
and Didier Semin. ‘Christian
Boltanski, la revanche de la
maladresse.’ Art Press (Paris).
128 (September 1998) p. 6.
See also Lynn Gumpert.
Christian Boltanski. Paris:
Flammarion, 1994 for an
abridged version of this
interview.
3 Ibid.
In The Use and Abuse of Art, historian Jacques Barzun
observed ‘the rise of art as religion’ since the late
nineteenth century, prompting Donald Kuspit to respond,
asking ‘Are avant-garde artists really our new prophets
and saints?’1 An interview with the French artist Christian
Boltanski echoed this line of questioning when he stated that ‘museums
that want to have Mondrians today are very similar to the medieval
cities that want to have relics of their saint. If they could not possess
the bones of a great saint, they found a local saint, or invented one.
I was very moved when the Japanese bought the van Gogh: to think
that these people who make computers needed this old piece of canvas,
as if it were magical, because van Gogh is one of the great western
saints. The paintings of van Gogh only exist because he is considered a
great saint who led an exemplary life.’2 In the same interview Boltanski
refers to Andy Warhol and Joseph Beuys as ‘great saints who lived
exemplary lives.’3 The comments resonated with me over several days,
prompting me to question the plausibility of Boltanski’s belief and
investigate which artists have engaged in such a debate.
In Search of the Miraculous brings together emerging and established
artists who explore the many confluences between art and religion in
the twentieth century, providing a visual response to the questions and
comments raised by Barzun, Boltanksi and Kuspit. Critics and the public
alike apotheosize artists, instilling their works with a relic-like quality.
Catalogues, biographies and volumes of critical essays create narratives
of divinity. Major retrospectives and million pound auction prices
further this narrative, providing spaces and events by which the
audience can come close to these works and engulf them in a pseudoreligious experience. While the art world changes so do the artists, each
feeding one another. Artists respond to these changes by creating works
that play on the notions of artistic genius as divine intervention and
the work as relic.
This exhibition brings together artists who explore these ideas in
their works, taking its title from Bas Jan Ader’s influential series In
Search of the Miraculous (1973-1975). Ader’s first performance saw him
walking from dusk to dawn alongside a highway, before transforming the
work into a three-part series that would be ‘the consequent realisation
of an idea, the idea of the tragic hero on the quest for the sublime.’4
Ader envisioned the final two parts of the series as documenting
crossing the ocean in a one-man yacht to Amsterdam where he would
walk through the city in a performance that echoed the first walk in
Los Angeles, and finally bringing together all three parts for an exhibition
in the Netherlands. Already an experienced sailor, Ader set out in July
1975 in his boat Ocean Wave from Cape Cod. Three weeks later, all radio
contact with Ader was lost and in April 1976 his boat washed ashore off
the coast of Ireland. To this day Ader remains missing, as his body was
never found.
In Search of the Miraculous embodies the quintessential tragic
romantic hero on a quest for something or someone. Ader’s work displays
a number of influences over the exhibition – one, the quest, or pilgrimage
even, for something and two, the cult of the artist or genius which has
grown around Ader over the last number of years as evidenced by the
recent number of exhibitions and books dedicated to him.5 Such is this
upward trajectory that his estate is conducting a re-evaluation of all
sales, loan and copyright requests, hence his absence from this show.6
Questions raised from Ader’s work in conjunction with both Kuspit’s
and Boltanski’s comments began to reveal varying themes running
through works that I encountered in the course of my research. Looking
at modern and contemporary work taking the intersection of Ader,
Kuspit and Boltanski as our starting point uncovers themes such as
pilgrimages, self-portraits as saints and relics. However, as much as these
themes conjure associations with a more traditional idea of religious art
perhaps, I would like to suggest instead that they move beyond a purely
religious understanding towards something broader and ungraspable something that Ader searched for when he set out on the Ocean Wave.
The miraculous may not necessarily have been the definition we would
normally resort to, namely some sort of divine intervention or even
extraordinary circumstances, but rather it stems from title of the book
from where he drew the name for his series: In Search of the Miraculous:
Fragments of an Unknown Teaching by P. D. Ouspensky and published in
1965.7 Here the miraculous refers to the realization of self-knowledge
and awareness of oneself in the universe, based on the teachings of
mystic G.I. Gurdjieff.
4 Jan Verwoert. Bas Jan Ader:
In Search of the Miraculous.
London: Afterall Books,
2006. p. 2.
5 Ader moved from relative
obscurity to art star status
since the 1990s as witnessed
by his inclusion in Tate
Modern’s 2005 Open Systems
– Rethinking Art c. 1970 and a
retrospective at the Camden
Arts Centre in 2006.
6 For the history of Ader’s
estate since the 1970s see
Wade Saunders. ‘In dreams
begin responsibilities.’ Art in
America. 92.2 (February
2003): 54-65.
7 P.D. Ouspensky. In Search
of the Miraculous: Fragments
of an Unknown Teaching.
London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1950.
8 Ania Corcilius. ‘Untitled.’
http://www.nararoesler.com.
br/artistas_txte.
asp?idartista=19
9 Eva-Lynn Alicia Jagoe.
‘Jorge Macchi’s Fractured
Narratives of Buenos Aires.’
Light Music. Colchester:
AHRC Centre for the Studies
of Surrealism and its
Legacies, University of Essex,
2006. p. 50.
Pilgrimages or Quests
While Ader may have searched for ‘miraculous’ knowledge, the artists
Brígida Baltar, Jorge Macchi and Mark Boulos explore the quest or
pilgrimage in their works where they seek to find something, whether
tangible or intangible. Baltar’s A Coleta do Orvalho (Collecting Dew) from
2001 traces her attempts to collect dew through an elaborate vial. The
work is part of a series of photographs and videos where she attempts to
collect dew, mist, humidity and the ocean breeze. With these gestures,
Baltar searches for and tries to contain the impermanence of dew, as in
the exhibition’s video, something that disappears after a few hours in
the sun. By collecting nature’s immaterial and transitory aspects, Baltar
shows that perhaps any attempt to grasp something as ephemeral as
dew is ultimately impossible and cannot be fully understood, much like
Ader’s search for the miraculous.8
Jorge Macchi’s Buenos Aires Tour (2003) charts his chance journey
around the city. By breaking a piece of glass over a map of Buenos Aires,
Macchi created eight different routes with over forty various stops along
the way, resulting in a labyrinthine journey from the fractures in the
glass. He travelled down the routes collecting objects along the way as
documentation – a handwritten English-Spanish dictionary, postcards
and a letter. In this work, ‘Macchi seeks to capture and at the same time
release the ephemeral experience of movement in the city.’9 The
miraculous that Macchi seeks results from the desire to know the city, to
dive head first into urban disorientation or unfamiliarity and to emerge
with new knowledge, here synonymous with experience, of Buenos Aires.
Both Baltar’s and Macchi’s quests revolve around the artist as the
subject and seeker, but Mark Boulos’s film The Gates of Damascus
(2005) documents Easter weekend in the life of Myrna Nazzour, a
woman who claims to have received the stigmata and secretes olive oil
and blood from her skin. Boulos films the many followers who seek out
Nazzour in order to hear her visions, receive blessings and her supposed
healing powers. Even going so far as to refer to her as Saint Myrna, the
pilgrims Boulos documents look toward Nazzour for miracles seeking to
capture a fleeting divine encounter through visiting her home. The film
Zineb Sedira
Self-Portrait or the Virgin Mary, 2000
challenges our understanding of modern-day pilgrimages and pilgrims as
Nazzour’s home, filled with people toting cameras and video equipment,
is reminiscent of our fascination with celebrities and the paparazzi.
Self-portraits as saints
While Boulos creates a portrait of a woman whom others believe is a
saint, other artists in the exhibition use their own bodies as part of their
investigations into the miraculous. Some of the self-portraits in the show
use religious icons to question our belief in the imagery, but some have
become iconic through the artist’s celebrity status in the art world, like
Gilbert & George, and their relation to particular movements, such as
Yolanda López and Feminist art from the 1970s.
Self-portraiture provides a complex vehicle to question traditional
religious iconography, such as Zineb Sedira’s Self-Portrait or the Virgin
Mary (2000) that situates the female body as a site of religious
controversies. In the self-portrait, Sedira wears the white Algerian
haik in contrast to the media’s persistent use of the black chador and
dismissal of other veil colours and types. Covered in the haik, Sedira
wants to ‘overturn Western stereotypes about the veil’ by emphasizing
the similarities between the veil and the traditional blue veil that the
Virgin Mary wears in religious icons.10
Yolanda López’s Portrait of the Artist as the Virgin of Guadalupe
(1978) is one of a series of three portraits of herself, her mother and
grandmother, which look at the use of female imagery in Chicana
culture, by inserting herself into a mandorla of the Virgin of Guadalupe.
Traditional representations of the Virgin depict her as passive, whereas
López constructs herself as strong and powerful thus transforming the
icon. What results is the ‘repositioning [then] becomes both satire and
provocation, while retaining the transfigurative liberation of the icon.’11
In doing so, López asks the question ‘what about the portrayal of
ourselves in our own culture? Who are our heroes, our role models?’12
Today the work has taken on a double role as a frequently reproduced
image representing 1970s Feminist and Chicana art, positing both López
and the self-portrait as saint and icon.
The same holds true for the artists Gilbert & George who have been
described as the ‘patron saints of contemporary British art.’13 A Portrait of
the Artists as Young Men (1972) plays out the dual reading as the work
questions whether this video portrait reveals aspects of the artist’s
biography by watching the video, when in fact Gilbert & George don’t
actually do anything, apart from George smoking. Viewers look towards
biography as an in to the work, hoping that by gleaning personal details
the artwork’s meaning will be revealed, but with the Gilbert & George
this is denied. The work mimics religious pilgrims seeking to receive
divine revelation from a saint’s image and hoping that it will pass on
part of their divinity onto the viewer.
10 Joseph McGonagle.
‘Translating Differences: An
Interview with Zineb Sedira.’
Signs: Journal of Women in
Culture and Society. 31.3
(2006): 624-625.
11 Amalia Mesa-Bains.
Chicano Art: Resistance and
Affirmations, 1991, R. G. del
Castillo et al [Eds.], Wright
Art Gallery, University of
California, Los Angeles:
Los Angeles, p. 137
12 Yolanda López. Yolanda
M. López Works: 1975-1978.
[exh. cat.] San Diego, 1978.
n.p.
13 Jonathan Jones.
‘A Portrait of the Artists
as Young Men, 1972.’
The Guardian. Saturday
22 July 2000.
14 Jeanette Winterson.
‘The Hole of Life.’ Barbara
Hepworth: Centenary. (exh.
cat.) Chris Stephens, ed.
London: Tate Publishing,
2003. p. 20.
15 Ibid.
Relics
If artists represent themselves as saints or are understood as something
similar, then their works could be interpreted as relics. When the artist’s
biography and practice becomes compounded, much like Boltanski’s
comparison between relics of Medieval saints and museums buying
Mondrians, then paintings and objects are all that remains of an artist
and their practice.
In Barbara Hepworth’s Icon (1957) her process and the form of the
sculpture moves the question of the saintly from the artist onto the
object, prompting the work’s association with reliquary. Perhaps what
interests me most with Hepworth’s work and its relationship to the
exhibition’s theme stems from an essay on her work written by Jeanette
Winterson where the writer comments that upon piercing the form ‘she
allowed us to see nothing - a privilege previously enjoyed by God. By
surrounding space with form, form can make the visible invisible.’14
Winterson continued stating that Hepworth’s work provides a ‘relationship
with the invisible.’15 What struck me was the overwhelming parallel
between the experiences a Hepworth sculpture invokes compared to that
of a religious experience in a church, in front of a relic or image of a
saint. Both attempt to communicate to the viewer a kind of transcendence
beyond themselves in their pairing of experience and form and image.
Icon is an remarkable marriage of avant-garde aesthetics and spirituality
on the cusp of Hepworth’s turn toward more overt religious symbolism in
the 1960s. In the context of the exhibition, Hepworth provides another
dimension to how artists have attempted to grasp the ephemeral in
their work.
Understood alongside Hepworth’s Icon, Yves Klein Untitled (1991)
provides another way of exploring how the works, whether a piece of
pigment or sculpture, can be interpreted as a relic through their link to
artistic process or through the invoking of an experience. Conjuring an
image of Klein’s work in one’s head, those familiar with his work may
immediately recall his monochrome paintings or sculptures using his
trademark colour: International Klein Blue. A colour described as a
‘full void, this nothing which encloses the everything possible, this
supernatural asthenic silence of colour which finally, beyond anecdote
and formal pretext, makes the immortal grandeur of a Giotto.’16 Both
Klein and the colour have become synonymous with one another and
the small fragment of blue pigment recalls the supposed shards of
bones from saints or pieces of the True Cross found in churches all
over the world.
The association between relics and the body is played out in Ofelia
Rodríguez’s Wordless – with the Virgin of Guadalupe (1998), when she
calls attention to the parallels between the saint represented and the
physical object itself. Rodríguez found the sequined image of the Virgin
– a relic of not only the saint but of the commercialization of the Virgin
and its transformation into trinkets and kitsch found all over Latin
America, particularly in Mexico. The use of the Virgin’s image paired
with the electrical plug symbolizes both ‘the incorporation of the sacred
and the everyday’ making the work ‘a sombre foil to the devotional
kitsch.’17 The cord appears to plug into the saint prompting the viewer to
imagine the image will do something, but nothing happens. Rodríguez’s
Virgin does not utter a word – echoing the work’s title Wordless.
Each of the artists approach relics, saints and pilgrimages using the
body. Both Macchi and Baltar use their own body to chart an experience,
be it a chance journey in Buenos Aires or trying to capture the
ephemerality of nature creating a variation of the pilgrimage. Boulos’s
film documents the experiences of Nazzour and the pilgrims who hope
that the divine intervention that overtakes her body is somehow passed
onto theirs. In contrast, the works that deal with relics or are relics
themselves exist in absentia of the body, like the image of the Virgin
of Guadalupe in Rodríguez’s work. The small piece of Klein’s pigment
and Hepworth’s Icon are all that remains of their practice and of their
person to the viewer, standing in for their body. López and Sedira usurp
religious iconography in order to question our understanding of the
political and spiritual meanings behind traditional images. Gilbert &
George’s video appears to promise a portrait of the artists, but we are
unable to glean any biography from their performance. While the artists
in the exhibition draw from religious iconography, their messages
transcend beyond religion. In the end the search returns to Ader and
the quest for knowledge or self-awareness, understood as miraculousness,
something that each of the artists moves toward or tries to convey in
their work and for the viewer.
Barbara Hepworth
Icon, 1957
16 Pierre Restany, ‘L’epoca
blue, il secondo minuto della
verita’ (The Blue Period, The
Second Minute of Truth.’),
announcement card fort Yves
Klein: Proposte mononchrome,
Galeria Apollinaire, Milan,
January 2-12, 1957 quoted
in Sidra Stitch, Yves Klein.
[exh. cat.] London: Hayward
Gallery, 1995. p. 81.
17 Dawn Ades. ‘Ofelia
Rodríguez: Popular Accomplice.’
Relics and Momentos: Recent
Work by Ofelia Rodríguez.
Colchester: University of
Essex, 1999. p.6.
Yves Klein
Untitled, 1991
Dr Joanne Harwood
Assistant Director of UECLAA
IN SEARCH
OF THE
REAL SELF
Ofelia Rodríguez
Wordless – with the Virgin
of Guadalupe, 1998
1 Jacob Needleman. ‘In
Search of the Miraculous:
A Synopsis by Jacob
Needleman.’ Gurdjieff
International Review.
Winter 1998/1999, Issue,
Vol. II (2), Revision May 24
2002, p 1. http://www.
gurdjieff.org/needleman1.
htm (13.09.2007)
2 ibid.: p 2
3 ibid.
This text investigates the search for the real self in the
works of four artists: Brígida Baltar, Jorge Macchi, Ofelia
Rodríguez and Yolanda López. As we have learned, the
current exhibition takes its name from In Search of the
Miraculous the unfinished, three-part work by Bas Jan
Ader. Ader, in turn, named his series after the book by P. D. Ouspensky,
In Search of the Miraculous: Fragments of an Unknown Teaching (1965),
an account of the author’s relationship with G. I. Gurdjieff, described
in Jacob Needleman’s synopsis as ‘one of the most enigmatic men of
the twentieth century.’1 In this context the miraculous is not treated
in a strictly religious sense but refers to the development of being in
man. Gurdjieff proposed that ‘man is not; he is only a fragmented and
veiled collection of personages masquerading as a real self. The real
self must be formed through work, through a specific form of suffering,
a discipline.’2
The absence of such discipline in the modern, Western world, led
Gurdjieff to propose a fourth way that ‘works on all aspects of man at
the same time, and requires no renunciation or belief.’ On the contrary,
‘it can and must be practised in the midst of ordinary life conditions,’
which makes it both faster and more difficult to follow. Central to
man’s successful development of his real self is the unity of three
centres of perception: the thinking centre, the emotional centre, and
the moving-instinctive centre. With these centres related correctly,
he can ‘cease to be a machine; he can become conscious.’3
It is interesting to consider Ader’s work in relation to Gurdjieff’s
system, especially the possibility that an artist is one of the few
personages in the ‘Western’ world whose discipline is practised
in ordinary life and whose work is potentially a means of ‘selfremembering,’ which can lead not only to conscience but also to
‘creative intelligence.’4 Ader’s work and specifically In Search of the
Miraculous would seem in some ways to apply Gurdjieff’s teachings
by testing the body, mind and emotions in the midst the city of Los
Angeles, then the ocean, and potentially the streets of Amsterdam.
The ocean stretch, at the same time, removed Ader from ordinary
life and isolated him in the vastness of Nature, which is reminiscent
of the more conventional physical, emotional and mental sacrifices
endured by religious figures (the fakir, monk and yogi mentioned by
Needleman in relation to the other ‘ways’ to self-knowledge).5 It is
perhaps inappropriate, however, to view Ader in this way. Instead,
Brígida Baltar sees in his work the search for ‘a kind of invisibility…
a way to express his emotions with no representations’.6 For Baltar,
‘Bas Jan Ader has no fear of death or tragic situations. Or maybe his
fear is so big that he couldn’t hide it. His work made connections with
Nature; enormous Nature – such as Niagara Falls, the big tree that fell
down and the sea into which he disappeared.’
Baltar’s A Coleta de Orvalho (Collecting Dew) places the artist in a
natural environment that, like the ocean, is unpredictable and expands
what Baltar refers to as the ‘body possibilities’. For Baltar, the mystery
of what will happen next to Ader also occurs in her collecting actions.
She writes that ‘the landscape with mist is a landscape that never is
the same. You cannot see through it. And if you get closer to the mist
it seems to be far. It is a kind of illusion, the impossibility, a search for
invisible things, immateriality; it is the other side of a perfect, visible
world with lots of images all around and things and things and things.
Collecting this atmosphere is a way to internalize a feeling of new
possibilities of the self with magic, without references, etc.’
Baltar’s comments reveal ways in which the ‘discipline’ of art,
the art ‘work’ can be bound at some level with the search for the real
self. Although the references in A Coleta de Orvalho are minimal, by
collecting the dew herself, Baltar suggests a degree of subjectivity and
alludes to her personal search, which is perhaps more evident in other
works such as Um Céu Entre Paredes (An Indoor Heaven), which is set
in her own house.
Jorge Macchi writes that ‘we make a very complicated system in
search of something really miraculous, just to end up finding our own
image on a broken glass.’7 For Macchi, Buenos Aires Tour ‘is a kind of
self-portrait in three parts’ produced with the collaboration of María
4 ibid.: p 3
5 ibid.: p 2
6 With thanks to Brígida
Baltar in conversation
with the author by e-mail,
September 2007.
7 With thanks to Jorge
Macchi in conversation
with the author by e-mail,
September 2007.
8 With thanks to Ofelia
Rodríguez in conversation
with the author by e-mail,
September 2007.
9 Jacob Needleman. ‘In
Search of the Miraculous:
A Synopsis by Jacob
Needleman.’ Gurdjieff
International Review.
Winter 1998/1999, Issue,
Vol. II (2), Revision May 24
2002, p 3 http://www.
gurdjieff.org/needleman1.
htm (13.09.2007)
Negroni and Edgardo Rudnitzky, two artists who know the city very
well. Macchi considers it to be a self-portrait because, ‘when all the
surprise is left to one side, what you have is a very intimate approach
to the city, and all the things you find create links with your
own history.’
Unlike Baltar’s piece, Buenos Aires Tour includes religious imagery.
This is for Macchi, however, ‘just part of this journey’; the series of
postcards with the crosses ‘just an exercise on the ephemeral.’ At the
same time, he is attracted to religious images, perhaps having been
close to Catholic religion as a boy and certain ideas have stayed with
him, including ‘a very confusing idea of death, suffering and salvation.’
As an adult, he prefers to be ‘a kind of spectator of religion’ but it is
evidently part of his personal quest which revolves on the one hand
around ‘things’ collected, seen, and felt in Buenos Aires but on the
other attempts to grasp the ephemeral, the emotional, the cosmic.
In her introduction to Buenos Aires Tour, Negroni describes writing
as ‘that inspired calm where we seek to reorganize ourselves, to unite
with that inner something that belongs to the Absolute, in which
everything participates.’ The same might be said of the discipline of
making art, the work of the artist, which has the potential to lead to
the real self. Ofelia Rodríguez describes how once she starts creating
her work, she falls into a state of ‘nothingness,’ a place where she is
not conscious of the rational: ‘what starts taking control of the
situation is my vision of the space where the work is created. In this
visual mode, I see how things exist in this space and how these parts
go together to make up the whole.’8 Rodríguez is struck by comments
by Bill Viola about ‘falling’ as the state in which the artist makes the
best art because of the implied loss of control. A number of Ader’s
works also involved falling, echoing perhaps Gurdjieff’s assertion
that man must cease to become a machine if he is to attain all of
the attributes of man – freedom, understanding, love and creativity.9
Rodríguez also describes how when creating Wordless, her thoughts
‘were not at all linked directly with the religious. The image of the
Virgin […] appealed to me primarily because the image itself represented
basic associations with popular Mexican culture.’ These sequined images
were applied to the skirts of women dancing in celebration of the
Independence of Mexico, for which the Virgin of Guadalupe has always
been an important symbol. She admits that is not impossible that such
religious images have been imprinted unconsciously on her mind and,
therefore, reveal something of her own self-portrait and quest for
self-knowledge.
<<
Jorge Macchi
Buenos Aires Tour, 2003
<
Yolanda M. López
Portrait of the Artist
as the Virgin of
Guadalupe, 2007
10 Yolanda M. López .
Works: 1975-1978.
San Diego, 1978.
http://mati.eas.asu.
edu:8421/ChicanArte_
pages/YLopezIssOutl.html
(13.09.2007)
In Yolanda López’s Portrait of the Artist as the Virgin of Guadalupe,
the use of the image of the Virgin is extremely conscious. Our Lady of
Guadalupe is a miraculous image of Mexican origin, like López’s family,
but she is also Patron of the Americas, further bridging the gap
between the artist’s Mexican past and U.S. present. Like Rodríguez,
López’s interpretation of this image is not straightforwardly religious.
Nor is it purely feminist. By replacing the Virgin’s image with her own
as a vibrant, running woman, she is undoubtedly establishing Guadalupe
‘as a powerful female icon’ and has said that she chose to transform
the image ‘because I feel living, breathing women also deserve [the]
respect and love lavished on Guadalupe.’10 López has also said, however,
that this image is more about ethnicity than gender. Guadalupe is
known also as ‘La Virgen Morena,’ ‘The dark-skinned Virgin’ and has
been associated since the fifteenth century with the Aztec goddess
Tonantzin who was said to have spoken in Nahuatl, a language still
widespread today in central Mexico. In this way, she is a powerful
example of one of the few Mexican or indeed Latin American figures
that have been accepted by Europe and North America. In her
investigation of this miraculous image López expresses the hope of
all those whose portraits are unknown, while revealing her own search
for the real self.
Brígida Baltar
A Coleta do Orvalho (Collecting Dew), 2001
video, 21 minutes 38 seconds
Galeria Nara Roesler, Brazil
Mark Boulos
The Gates of Damascus, 2005
video, 24 minutes 22 seconds
Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London
List of Works
Gilbert & George
A Portrait of the Artists as Young Men, 1972
video and certificate, 16 minutes 30 seconds
Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London
Barbara Hepworth
Icon, 1957
wood, 45.7 x 35.6 x 20.5 cm
Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London
Yves Klein
Untitled, 1991
sponge and plastic, 5.5 x 5.5.x 5.5 cm
Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London
Yolanda M. López
Portrait of the Artist as the Virgin of Guadalupe, 2007
giclee print, 50.8 x 81.3 cm
University of Essex Collection of Latin American Art (UECLAA)
Jorge Macchi
Buenos Aires Tour, 2003
postcards and guide, 21.0 x 15.0 x 6.0 cm
University of Essex Collection of Latin American Art (UECLAA)
Ofelia Rodríguez
Wordless – with the Virgin of Guadalupe, 1998
mixed media on canvas, 89.0 x 120.0 cm
University of Essex Collection of Latin American Art (UECLAA)
Zineb Sedira
Self-Portrait or the Virgin Mary, 2000
c-type photograph, 3 parts each 182.9 x 101.6 cm
Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London
Mark Wallinger
Angel (1997)
video 7 minutes 30 seconds
Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London
In Search of the Miraculous
1 October – 8 November 2007
University Gallery
University of Essex
Wivenhoe Park
Colchester CO4 3SQ
Curator: Sarah Demelo
Gallery Director: Jessica Kenny
Texts © the authors 2007
Designed by Dean Pavitt at Loup Design
Printed by Palladian Press
Isbn 1904059562
Picture Credits
Brígida Baltar’s A Coleta do Orvalho
reproduced with permission of
Galeria Nara Roesler.
Gilbert & George’s A Portrait of the
Artists as Young Men, Yves Klein’s
Untitled, Mark Boulos’s The Gates of
Damascus, Barbara Hepworth’s Icon,
and Zineb Sedira’s Self-Portrait or
the Virgin Mary are reproduced with
permission from the Arts Council
Collection, Southbank Centre, London.
Yolanda López’s Portrait of the Artist as
the Virgin of Guadalupe, Jorge Macchi’s
Buenos Aires Tour and Ofelia Rodríguez’s
Wordless – with the Virgin of Guadalupe
are reproduced with permission of the
artists and UECLAA.
P